Many things happened after my last update, and I wrote the last post only five days ago.

In several recent articles, I told that, according to astrology, a difficult time in my life is starting. This couldn’t be more true. You can read the previous articles about what happened here, here and here.

It turns out, because my mom and dad aren’t divorced, the responsibilities for my dad’s funeral and legal matters fall on my shoulders. That’s because I’m the only person from the family living in my country.

In case you’re not my regular reader, me and my dad weren’t close, as he left our family long time ago. I think I haven’t seen him for eighteen years.

When my father died, I notified my mother and brother. They busied themselves arranging covid tests and flights to come to Lithuania.

I had to get in touch with my half-sister who is the daughter from the first marriage of my father. I’ve never seen her before. She also didn’t want anything to do with the man who abandoned them when she was thirteen. But she said she couldn’t refuse to help her half-sister.

When we met, we instantly clicked. It really felt like she’s my sister. She drove me to all the places that I needed to sort out his funeral. We had to go to the hospital where he died to collect his death certificate, we needed to go to the funeral home to sign documents for his cremation. It was his preference to be cremated, as we found out.

We had to go to meet his relative who gave some of his documents and explained what to do about the burial place (as it’s illegal to scatter the ashes of the deceased in Lithuania). Thankfully, he was in charge of the family grave place, so even though that graveyard was no longer open to new burials, we were allowed to bury him near the rest of his generation.

We also needed to go to the graveyard administration office for some formalities, and after that – to locate the family gravesite. My half-sister volunteered to shovel the snow off the graveyard the next day, for the funeral home staff to be able to dig the hole for the cremation urn.

The body was cremated, and the funeral was taking place the next day. We had to let other relatives know, and we also needed to deal with my dad’s drinking buddies who were after the deceased’s money. That wasn’t pleasant at all. They probably stole his wallet after death as the documents were returned but the wallet was missing.

When I signed my papers to cremate my dad, we had to go to the morgue to confirm his identity. I’ve never seen a dead body before, and it was the dad that I needed to see first.

We weren’t given any chance to prepare. We were simply taken to the adjoining morgue and the father’s body was shown. We were afraid to see it because we knew he was alcoholic. So we thought we would see a swollen dead face and it would remain stuck in our minds for the rest of our lives.

When the body was uncovered, it was a surprise what we saw. The face looked like his pre-drinking days, just much older, of course. He looked like a frail benign granddad. He must have lost a lot of weight before his death as the face looked nothing like in his last pictures we later saw.

He looked so frail and benign, that, as we were leaving the morgue, I started crying. If I still held any anger about his being a terrible father, it was gone now. So it did me good to see his dead body.

My half-sister, however, was unable to forgive him. She didn’t cry. I hope she will forgive him though, as it’s much better for health and peace of mind.

Since then, many more things happened, but I will keep that for the next article.