- Single mom Monica Long was busy preparing for her child’s birthday party when her two youngest made a mess
- The busy mom cleaned them up and vacuumed the dirt they’d gotten all over her carpet
- Days later, Monica discovered her grandfather’s ashes had been emptied — and realized what her kids had done
A mom of three found herself cleaning up a huge mystery mess. Days later, she figured out what it was.
Monica Long, on TikTok @molo.solo, tells PEOPLE that she was in her Colorado home getting ready for her youngest son’s birthday party when her toddlers got into something.
“I’m a single mom to three boys that are on the spectrum, ages 14, 3 and 2, so our house is wild. You never know what one day to the next is going to be like. My younger two are toddlers, so they’re just getting into everything these days,” she explains.
“I was cleaning and getting ready for the birthday party, to have friends over to celebrate my youngest baby. I was in the bathroom and I came out. It took only four minutes, but there was stuff all over them and the floor. I was like, ‘Where did this dirt come from?’ I grabbed the vacuum and vacuumed it up and continued about my day.”
It wasn’t until days later when Long discovered the empty container that once held her PawPaw’s ashes that she realized what had happened.
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“PawPaw was on a shelf, out of their reach, but they’re climbers. They climbed their little way up and got ahold of him,” she explains.
“I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, they got PawPaw and I vacuumed him up.’ I couldn’t believe this happened. I love them to death but oh my goodness, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Long shares.
She recalled her boys standing there with white dust on their clothes and their lips. “I pieced it together. The littlest one, he figured out how to open bottles by biting and unscrewing them. So that’s why they had white dust on their lips. And I just dusted and cleaned them off, not thinking anything of it. But they might have eaten part of their grandfather, which is horrifying.”
After realizing what happened, Long made a video making light of the situation, meant for just her sister.
“I sent that video clip to my sister initially, and she made a joke about 2025 starting off wild. I shared it on Facebook knowing friends would think it was funny. After that, I just figured I’d share it on TikTok, where I have other friends,” she says of her viral video, which has since amassed more than 2.3 million views.
“It just took off. I did not expect it, and it was just wild. I never would have thought that would happen,” she adds.
She also shared the humorous situation with her family. “I called my grandmother and said, ‘MawMaw, I gotta tell you something.’ She goes, ‘Well what is it?’ I said, ‘The boys got PawPaw and they dumped him out and I didn’t realize it was him so I vacuumed him up,’ ” she shares.
“She goes, ‘Oh no,’ but found it comical. She goes, ‘I bet PawPaw would have got a kick out of that,’ and then tells me, ‘Don’t worry, we have more PawPaw.’ ”
Long adds, “I just never thought I’d have to tell my sweet little grandma that I vacuumed her husband up and he’s in a Shark vacuum. So she got a kick out of that and my daddy laughed too. He goes, ‘Oh gosh, it would be those two little ones that got PawPaw.’ ”
As the video went viral and the comments rolled in, Long says she “spent the whole week laughing” at the responses.
“The majority of the people had something funny to say and just added to the humor of the whole situation. People had negative comments, but you just let it roll off your back. Everybody’s entitled to their opinions and that’s fine,” she says.
“I tried to make some follow-up videos to answer some repetitive questions. They asked why PawPaw was in a sand art plastic bottle and I was like, ‘Well we’re not rich and he was a follower of Jesus.’ ”
Long believes her PawPaw “would have found the humor in all of this,” as she’s chosen to.
“He had shenanigan stories of his own from being a principal. He was a Vietnam War veteran and a school teacher for many, many years. He and his wife, my MawMaw, they were house parents at children’s homes. She was also a beautician. The rest of his ashes are buried in a veteran’s cemetery in Texas.'”
Laughing, she adds, “This would be another story for him to laugh about.”
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