Not a lot is known about Jerry Sauve, and there was no one at his funeral Tuesday to shed more light.
Those who attended at the Western Montana Veterans Cemetery in Missoula came down the Bitterroot from Corvallis, after American Legion Post 91 there put out word of Sauve’s service with full military honors.
“He didn’t have any loved ones to mark his passing. His fellow veterans are here to mark his passing,” post chaplain Martyn Reiss said in a short address.
Only the bare specifics of Sauve’s military service are available. Cemetery manager Curt Aasved documented enough to qualify him for the veterans cemetery. Sauve served in the U.S. Army for 23 months from January 1963 to December 1965 and was honorably discharged as a Specialist E-4. He had no overseas service.
Sauve lived in the Noxon area but died of natural causes in April 2016 in Spokane at the Veterans Administration hospital. He was 70 years old, with no family to make funeral arrangements.
“Apparently the VA had called around and didn’t come up with anything,” said Tom Grymes of Daly Leach Memorial Chapel in Hamilton.
He’s not sure how the social worker from the VA got his funeral home’s number, but Grymes, who was in the National Guard for 25 years, agreed to take on burial duties.
“It’s quite a situation from our perspective on how do you handle these things,” Grymes said. “With Jerry in particular. He did have a friend who was able to tell us he wanted to be cremated, and he wanted to be placed in a veterans cemetery.”
The first part went smoothly. Grymes has a friend in the mortuary business in Cheney, Washington, who agreed to do the cremation for what he believes was a cut-rate charge to Daly Leach. The ashes were shipped to Hamilton, where they’d been kept ever since.
“We were still trying to get all documents we needed in order to qualify him for a VA burial,” Grymes said.
He tried unsuccessfully to procure the $70 county burial fund from Sanders County, where Sauve lived. Even the VA, which courted Daly Leach in the first place, was uncooperative, saing it would not pay a funeral claim to a funeral home, only to the families.
“Then we applied as a funeral home for unclaimed individuals and they said you aren’t pre-approved to do so. So, no, we don’t do that either,” Grymes said.
Finally all the documentation was in place. Grymes talked to Doug Mason, adjutant of Corvallis Legion Post 91.
“He said they’d be honored to come and do the honors service for us,” Grymes said.
And so, more than a year and a half after Sauve’s death, he was laid to rest.
Representatives of the Montana National Guard were on hand, and the Post provided the gun salute.
Bob Kollermeier took the afternoon off for the service. His wife, Shawna, was one of a handful of people who witnessed the short ceremony in the committal shelter. A folded American flag with three rifle shells on top was handed to her to carry across the grounds to the columbarium.
“That was by default, I guess,” she said later. “I didn’t know if I could even handle it. I’m pretty emotional even when I don’t know somebody at a funeral.”
Shawn Kollermeir stood next to Keely Jankunas, also of Corvallis, and Jankunas’ daughter Georgia.
They drove down for the ceremony a day after Al Simmons, a World War II veteran and Keely’s father, passed away at his home in Hamilton at age 92. Services for him will be in Corvallis on Friday.
“We’re just coming to support veterans,” Jankunas said. “There’s nothing sadder than having a family who’s not here. I don’t know anything about the situation, other than he had no family here.”
The ceremony was over in less than 20 minutes, when Mason placed the urn containing Jerry Sauve’s ashes in front of the open niche at the columbarium.
His military documentation and funeral were carried out without bringing the Missing In America project into the picture.
“It’s exactly what we do, but with this scenario it was lucky they were able to verify his veteran eligibility,” said Marty Malone of Park City, the project’s Montana state coordinator.
He complimented Daly Leach for taking on the project and Aasved for doing the research.
“That’s awesome that they would step up and do that,” Malone said.
Since 2009, Missing in America has processed 33 veterans remains, many of them indigent, and qualified them for proper burials. Malone said his current working list has more than 100 names that his team is poring through genealogical and service records to document.
“Jerry’s situation is sad in a lot of ways,” said Grymes, who said it was the first time in his 27 years in the business that the VA contacted the funeral home about an unclaimed person.
“The fact that it’s being taken care of in an appropriate way is a good thing. But it’s an unfortunate thing, the fact that there’s no family to be here.”
