Lost and found

| May 4, 2012 9:15 PM

First, Luanne Melior lost her father.

Then the city lost him, too.

As a recent Press story reported, the cremated remains of Dara Brown Warren did not end up where Luanne and her husband thought they were supposed to, under a giant maple in Riverview Cemetery. Upon further review, city officials concede that they really aren't certain where Mr. Warren's urn now rests - and they feel horrible about it.

We're commenting on this unfortunate event not to cast blame or to exacerbate already tender feelings. We're pointing to it as a good example of solving inevitable problems.

The case of the missing remains is inevitable, after all. Overseeing some 20,000 burials dating clear back to the 1880s, the city of Coeur d'Alene has done well providing comfort and consistency to all those families despite enduring more than a century of employee turnover and the evolutionary tides of record keeping. Who else has provided that depth and breadth of service without screwing something up?

But that's only half the picture. The other half is Luanne and her husband, Pat.

Acknowledging that there were some tense moments in a week or so of communicating with city officials, the couple rose above their feelings of anxiety and anger to find a place that would give them peace and allow them to move forward. The answer came through both sides agreeing to continue to communicate - not with threats of lawsuits or defensiveness, but with the goal of resolving a problem to the best of everyone's ability.

This rational approach is seemingly less and less common, perhaps because complaints are viewed as threats and litigation takes the place of civil communication. Amicable resolution then becomes impossible.

Part of the reason this story ended as happily as it did is that the Meliors felt compassion for others.

"Why put another family through what we're going through right now?" said Pat Melior. "We finally got the apology we were looking for. That's basically all we wanted anyway."

We find yet again that a little compassion can go a long way.