A nurse has finally been laid to rest after her remains were found in the trash in Huber Heights, Ohio. Shianne Richardson and her wife were dumpster diving in the neighborhood when they happened upon an urn filled with the nurse’s cremated remains. Both women knew they had to give this woman the final sendoff she deserved.
“We sometimes stop at dumpsters because a lot of places throw away food,” Richardson explained. “We pulled up and I immediately saw a black box, and I picked it up and it was heavy.”
She said the realization that she was holding an urn filled her with unexpected emotion. It was as if she was holding a woman’s entire life in her hands. “I flipped it around and saw a sticker with a funeral home name on it, someone’s name, death date,” Richardson said. “I was like ‘with the weight of the box and this sticker, she’s definitely in here.’”
It’s not clear how the nurse’s remains ended up in the dumpster.
“It’s just disrespectful and disgusting,” she said.
Richardson made it her mission to find out who this woman was, so she typed her name into Ancestry.com and found her cadet cards from when she was a nurse in the armed forces. The urn belonged to Dove Clark, who was a nurse during WWII.
“I was amazed that she lived this fulfilled, selfless life and she was still just disposed of,” Richardson said.
She also found out that Clark’s husband had been buried at Enon Cemetery in the 1990s and that he had meant for his wife to join him when she died.
Richardson and her wife drove to the cemetery to find the headstone.
“We were both talking to her in our heads saying ‘show us where you are, we want to put you to rest, show us where you are,’” she said. “I was coming up this way and I saw her, she’s right here.”
They located Clark’s resting place and called the cemetery to see if they could make space for Dove.
“We were ready to raise money, do anything we needed to bury her,” she said.
An employee named Don answered and told her that he would do it for free.
“We called Don, and he was like, ‘If you’re willing to bring her here, I will bury her because that’s just crazy,’” Richardson said. “We gave her ashes to Don and knew she was safe.”
Thanks to their quick thinking, Dove Clark was finally laid to rest nearly 10 years after she passed away.
“God forbid something like this happens to me,” Richardson said.
The cemetery also conducted a Nurse Honor Guard Ceremony to honor her passing.
“It was everything she deserved,” Richardson said. “I feel like I met her, I knew her, and I grieved her all in such a short amount of time.”
