Veteran thought to be homeless had family show up at burial

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Just as the burial service was about to begin for a homeless World War II veteran with no family, the man's widow surprised the crowd by showing up at the cemetery.

And it turns out that 84-year-old Edwin Cecil McQuiddy had lived in a nursing home and hadn't been homeless at all.

The revelations came Thursday at a funeral in Kansas City for McQuiddy, a Navy musician 2nd Class who died March 10.

A group of Kansas City-area funeral directors who are part of the Dignity Memorial Homeless Veterans Burial Program organized his cremation and burial with military honors because no one knew he had any family.

But as the service was starting, funeral director Mark McGilley was told the man had a widow and had lived in a nursing home.

"Holy cow!" he said. "Are you kidding me? His wife is living?"

About that time a car pulled up and Lois McQuiddy stepped out. The two had lived together before health problems forced Edwin McQuiddy to move into a nursing home.

McGilley had intended to present a folded U.S. flag to a Gold Star mother, Shirley Hemenway, whose son Ronald died at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. But the funeral director had to revise his plans, so he pulled Hemenway aside to let her know about the changes.

"We didn't know anything about a widow," he told her. "We have to give the flag to her."

"We would have come anyway," Hemenway responded. "It's OK."

With folded flag in hand, Lois McQuiddy sat quietly during the service remembering her husband as he was before diabetes and amputations, when the two were members of the Bonsai Society of Greater Kansas City and sickness hadn't yet taken hold of him.

Now, she said, "it was time for him to be released from his misery."

When the funeral was over, she got back into the car, carrying her husband's ashes in a little pine box.

McGilley said a stepdaughter had asked if McQuiddy would qualify for a burial program as an indigent. She had said she wouldn't attend the ceremony, and no one knew about any other family members.

"We stepped in to help," McGilley said. "Otherwise the county would have had to bury him in a pauper's grave. And that wouldn't have been right. Our commitment is to veterans, regardless of their circumstances. We will be there for them."