By Marie Luby
San Diego, CA (KSWB/CNN) - A woman in California said her father's ashes got lost in the mail on their way to her brother.
A phone call from a co-worker leaves Carole Irwin speechless.
"She tells me, 'hey, did you deliver a package up north with your dad's urn and dog tags?' I was flabbergasted because I never even told really anybody about it," said Irwin.
She had sent an urn to her brother soothe siblings could share the ashes of their late father, Randel Irwin.
"It just provides such a comfort to me," she said.
But a post office mix-up sent the urn to a woman in Seattle, who contacted a local news station to find the sender. The dog tags helped trace the package back to Irwin.
"I couldn't believe seeing the urn I had sent in the mail. I mean it was just very overwhelming. I didn't know what to do," said Irwin.
Turns out, the package had fallen off the mail truck and was repackaged with the wrong address. Instead of being irate, Irwin said she wasn't surprised. After all, her dad, a geologist and Vietnam vet, always was the adventurous type.
"I was just like, I guess he just wanted to go see Seattle," she said. "I'm just so fortunate that it got into the right hands. If it was anybody else, they could have just went ahead and went 'oh what's this? Whatever, it's not mine, I'm just going to go and throw it away.' But this woman really took the effort and time to really figure out where this came from."
And so the urn will find its rightful owner after this detour in a journey that has touched Irwin.
"I loved my dad, I adored my dad, he's been a brilliant man," said Irwin.
KSWB/CNN