‘My dad can’t be found’: China columbarium loses ashes of dead man, offers replacement remains, causes grieving wife heart attack, daughter insomnia

Fan said she planned to withdraw her father’s ashes and bury them alongside those of her grandfather, who passed away in November, so her father could finally rest in peace according to her hometown tradition.

Zhao Yang, a member of staff from the columbarium, told Fan that they might have mistaken the number of her father’s compartment, which was 745, with the cabinet number 754 during a move in 2020, and offered to compensate them with “a new casket of ashes”.

Fan said the response had caused her to suffer from insomnia and given her mother a heart attack.

“My grandfather’s wish cannot be satisfied and my father cannot rest in peace,” she said.

Chinese people believe the dead can only rest in peace if they are properly buried. It is also deemed taboo to disturb a grave.

In order to save land and protect the environment, China has been promoting cremation over traditional burial since 1956.

According to the China Funeral Association, the country’s cremation rate rose from 26 per cent in 2020 to nearly 60 per cent in 2021.

Fan said she could not accept the columbarium’s explanation as not only was the casket gone, but her father’s photo and a piece of paper with her handwriting on it were also missing.

In addition, the two compartments said to have been mixed up were not even in the same row.

The columbarium had offered a new solution of looking for Fan’s father’s casket by matching fingerprints left on the possible caskets with those of Fan.

Mainland social media was left in shock by the story.

“The columbarium is not offering a new casket, but a new father,” said one person on Douyin.

“I am shocked that the staff at the columbarium are treating their job as a game,” said another.

“Ashes offer spiritual sustenance for the living so they can remember the dead. Losing or mixing them up causes serious trauma to the deceased person’s relatives,” said a third.

It is not the first time a Chinese funeral practitioner has mixed up a person’s ashes.

In August, a funeral home in eastern China’s Anhui province gave an elderly man’s ashes to another elderly man’s relatives, then sent staff to dig the buried ashes out from the grave to return them to their original home.

The staff members kneeled and kowtowed three times to show respect before doing so.