Daughter’s anguish as she says council cremated wrong body instead of mother
A GRIEVING daughter claims that council officials may have cremated the wrong body instead of her mother.
The woman said that her mother died of a heart attack in November last year and that she held a funeral for her the following month.
However, this month she received emails from both the coroner and local authority officials asking her to register her mother’s death so that funeral arrangements can be made.
Officials claimed that her mother’s body was still lying in the hospital in Shrewsbury.
The email from Shropshire council’s public protection officer read: “The reason that I have been asked to help is that your mother remains in the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, her death has not been registered and there has been no instructions from her next of kin in regards to her funeral.”
The woman, who spoke to The Sunday Telegraph on condition of anonymity, claims the email “blindsided” her and left her living “in absolute hell”.
The council has since apologised, claiming it was an “administrative error”. However, a string of bungles and incidents at the hospital and funeral home where the woman last saw her mother has left her convinced that she could have cremated “the wrong body”.
“All of us, we’re now going to be convinced forever that the ashes we have aren’t real and it doesn’t really matter what they say or do,” she said. “We’re just going to be in doubt about that and it’s not going away.”
In the days following her mother’s death, the woman went to visit her in Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, but noticed that her name was misspelt on her wrist tags. This left her very upset and the mortuary staff promised to take the tags off and amend them.
She now believes the wrong name tags could have been put on her mother, or that they could have been left off.
A few days later, the woman went to visit her mother in the funeral home, where staff told her: “I’m sorry, I’m telling you right now, for your own good, you can’t see her”.
She now believes that “there’s a good chance” that funeral home staff were not talking about her mother’s body.
A Shropshire council spokesman: “[We] are aware of these concerns following an email sent in error and has contacted a member of the family to apologise for any distress caused.”