OCEAN CITY, N.J. — Paulette Eva Rose Tricoche died last summer at age 71.
The Reidsville, Georgia woman was cremated and her ashes placed in a purple urn, etched with her birth and death dates, along with a simple message: “In Loving Memory Mom.”
On Oct. 7, that urn washed ashore in Ocean City, New Jersey – more than 800 miles away from the Georgia town of 5,000 west of Savannah.
Ryan Leonard, 39, said his kids found the urn in some sea grass outside their home on Friday.
Jackson, 7 and Reid, 3, were sifting through “sea grass that had washed up in the storm,” Leonard said in an interview Friday.
It was found with other random things like small bouys and a flip flop.
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The family lives right on the bay and is familiar with things washing up there, “mostly things that drop off a boat into the lagoon – tags and surfboards, that kind of stuff,” but never something as odd as an urn.
Leonard found an obituary for Tricoche online, but couldn’t find anything about a family. He reached out to the funeral home that posted the obituary, but hadn’t heard back by Friday evening.
When reached on the phone Friday evening, Bradley B. Anderson, of the Bradley B. Anderson Funeral Home said he would check his records to see where the woman’s family might be so they can retrieve their loved one’s remains.
For now, the Leonards are storing the urn in their garage.
“We didn’t open it, but the lid is on tight.”
