A bereaved mother is startled when kids arrive on her doorstep trick-or-treating in her dead son’s Halloween costumes. She immediately checks his room and is in for a tear-jerking surprise.
“Please give it a thought, Mrs. Brown. You cannot always escape this time of the year. You have to overcome it, and this is the only way out. You need to celebrate Halloween or at least decorate your house,” the psychologist told Rosemary, 37.
Rosemary’s eyes brimmed with tears as she pressed her chin on her knuckles. She was nervous. “Will I be able to do it? Will it help me not think about what happened to my son on that Halloween?” she thought.
Rosemary shyly smiled and got up to leave the clinic. She headed to the market to buy décor. Though she did not feel like celebrating the holiday, she followed the doctor’s advice.
It had been three years since Rosemary and her son Dave carved fleshy pumpkins into glowering jack-o’-lanterns. It had been three hellish years since Rosemary lost Dave on the morning of Halloween, and his death still kept haunting her…
For illustration purposes only | Source: Pexels
Lucas, Rosemary’s husband, was surprised when he came home on All Hallows Eve. He had been out of town on a business trip and was astonished when he saw his house fully decorated with the Halloween spirit.
“Rose, hey…hey…” he exclaimed as he entered the door, holding big boxes of stuff he’d shopped from the city. “I’m so happy you’re doing this. I’m sure our son would be happy to see you smiling after a very long time.”
Lucas kissed Rosemary before leaving to freshen up. Tears rolled down Rosemary’s face as she fixed the light into the jack-o’-lantern. It was Dave’s favorite part of the festival. He always placed bets with his friends about who had the funkiest jack-o’-lantern.
Rosemary’s house that day looked so beautiful and all set for a perfect Halloween. It caught everyone’s eye, especially one gang of kids on the street.
Those we love do not truly leave us. There are certain things death can never touch.
They couldn’t help but think Rosemary’s decorated house was a signal inviting them over for a trick-or-treat. They had never visited Rosemary’s house on Halloween before, so seeing her house ready for the holiday tempted them.
The kids marched to Rosemary’s house in costumes that would go on to make the bereaving mother burst into tears.
For illustration purposes only | Source: Pexels
Just as Rosemary readied the table for dinner and was wiping the crockery, she heard a loud knock on the door. She answered the door and turned pale with shock seeing a group of happy little children chiming, “Trick or treat!”
Rosemary could not believe her eyes. She recognized the costumes the kids were wearing. She had exclusively sewn them for Dave three years ago for Halloween, but he never got to wear them. He died in an accident while crossing the road the morning of All Hallows Eve.
Rosemary was shaken. She clasped the door and gaped at the children from head to toe.
“That embroidery… those buttons and skeleton paintings on the shirt… Dave asked me to do a patchwork resembling cobwebs on his witch hat… And these pumpkin buttons… ‘D’ for Dave… I sewed them myself. What is going on? How did they get my son’s Halloween costumes from his room?” Rosemary thought.
“It cannot be.”
Rosemary quickly gave the kids some candies and ran to her son’s room. She pulled out a trunk from under the bed and opened it. Dave’s Halloween costumes were not there.
For illustration purposes only | Source: Pexels
Rosemary was startled. She started sweating and sat on the floor, crying. “Who took them? Who gave my Dave’s clothes to those kids?”
She looked up and saw the state of her late son’s room. It looked different and empty. Almost all his items were missing, including his favorite shoe collection, posters, and even superhero toys. Rosemary peeped into his wardrobe and only found empty hangers.
Everything was intact when she checked Dave’s room a month ago. She never gave away a thing there because she wanted to preserve everything in memory of her dead son. So seeing Dave’s room in a near-empty state puzzled her. Rosemary could not understand what was going on and immediately called Lucas.
“Everything is missing. I see nothing here that belonged to our son. Darling, what’s going on? Who took Dave’s things from here?”
