Two Oregon women spend years sifting through ashes to give veterans a proper burial

After noticing that many abandoned cremated remains in Portland belonged to veterans, the two volunteers launched a decade-long effort to find them and give them a soldier’s resting place
Carolyn Arntson and Denise Hatch stood in a dimly lit storage room at Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial Funeral Home, searching through hundreds of boxes — stacked floor to ceiling — of cremated remains.

Here, in a place of such conspicuous death and loss, the duo searched for remains of military veterans left behind and abandoned. Some have sat on these shelves for more than a century.