Nearly two years after his death, CHILDREN OF BODOM frontman Alexi Laiho finally got a gravestone. The one-and-a-half-meter-by-50-centimeter monument was unveiled earlier this month at the Malmi Cemetery, a large cemetery located in the Malmi district in Helsinki, Finland, where the 41-year-old musician’s ashes were buried late last year.

A photo of the gravestone, which features a line from the CHILDREN OF BODOM song “Kissing The Shadows” (“So together in peace we shall be”),is available below. In addition, the lower right edge of the stone is decorated with Laiho‘s signature. Behind the stone is a metal cross sunk into the ground, the center of which is decorated with Laiho‘s V-model signature guitar. Find more pictures at Ilta-Sanomat.

Prior to the gravestone being installed, social media posts of Alexi‘s grave showed a candle sitting on top of his burial spot.

Australian-born music publicist Kelli Wright, who says she married the musician three years before his death, announced Alexi‘s burial in a social media post last December. She wrote: “Finally, with extremely mixed emotions, I can announce MY late, unconditionally and forever loved husband’s ashes were buried yesterday on our 4 th Wedding Anniversary. The family Laiho plot is where he was buried. Alexi and Kelli 2005 – eternity”.

At the time of his death, Alexi was still legally married to his former SINERGY bandmate Kimberly Goss. In January 2021, Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat reported that Laiho tied the knot with Goss in February 2002, and the couple never officially divorced. Although Laiho filed for divorce in November 2002, he quickly withdrew the petition and never filed another.

According to Finnish law, Laiho and Wright would not have been able to legally wed, as Laiho and Goss had never terminated their marriage.

In March 2021, Alexi‘s sister Anna accused Kimberly of holding up the burial process, writing in a social media post that Goss was using “her legal rights as a widow, preventing grie[v]ing mother and father [from] bury[ing] their own son. Her selfish and narcissistic explanation is that she wanted to take part in the funeral and still wants to be present when the ashes are buried,” she wrote. “But our family does not want this monster anywhere near us.”

For her part, Goss, who lives in Chicago, Illinois, denied allegations that was “a ‘gold-digger’ who Alexi ‘hated’,” explaining that “this can be easily disproven through the beautiful text and video messages he sent me daily, right until the last day of his life. Messages so sweet, yet so heartbreaking at the same time. Heartbreaking because you can see how ill he was. I tried everything I could to help him. I often messaged people in Helsinki to check in on him because I was so worried.”

Last December, Anna told Ilta-Sanomat that “the protracted dispute” over her brother’s ashes was “over” and that she and the rest of her family welcomed the opportunity to focus on grieving her brother “in a new way.”

Alexi passed away on December 29, 2020 in his home in Helsinki, Finland. He died of alcohol-induced degeneration of the liver and pancreas connective tissue. Furthermore, Laiho had a cocktail of painkillers, opioids and insomnia medication in his system. He had suffered from long-term health issues leading up to his death.