That’s when Rosemary sensed a weird hesitation on Lucas’ face. He could not look her in the eye and simply walked away.
“Lucas, what’s going on? Why aren’t you saying anything? Where are my son’s things? And why are those kids wearing his Halloween costumes?”
For illustration purposes only | Source: Pexels
Rosemary followed Lucas to the kitchen where she found him staring at the plain wall.
“Darling, what’s going on? Why are you silent? I’m going crazy. Can someone please tell me what’s happening in this house?”
Lucas turned around, tears streaming down his face. He hugged Rosemary and made a confession.
“Sweetie, I know how much Dave means to us even now. But I could not see you destroyed like this,” he began.
“Once, I visited the shelter at the end of this street with my friend. The little boys there reminded me of our son. So I gave away all his stuff to them. Whenever I see those kids in our son’s shirt, pants, or even shoes, I see Dave, not some strange random kid.”
For illustration purposes only | Source: Pexels
Rosemary burst into tears. “So, were those kids who came trick or treating to our house from the shelter?”
“Yes, they are! On my way home this evening, I saw them wearing the costumes you’d made for Dave. I was so happy and invited them to our home for some candies, hoping you would be happy to see them.”
Rosemary threw herself into Lucas’s arms and began to cry.
“Thank you so much, darling. You have no idea what you did today!”
“I did?” Lucas was puzzled, seeing a strange glow in his wife’s eyes.
“Yes! One of those little boys looked just like our son Dave. I think this is what destiny wanted us to do…to adopt him and bring him home as our son!”
Lucas and Rosemary were so delighted, they quickly began the paperwork to adopt Tom, the little boy who reminded Rosemary of the late Dave. They brought him home six months later.
Ever since Tom arrived, Rosemary was never sad again. She, Lucas, and Tom lived a life of dreams and happiness together. They also helped the other children in the shelter find loving homes.
A year later…again on Halloween…
“Mama, look…my jack-o’-lantern…you like it?” Tom asked Rosemary, showing a gorgeous jack-o’-lantern he’d made. Rosemary shed tears of joy as she realized Tom was none but a gift her late son Dave had sent from heaven.
“It’s beautiful, darling! It reminds me of someone dear to me!” she cried and hugged the boy as they got ready for the evening.
For illustration purposes only | Source: Pexels
What can we learn from this story?
- Those we love do not truly leave us. There are certain things death can never touch. After losing her son Dave, Rosemary was devastated. She had never celebrated Halloween for three years since the day marked her beloved son’s death. However, she would later learn that her son wasn’t truly gone when she meets a young boy who resembles Dave and becomes part of their family.
- Embrace your grief and move on. No sorrow is permanent unless you choose to stick to it. It took Rosemary three years to embrace her grief and move on from her son’s loss. Although she was never entirely out of it, she sought solace in her adopted son Tom.
My Fiancée Vacuumed Up and Threw Away My Dead Mother’s Ashes from the Urn
I treasured my mother’s ashes for three years after her death. Her urn was that one sacred thing I asked my fiancée to never touch. But in her rush to make our home spotless, my fiancée vacuumed up the ashes, threw them out with the trash, and hid the truth from me.
Does the death of a loved one mean they’re gone from us forever? My mother Rosemary was my sun, moon, stars, and everything in between. After her death, I still felt her presence through the urn that held her ashes. Until the day my fiancée decided to “clean” our apartment, and my world shattered all over again.
An older lady’s framed photo, an urn, and glowing candles on a table | Source: Midjourney
The evening air was thick with memories as I stood in our living room, touching the silver frame that held Mom’s favorite photo.
She wore her favorite white dress and smiled at the camera, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
It had been five days since the accident that killed Mom, but some days, the pain felt as fresh as the morning I got the call from the hospital.
A man holding an older woman’s framed photo | Source: Midjourney
“Hey, Christian,” my sister Florence called from the couch. She had moved in after Mom passed, and her presence helped fill the echoing emptiness of my heart.
