“Sorry, we don’t have her,” the funeral assistant told me. “Try calling the medical examiner’s office.”

“Oh, boy … oh boy,” Rich O’Brien, lead medical examiner for Pierce County said when I introduced myself. “That was a long time ago. We might not have her remains anymore,” he said and it turns out they didn’t.

Nonetheless after a lengthy conversation about what might have happened to my sister’s remains, O’Brien promised to check around and in a few days I got a call back. “I found her,” he said. “She was at the funeral home in their mausoleum.” I asked if he was sure it was my sister. “Yes,” he said and told me he could definitely verify that because there is an official tag that stays with the remains for the duration. He went on to explain that the assistant had made an error and then offered to pick up the ashes. The medical examiner’s office would hold the remains until we reimbursed the state for the cremation fee of $720.

If someone’s remains are not claimed at the hospital, Washington state policy is to cremate the body and hold the remains. A funeral home is contacted and they bill the State for the cremation fee. In 2007, state policy prescribed that the unclaimed remains stayed at the funeral home. Now the state’s policy has changed and the ME’s office holds the remains until claimed. If the remains have not been claimed after an extended period of time, the ME’s office disposes of them in some way.

Somehow the brown plastic shoebox that housed my sister’s ashes had been miraculously overlooked and we were entitled to what was left of her. We just had to pay the money. Both Libby and I live on social security plus income from odd jobs. The lump sum of $720 seemed staggering to us at the time. So I waited for mana to fall.

We planned a small, private ceremony for mid-April when my niece (Suzy’s only child) would be in Washington and needed to get the ashes before then. Two weeks before Danielle’s arrival it was evident that mana wasn’t going to fall. So I devised an email plea asking friends for monetary help. Within a week, we had gathered enough money to purchase our sister’s ashes. Originally the plan was to ship her remains but then I had a profound dream.

When I woke from the dream, I couldn’t get my breath. It took some time for me to calm down but I knew the dream was important. I had not dreamt of my sister so acutely, so accurately for many years. After gaining some control, I went back into the dream.

This time I walked over to my sister; kneeling down I talked softly to her. I told her that Libby and I wanted her to know that we felt deeply all the things she had gone through and were so very sorry that she had to suffer all alone.

When I awoke I knew we had to physically go and pick up my sister’s ashes and that’s what we did. Within a few days after our return from Tacoma, Danielle, Libby and I let Suzy go in the waters of Puget Sound.

I wish I could say we picked Suzy up, hugged her and took her home, where we drank a few glasses of wine together and reminisced about times past when we were all little girls. I wish so many things. There is a wide span of years that we know nothing about. We have no idea what our sister’s life was like during the time she disappeared, where she went, where she lived or how she got to Tacoma. We may never know. But we do know where she is now. Finally.