In a previous story I told you that my father was sick for 12 years. In all that time, although he tried to live a normal life, when he had a relapse, he became very sad and began to talk about death. Since he was a retiree from the University, he would tell us that everything that had to do with funeral expenses would be covered by his insurance and that we should not worry about that because the contract was in a yellow folder on the bedside table. He also told us that he wanted us to sing at his funeral and that after he died, we should bring flowers to his grave.

We didn't like to talk about that, so we always changed the conversation. We believed that the more we talked about it, the quicker death would come. But Dad would scold us and tell us that we had to be prepared for that outcome and that if he was, we should be too. After that he kept mentioning what he wanted and what he didn't want at the time of his wake: I do not want to be taken to a public hospital, I don't want to be cremated, I don't want to be massed, and I want all my friends to be notified so they can say goodbye to me.

When my father became seriously ill, we had to admit him to a clinic. According to the medical insurance he had, we did not worry. He went into intensive care with all the necessary care and treatment, but after three days we were informed that all the insurance had been used up. We had to go to the office and they informed us that there had been considerable changes in the policy and that the contract had changed. We took papers and documents with us, but nobody paid any attention to us. At that time of grief we were not strong enough to sue, so we went back to the clinic and agreed with management that we would pay.

I remember that we had to borrow money: my dad had a truck and a piece of land that we could sell to pay the creditors. The money they gave us was enough to keep him for three more days in the clinic's intensive care unit, but after that, the management suggested we take him to the public hospital. We remembered what my father had asked us when he was conscious: "I don't want to be taken to a hospital", he had repeated it many times; but above his request, there was the urgency to save his life, so we decided to take him to the hospital on a Friday and without being able to do anything else, my father died the following Monday.

_{Image from my personal gallery}

Then came the paperwork for his funeral, but there we discovered another mistake in the insurance policy: it only covered the coffin, the funeral home, but not the grave. We showed them the documents that my father had kept in that yellow folder, but the insurance company claimed that the inflation that the country was experiencing had left them with no available plot, so they recommended that we cremate him. We saw our faces and began to cry: we could not do that to our father. We had already failed him by taking him to a hospital, we could not betray him again.

Without wasting time, we called the cemetery authorities and finally got a plot, even though we had to pay twice as much. We also sought out one of his friends to sing that day. The singer performed my father's favorite songs. We also tried to maintain his grave with natural and fresh flowers. When we arrive at his grave, we ask for his blessing and say: here are your flowers, daddy, as always. Maybe the agreements with the insurance companies were not fulfilled, but what my father asked us to do, yes.

_{Image edited by me in Canva}

The images are from my personal gallery and the text was translated with Deepl.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR READING AND UNTIL ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY, FRIENDS