A deep clean at a grocery store wound up reuniting a family with a lost, cherished memorial to their late daughter.
Tom and Cathy Hemish of Rosemoutm Minnesota, lost their 35-year-old daughter, Leah, to an aggressive cancer in 2019. Leah died only six weeks after her diagnosis.
Her family — shaken and grieving — commissioned a custom pendant that incorporated Tom, Cathy, and Leah's birthstones as well as a small portion of Leah's ashes.
"This was one thing my wife wanted to do so she could have Leah with her all the time," Tom told KARE11. "Our birthstones were put on there. It's our family, just the three of us. We miss her like crazy all the time."
But further tragedy struck when, four years ago, Cathy and Tom lost the pendant during a shopping trip at a Cub Foods grocery store in Rosemount.
The couple searched the store, its parking lot, their car, and their home hoping to find the little piece of their daughter that they carried with them everywhere they went, but ultimately were unable to locate the pendant. They even posted photos of the pendant on social media asking their neighbors to call them if they spotted their lost jewelry.
"It hurt,” Tom said. “But what do you do? You have to just move on.”
Then, just over four years later, employees at the store were carrying out a deep clean of the building’s coolers and found the missing pendent, noticing it included a birthday engraved on the back.
Thinking the pendant likely held sentimental value for whoever lost it, the employee handed it over to their manager, who then posted about it on neighborhood Facebook pages — the same ones that Tom and Cathy posted to four years earlier.
Another Facebook user saw the post and reached out to Tom and Cathy directly to let them know the pendant had been found.
"There's a lot of not good, happy news that comes out every day, and to have somebody that steps up and does the good thing and the right thing, it doesn't happen very often," Tom said. “We just are very thankful for the people that found it and did what they did to reunite us with her, to put us back with her.”
The store manager, Maria Nagel, told KARE 11 in an email how the scenario played out inside the store.
She explained that an employee named Kevin located the pendant, saw the inscription on the back, and gave it to her.
"He brought it to my attention and I felt inspired to find the rightful owner. I hoped that by turning to social media, it would find its way back home," she wrote. "I remember years ago, a woman had lost a pendant that was made with her daughter's ashes but it was never found. I didn't think this could possibly be it, but, as it turns out this was the lost pendant!"
She said that she and the rest of the Cub employees were "so happy that we were able to reunite this cherished [memento] to the Hemish family."
