'Rolling wake': Widow takes husband's corpse on Alaskan road trip
People grieve in different ways after losing a loved one, but one woman took her sorrow to another level, taking her dead husband on a road trip in Alaska.
Using ice from local canneries to keep the corpse cold, the woman placed the body of her 78-year-old spouse inside an aluminum transport casket and took him for one last ride.
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Police found the body several days into the road trip and said that throughout the journey, the woman stopped off at canneries to stock up on ice for the truck bed during the “rolling wake,”Juneau Empire reports.
I'm thinking Kathy Bates as the woman and Bill Paxton as the corpse?https://t.co/5q9mWiRs8P
— R Taylor (@sparkydeathcap) July 24, 2016
The man died from natural causes on Prince of Wales Island and his wife drove the body to the city of Ketchikan.
Police Chief Alan Bengaard told the Ketchikan Daily News that the body should have been en route to the morgue, but instead “for some reason she decided to not go directly to the mortuary and had been driving around with him for a couple days.”
“My understanding is kind of - leading up to the events of the last couple of days - there’s been a rolling wake or viewing,” Bengaard added. “It was pointed out to me that evidently, she had stopped at a couple of the canneries and got ice and filled the bed of the truck with ice to keep the body chilled.”
https://t.co/wmfKsmvrKt
— boycollins (@maelstephen) July 24, 2016
She has promised the authorities not to take the corpse out on the road again. So they can't actually stop her?
The mortuary has taken custody of the body after police were called to the scene, while the family will decide how to care for the body.
According to the officer, the woman did not break any laws, but he said “you can’t make this stuff up” and that hopefully the woman won’t choose to go back on the road again with the body.
