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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/Far_Highlight_4147 on 2025-11-03 06:03:03+00:00.
So this is actually a fairly old story. Around 2006-07. I (currently M35) was dating a girl I met through community theatre. On this particular get together my girlfriend and I were going to go see a show with her immediate family. Her mom and sister were going to meet us at the theatre while I was going to drive my girlfriend and her dad.
First piece of backstory. My grandmother had passed away about 5 years beforehand. She was cremated and we kept her urn behind a picture of her on the mantle of our living room.
Second piece of backstory. My dad had recently lost his career job and we were in the process of having our house foreclosed on so we were doing a lot of downsizing. In the meantime my dad was driving for a delivery company that required him to use our personal vehicle which was a hatchback.
Back to the story.
So I get to my girlfriend’s house and while waiting for her and her father to come out I’m adjusting the back seat of the car for her to use. As I’m doing so I find this brass colored box. I look at the label on the box, set the box down, immediately pull out my cell phone and make a call.
“Hi. Mom? Could you please ask your husband why the cremated remains of his mother are in the back of the car right now?”
Apparently my dear old dad had it in his mind that to have one less thing to move he would take grandma’s urn and have them interred with her husband and if a delivery brought him near where the cemetery was he could just swing in and drop her off (pretty sure that’s not how that works)
I end the call pretty quickly and put the urn in the boot of the car as my GF and her dad came out of the house. GF gets into the back seat while her dad gets into the passenger seat. The drive to the theatre is about a 15 minutes (might as well have been hours) her dad, since this was more or less the first time we had had more than a passing conversation, was giving me the “Dad Quiz” “what do you plan to do for college?” “What are your plans for a career” etc. etc.
I, quietly panicking, am only giving short non committal answers.
We get to the theatre and her dad goes into meet up with the rest of her family. GF stoped me in the parking lot and asked why I was being so awkward around her dad because she wanted him to approve of me.
I explain to her, “no it wasn’t because her dad was giving me the “dad quiz” it’s because the whole drive I could hear this box sliding back and forth in the back of the car. What’s in the box? My Grandma.”
I had never actually seen the color drain from a person’s face before. GF turned and immediately walked away from me. She would not talk to me, would not even look at me for the remaining time before the show started.
During intermission I’m trying to explain everything “she passed a few years back, we kept her on the mantle in the living room etc.” she still wouldn’t engage.
Finally as the lights we going down for the second act she leans over to me and just barely whispers “your grandmother is cremated right?”
I swear I almost burst a blood vessel trying not to break down laughing. But when I thought about it I realized during my panicked explanations I had in fact not mentioned that she was cremated. And when you hear something crazy like “ my grandmother is in a box in the boot of my car” without context yeah it can take a few minutes (or the first act of a play) to reach that conclusion and not that if I hit enough of a bump an arm would flip up over the back seat and land on her shoulder.
At the same to this day I still like to picture what was going through her mind when I was mentioning that we kept her on the mantle in our living room.
“There’s the 8 pointer we got a couple years ago.”
“there’s the bass from the lake.”
“there’s grandma.”
After the show we went back to her house and everything was explained with context. We ended up explaining what happened to her family as well and they thought it was HILARIOUS.
GF was less than amused and was a bit traumatized by the whole thing.
TL;DR a series of odd decisions and poor wording led to my Grandma’s urn being in my car during a date and traumatized my girlfriend.
P.s. we did end up breaking up several months later. Yes grandma did end up getting buried at the cemetery.