What to do with an empty crypt?

Mary Solberg of Crookston, Minn., knows she doesn’t have any legal rights when it comes to her former husband, Toby, with whom she picked out side-by-side crypts in Riverside Cemetery in town in 2010, years after they divorced in 2009. He died in 2013.

Her ex-husband’s family has removed his body from the cemetery and buried it in Erskine, Minn., near where his parents are buried.

But what’s a woman to do with an empty crypt she paid for, with someone’s name engraved on it who’s buried elsewhere?

She filed a small-claims lawsuit filed in Cass County District Court. She says the cemetery should’ve at least told her the body was gone.

Her ex-in-laws sent her a note in June that they removed him.

“I’ve given up on getting Toby back,” she tells Forum News Service.