You can laugh at me for this one.
My father wanted to have his ashes scattered over the San Francisco Bay.
A pretty simple request of me, a private pilot.
The day came to carry the box of his ashes up in a small two seat Cessna. The windows open easily and it is safe to do it at 70 knots, which is also a safe flying speed.
I had a close relative, who shall remain nameless, for reasons you will quickly recognize.
I asked her if she knew how ‘to empty something’ into a moving air stream, as you would do when pouring coffee out of a moving car window. She said ‘yes’, and I told her how to open the window.
Well, she didn’t know how to do it. Properly you put the open side directly into the wind. She just put the box out the window open side facing away from the plane.
We were over Alcatraz, roughly the middle of the Bay.
All the ashes blew back into the plane.
When we landed at Oakland airport, I had to find a vacuum cleaner and vacuum the inside of the plane. That is where my father ended up.
Interestingly at an art exhibit, a few months later, I saw some imaginative funeral urns. One was exactly like the one my father ended up in.