I sat one seat over from a nice lady on the flight from Atlanta to Tampa.

Like this, but without the nice lock to hold it shut

Our middle seat was empty until the very last passenger wandered onto the plane. Until then we had

joked that we had the lucky row, jinxing ourselves. She sat there, holding a small aluminum cookie tin with a deck of cards pattern on it, a cell phone, and a coffee.

The flight was a quiet 1 hour once we were in the air, and the three of us kept our headphones on throughout the flight.

The tires touched the ground, the headphones came off, and the cell phones came on. She seemed anxious to fire up her iPhone, calling one of her children. Speaking loudly with joy in her voice she said:

“Hey! I just landed! Yeah, I can’t wait!... Guess what!?, Grandpa flew back with me! Yeah, he’s sitting on my lap!”

My neighbor and I looked at each other, both realizing simultaneously what was in the tin. Human remains.

“I had a feeling about that tin” said the middle seat passenger.

I walked with the lady up the ramp towards the exit and asked her if he was a card playing man. She told me that he lived to play cards and that the last time he flew was when he was deployed to Vietnam, telling her:

“You can put me on another plane when I’m dead”.

She paused for dramatic effect, looking at me with a victorious smile, not the kind of smile I would expect from someone who just said goodbye to her father and was carrying his ashes, saying:

“I win”.