“Remember how Mom would always say grace before dinner, even if we were just having cereal?”
I smiled, running my finger along the frame. “Yeah, and remember how she’d catch us sneaking cookies before dinner? She’d try to look stern but end up laughing instead.”
A sad woman looking at someone | Source: Midjourney
“God, the way she’d put her hands on her hips,” Florence said, wiping her eyes. “Like she was trying so hard to be mad at us.”
“‘Lord give me strength!’” we said in unison, mimicking Mom’s exasperated tone, and for a moment, it felt like she was there with us.
The front door opened, and my girlfriend Kiara walked in, her footsteps hesitant. She’d been like that since Mom died, always hovering at the edges of our grief, never quite knowing how to step in.
A woman in the hallway | Source: Midjourney
“I picked up dinner,” she said, holding up a takeout bag. “Chinese. From that place you like, Christian.”
“Thanks,” I replied coldly. Something had changed between us since Mom’s death. It was like a wall had grown where there used to be an open door.
Two weeks after the funeral, I came home early from work to find Kiara packing a suitcase. The sight stopped me cold in the doorway.
“Where are you going?” I asked, though the answer was written in every careful fold of clothing she placed in the bag.
A woman packing her clothes | Source: Pexels
She didn’t look up. “I need some time, Christian. This… all of this… it’s too much.”
“Too much? My mother died, Kiara. What did you expect?”
“I don’t know how to help you!” She finally met my eyes, her own filled with tears. “You cry every night. You spend hours staring at her pictures. You and Florence keep talking about memories I wasn’t part of, and I feel like an outsider in my own home.”
“So your solution is to leave? When I need you most?”
A sad man looking at someone | Source: Midjourney
“Please try to understand—”
“Understand what? That my girlfriend of four years can’t handle a few weeks of grief? That you’d rather run away than support me?”
“That’s not fair!” Kiara’s hands trembled as she folded another shirt. “I’m trying my best! But it looks like you’ll take forever to move on, Chris.”
“Your best?” I grabbed the shirt from her hands. “Your best is packing your bags while I’m at work? Not even having the decency to tell me to my face that you care more about yourself than me… and my grief?”
A shocked woman | Source: Midjourney
“I was going to call you—”
“Oh, that makes it so much better!” I threw the shirt across the room. “What happened to ‘I’ll always be there for you’? What happened to ‘we’re in this together’?”
“I’m not equipped for this, Christian. I can’t be what you need right now.”
“I never asked you to be anything but present, Kiara. Just to sit with me, to hold my hand, to let me know I’m not alone. But I guess that’s too much to ask, isn’t it?”
A distressed man with a woman | Source: Pexels
She picked up her suitcase, her shoulders shaking. “I’m staying with my friend Shannon for a while. I’ll text you. I just… I need space to figure this out.”
“Figure what out? How to be a decent human being? Go ahead, run away. It’s what you’re good at, isn’t it?”
Kiara left without saying anything.
Florence moved in the next day, bringing with her the comfort of shared grief and understanding. We spent evenings looking through old photo albums, crying together, and laughing at memories of Mom’s terrible dancing and amazing cooking.
A man watching a woman leave with her bag | Source: Pexels
“She would have hated this,” Florence said one night, gesturing at the takeout containers littering our coffee table. “Remember how she used to say fast food was ‘the devil’s cooking’?”
“But she’d still take us to McDonald’s after doctor appointments,” I added, smiling at the memory. “Said it was ‘medicinal French fries.’”
“Chris, did Kiara call?”
“Nope! Just texted. You know, I stayed with her through her father’s illness, her bad days, her everything. And yet here I am, alone in my own grief. I needed her, but maybe she just didn’t love me enough.”
An upset an sitting on the couch | Source: Pexels
The only way Kiara contacted me was through texts like, “Hope you’re okay.”
