Not only motherless, but catless as well. That's me, at present. Manasse died, 5 days after Mum did. He was 17, which I'm told compares to a human lifespan of 84. And as with Mum, the overriding sense was one of acceptance. I have yet to cry for either one. Perhaps I'm just heartless ( Read more... )

It's been 11 days since my mother died ( Read more... )

It's been 9 years since I put up my very first, and very tentative, LJ-post. At the time, I had no conception of how much this journal would come to mean to me in the years following: more than simply allowing me to keep a(n infrequent) record of my all too mundane life, it has allowed me to encounter people, knowledge and ideas I never would have ( Read more... )

Today, the sad news reached me that one of my former hp colleagues succombed to breast cancer last Friday. We'd kept in touch through e-mails and Facebook-messages up until July, but I didn't know she was sick until halfway through last week when her husband mentioned she only had days left...So sad, she leaves a 2-year old daughter behind ( Read more... )

Is it bad of me that, despite the fact that I wasn't particularly busy over the weekend, I still managed not to remember that it had been two full years since my father's passing? I would have forgotten all about it if Mum hadn't mentioned it on Sunday ( Read more... )

A few hours ago, I carried my father's urn to his final resting place, and buried it there; while my sister, niece and nephew, my sister's boyfriend and an employee from the cemetery looked on. Monique helped me to fill in the little grave and tamp down the earth before the plaque was placed on top of it, and then we just stood there in the rain ( Read more... )

We picked our father's final resting place this morning, my sister and I. He will be interred in the 'urn garden' of the Nieuw Eykenduynen cemetery in The Hague sometime next month, the exact date to be decided still as we've agreed to wait until the headstone of polished green granite that we also picked out and ordered this morning, is ready. ( Read more... )

My sister and I are having to decide on what to do with Dad's ashes. There's quite a number of options to choose from, ranging from the traditional (interment in either a grave or a wall), to the sublime (sending him up 20 kilometres in the sky in a balloon), the morbid (taking the urn home to sit on the mantlepiece) and the ridiculous (having ( Read more... )

I've been dealing with and trying to settle my father's affairs since he died a little over two weeks ago. This has meant letters and phone calls to insurance companies, the IR and pension funds, and visits to the town hall and the bank. It'll take a few months before I'm done, apparently, and will probably involve the services of a notary public ( Read more... )

Bone-weary. Slept fitfully last night. All the events of the day kept going through my mind, and the knowledge that my father's gone kept sleep at bay. Got up in the middle of the night and made myself a cocoa. Watched a bit of nighttime TV, which is even worse than daytime TV ( Read more... )