She Bought an Urn for Her Cat. Instead, She Found Someone Else’s Loved One.
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On a shelf in a quiet thrift store in Winkler, somewhere between chipped teacups and somebody’s old wedding china, an urn sat for weeks, not empty, but full.
Not metaphorically full, as in “rich with memories,” or “filled with meaning.” Literally full. Inside the smooth, silent container: cremated remains.
No name. No inscription. No tag. No clue.
A Winkler woman who bought an urn at a thrift store, hoping to use it for her cat’s ashes, was shocked to discover it already contained unclaimed cremated remains and is now searching for the owner before scattering them next year. (Photo courtesy of Hayley Bueckert-Dyck.
Supplied photo)
And for weeks, no one noticed.
The woman who found it. Hayley Bueckert-Dyck wasn’t looking for a mystery, she just wanted a dignified resting place for her 19-year-old cat. She took the urn home for $20, intending to give her pet a final resting place, only to discover that it was already occupied.
An urn without a name is like a book without a title page. All the stories are inside, but no way to know whose.
There are practical problems here, ashes don’t come with serial numbers, and emotional ones, too. Returning an urn to the thrift store would almost certainly mean its contents would be discarded. Hayley decided she couldn’t let that happen.
She posted online. She did not share photos, because the urn’s design is the only clue she has, and she wants that clue to count for something. While she’s received a number of inquiries, none have been able to ID the urn.
If no one claims the ashes by February 2026, she will scatter them. Quietly. Somewhere they can rest without being mistaken for an antique.
She also did something else. She thought about what it means to be lost like that, to have everything you were boiled down to a small pile of ash in a vessel sitting on a thrift store shelf, waiting for a stranger.
“Mostly I just feel bad that this person or animal is sitting in the home of somebody who didn’t know them,” she wrote. “Not how I would want to be kept after I died.”
There’s an odd intimacy in what she’s doing. She’s a stranger holding on to a stranger’s last remains, keeping them safe while hoping, almost whispering, that someone recognizes them.
And if no one does, she’ll be the last person who cares enough to make sure they’re not forgotten on a shelf.
For now, the urn sits quietly in her home, unclaimed and anonymous, but not entirely alone.
» Local Journalism Initiative/Winnipeg Sun