I typed and deleted, “I needed you, Kiara.” But sent, “I’m managing. Thanks.”
A month after Kiara left, she asked to meet at our usual coffee shop. She sat across from me, looking smaller somehow, her hands wrapped around an untouched latte.
“Shannon’s boyfriend confronted me yesterday,” she hesitantly began. “Called me selfish and cold-hearted. Said I abandoned you when you needed me most.”
A woman in a coffee shop | Source: Unsplash
I stayed silent, watching her struggle with the words.
“He was right,” Kiara continued. “I’ve started therapy, Christian. I want to be better. I want to learn how to be there for you, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.”
“How do I know you won’t leave again?” I asked, the fear raw in my voice.
“Because I love you,” she replied, reaching across the table. “And I’m learning that love means staying, even when it hurts. Even when you don’t know what to say or do. I’m sorry for being a jerk.”
A woman holding a man’s hand | Source: Unsplash
Life settled into a new pattern after that. Kiara moved back in, and three years later, we started planning our wedding.
Mom’s urn remained on its special table in the corner, surrounded by her photos and her plastic rosary — the one she’d carried everywhere, even to the grocery store.
“We should divide the ashes,” I suggested to Florence one evening. “You could have half.”
She shook her head, touching the urn gently. “No, let’s keep them together. It’s what Mom would have wanted.”
An urn on a shelf | Source: Midjourney
I nodded, tears welling up in my eyes as I thought about Mom and how much I’d miss her at my wedding. I’d already decided: the urn with her ashes would have a special spot in the front row of the church. It would make me feel like Mom was there, blessing me as I took this important step in my life.
The wedding planning consumed our days. And Kiara seemed different. She was more present and understanding.
She held me when the grief hit unexpectedly, sat through stories about Mom without fidgeting, and even asked questions about her sometimes.
Grayscale shot of bridal accessories | Source: Pexels
Then, the call from Florence came on a Tuesday evening, just three days before my wedding. “Hey, Chris? I was wondering if I could have Mom’s rosary. The plastic one? I found a photo of her holding it, and—”
“Of course,” I said, moving toward the urn. “Let me just—”
The words died in my throat as I opened it. Inside, where Mom’s ashes should have been, sat a Ziploc bag filled with… SAND? The rosary lay beside it, exactly where I’d left it three years ago.
The front door opened, and Kiara walked in carrying shopping bags. One look at my face, and hers drained of color.
“What did you do to Mom’s ashes?” I asked.
A man pointing a finger | Source: Pexels
She set the bags down slowly, her hands trembling. “Honey, it’s not what you think. I didn’t do it intentionally—”
“What did you do, Kiara?”
A long silence followed. Then she confessed, “I was cleaning while you were at work a few months ago. The apartment needed a deep clean, and—”
“And what?”
“I picked up the urn to clean the table and accidentally dropped it. It shattered. I quickly assembled the ashes into a bag. But the bag tore. The ashes spilled onto the carpet. I… I panicked. I vacuumed them up and threw the ashes into the trash outside.”
My knees buckled. “You vacuumed my mother’s ashes and threw them in the trash?”
A woman using a vacuum cleaner | Source: Pexels
“I didn’t know what to do. I got some sand from the park nearby. Found a replica of the same urn in the antique shop downtown. I filled it up with the sand. I… I thought you’d never open it again.”
“Never open it? You thought I’d never want to see my mother’s ashes again?”
“I was trying to clean the house. It was just an accident.”
“Clean?” I slammed my hand against the wall. “Those weren’t dust bunnies under the couch, Kiara! That was my mother! The only physical piece of her I had left!”
A shocked man | Source: Midjourney
“I’m sorry, Christian!” she sobbed. “I wasn’t thinking!”
“Clearly!” I picked up the urn, cradling it to my chest. “You weren’t thinking when you decided to ‘clean’ around the one thing I specifically asked you never to touch. You weren’t thinking when you vacuumed up my mother’s remains like they were dirt. And you certainly weren’t thinking when you replaced them with sand and lied to my face for months!”
