He is a man who has buried a great many children and he does not have much to say about most of it.

What he said was: “Colonel, I have been doing this since 1984 and I have never once had a family ask me to move a cremation forward.

“They ask me to push it back.

Every time.

Somebody always wants more time.

“Yours was the third time in my life anybody asked me to move one up, and the first two were for religious reasons and they told me so in the first sentence, and this family did not give me a reason at all.

“I had already written it down.