The last week has been harder than I even thought possible. So much has happened since I wrote here. In my last post I wrote about what happened three weeks ago, when I flew to Spain, in regards my maternal great uncle (I'll be referring to as my grandfather for the rest of this post), was in hospital. He wasn't doing well, but I thought he would pull through. On Monday, 24 April, I woke up to the news that he'd passed away in the early hours of the morning. I went into shock and it took me about two days before the tears came. I didn't know if I'd make the funeral (on Wednesday 17 May) as I'd booked my flights to see Andy but was returning to the Netherlands on the Sunday beforehand. My parents offered to pay for me to change my return ticket so I could go. Andy also managed to get the day off work to come with me to the funeral.
The day before I flew to England, I got a message from my dad saying that the health of his mother, my Oma, was getting worse, much worse. Her health has been bad for years and had been slowly getting worse. Now it was deteriorating fast and my parents, who were in Uganda at the time, booked their tickets to Netherlands to see her. Saturday was the earliest they could fly out. On Friday night, I flew to England as was the plan. It was on Saturday afternoon, in the kitchen of Andy's host family, when I got the message from my dad saying that my grandmother had passed away.
Here in Holland, the funeral takes place very quickly after the person passes away. This is true for Oma. The date picked for her funeral was Thursday, 18 May (five days after she passed away). So my parents booked a ferry to England to make it to my grandad's funeral on Wednesday 17 May. They also booked the return trip to the Netherlands the same night to make it back in time for my Oma's funeral the next day. My flight back to the Netherlands was in the late evening on Thursday, which meant I wouldn't have made it to Oma's funeral, so my parents booked me onto the return ferry with them.
I'm not going to write anything about what happened at either funeral because its still really raw for me and for my family. I've really been grateful that I was able to go to both funerals and that Andy was able to come with me to Grandad's funeral.
As I sign off, I want to say that I'll always miss Grandad John and Oma. They are two special people who have both departed and I hope that I'll be able to see them both again one day. This quote is so true: "Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal."
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