“Please, Christian, we can fix this—”
“Fix this? How exactly do you propose we fix this, Kiara? Should we go dumpster diving? Should we sift through garbage bags looking for my mother’s ashes?”
An emotional, teary-eyed woman | Source: Midjourney
“I’ll do anything—”
“Did you even try, Kiara? Did you even attempt to salvage anything? Or did you just panic and run to the park for sand, like you always run away when things get hard?”
Her silence filled the room like poison.
“That’s what I thought.” I started gathering Mom’s photos from the table before dumping the sand from the urn. “You know what the worst part is? I actually believed you’d changed. I thought all that therapy and all those promises meant something. But you’re still the same person who left me when my mother died. You’re still running from the hard stuff.”
Close-up shot of an angry man yelling at a woman | Source: Pexels
“Our wedding’s in three days. Please… I’m sorry. Don’t leave me. Where are you going, Christian?”
“Away from you!” I grabbed my keys and things. “I can’t even look at you right now.”
Before stepping out, I looked back, hoping stupidly for a sign of regret. Anything to show she understood what she’d done.
But Kiara just stared at the floor, her face unreadable, and already distant. My chest tightened, and the last bit of hope drained out of me. Without another word, I turned and left, the empty urn heavy in my hands.
A man walking away with a suitcase | Source: Pexels
The hotel room I checked in felt sterile and cold. I sat on the edge of the bed, Mom’s photos spread around me. My phone buzzed continuously with messages from Kiara, but I couldn’t bring myself to read them.
How would I tell Florence? How could I explain that the last piece of our mother was likely buried in a landfill or blown away like dust because my fiancée treated her remains like dirt?
As dawn broke, I stared at the urn one last time, realizing I was left with only emptiness and betrayal.
A distressed man | Source: Pexels
Things would never be the same, and I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to forgive my fiancée. Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe I never could. But deep down, in a corner of my heart, I hoped my mother would forgive me.
I took the rosary, feeling the familiar smooth plastic under my fingers.
“The night before your accident, you made Florence and me promise to keep it safe, Mom. Said it would help us find our way when we felt lost,” I whispered, tears brimming in my eyes.
“Maybe that’s why you wanted us to have it. Because you knew that someday, we’d need something more than your ashes to hold onto.”
A man holding a rosary | Source: Pixabay
I clutched the rosary tighter, remembering Mom’s words, “Love isn’t in the things we keep, dear. It’s in the memories we make and the forgiveness we offer.”
I don’t know if I can forgive Kiara. Every time I close my eyes, I see Mom’s ashes being sucked away into nothing. How do you forgive something like that?
I stepped out onto the seashore nearby. The city lights blurred through my tears as I clutched the empty urn and rosary to my chest. A gentle breeze stirred, reminding me of how Mom used to say the wind carried whispers from heaven.
An emotional man’s eyes | Source: Unsplash
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, looking up at the sky. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect your ashes. I had one job — to keep you safe. But I failed. But I want you to know… wherever you are… that you’re still here with me. In every breath I take, in every memory I hold, and in every prayer these beads have witnessed. I love you, Mom. I’ll love you until my last breath and beyond that. Please forgive me.”
The wind seemed to wrap around me like one of her warm embraces, and for a moment, I could almost hear her whisper, “There’s nothing to forgive, dear. Nothing at all. Love you too.”
Silhouette of a man standing on the seashore | Source: Pexels
This work is inspired by real events and people, but it has been fictionalized for creative purposes. Names, characters, and details have been changed to protect privacy and enhance the narrative. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
The author and publisher make no claims to the accuracy of events or the portrayal of characters and are not liable for any misinterpretation. This story is provided “as is,” and any opinions expressed are those of the characters and do not reflect the views of the author or publisher.
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