Barbara Offenhartz lived her 89 years on Earth with an itinerant spirit, taking her family around the world on “budget adventures” – from tent camping in African national parks to living in Japan for a year – simply because they could.
Her last adventure ended in San Francisco, where, last month, a box of her cremated remains traveled from her son’s porch on Potrero Hill to a homeless shelter below an underpass, for reasons that, even to her children, remain unclear.
The saga began last month, shortly after Barbara Offenhartz, who was living outside of Boston, died. Potrero Hill resident John Offenhartz, Barbara’s son, who was handling her remains with the help of a funeral home back East, had expected the box containing his mother’s ashes to arrive on his doorstep, as had been promised. But on or about the day the ashes were set to arrive, he got a call from the funeral home.
Over the phone, the funeral home employee told him, “Hey, we got a call from a homeless woman who said she’s found your mom’s cremains,” Offenhartz, 61, recalled. The employee relayed the finder’s phone number.
A resident of San Francisco for nearly half his life, Offenhartz said he and other neighbors of their tight-knit hill community have a practice of bringing in other people’s packages if a neighbor spots one on a porch.
“It’s an unofficial network,” he said. “Folks here know better than to leave things out, and we look out for each other’s stuff.”
John Offenhartz, whose mother’s ashes were stolen from his porch last month, holds her ashes after being reunited with them. (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)
As he dialed the woman’s number, Offenhartz suspected the package was delivered and then stolen by a porch pirate. The post office was instructed to ring his doorbell but most likely had left the package outside his door, unattended, he said.
When the woman, Heather MCcray, picked up the phone, Offenhartz said she seemed more upset than he was. She told him that she found the package – a black plastic box – and immediately understood what it contained when she saw what was printed on it.
It read plainly: “This contains the cremated remains of Barbara H. Offenhartz,” with her death date and a number for St. Michael’s Crematory in Boston. Representatives from the funeral home declined to comment.
In an interview, MCcray, originally from Los Angeles, said she found the box sitting on top of an electrical outlet outside the Division Circle Navigation Center, near the corner of South Van Ness Avenue and 13th Street. When she saw the name was Barbara, she felt even more compelled to find out who the ashes belonged to.
“My mother’s name was Barbara,” said MCcray, who said she had her late mother cremated in 2017, but never showed up to the appointment to have the remains interred. “I didn’t even call to cancel. I knew that I didn’t put my mom in the ground, and it reminded me of what I didn’t do.”
MCcray and Offenhartz made a plan to meet outside the homeless shelter. When he arrived soon after their call, she couldn’t help but laugh at his choice of transportation: a motorcycle.
“Make sure you strap her down well!” MCcray called out to him, before Offenhartz handed her $100, plopped the box in his backpack and rode away.
“As stories go, the whole thing from start to finish was maybe half an hour,” said Offenhartz. “But it was a whirlwind.”
Once Offenhartz got home, he felt a sense of relief – tinged with both shock and, strangely, amusement, for how perfectly imperfect the ordeal had been.
John Offenhartz, left, in a photo with his mother, Barbara Offenhartz. (Courtesy of John Offenhartz)
Offenhartz’s father passed away in late 2024. His mother’s death, a sudden decline after a brief bout of respiratory issues, happened shortly after the anniversary of his father’s death, he said.
His parents were together for 65 years, both of them chemists who met at Swarthmore College and hitchhiked through their honeymoon in Europe. After they both earned doctorates in physical chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, they embarked on postdoctoral fellowships in Cambridge, England.
After that, they journeyed – with their young daughter, Kathleen, in tow – through Warsaw, Poland, and on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Nakhodka, Russia, before sailing to Japan, where they began fellowships. There, during a typhoon, Offenhartz was born.
Barbara’s box now sits on a dresser in the Offenhartzes’ living room, enveloped by old photos of the family’s many colorful experiences throughout the years.
He kept thinking about how his mother would have reacted. He had a feeling she would have loved it.
“She was unflappable. It took a lot to get her upset, and she lived for adventure.” he said. “I can’t help but think she would have said, ‘What a great story.'”
This article originally published at His mother’s ashes vanished from his S.F. porch. Then the story took an incredible turn.
