Pops

Our sweet old gardener "Pops" has died. He passed away 3 days ago. He was Tella & Nora's stepdad. Lucas keeps saying: "Pops really, really tired" & "Pops no wake up". He also says that Pops now sleeps on the clouds and waves at the clouds. Obviously, Tella & Nora are very sad. We visited them last night at the wake (first time any of us has seen a corpse). Pop's coffin was out on Tella's porch & everybody was asked to come and have a look at Pops. I found it all rather unpleasant & had to walk away once to have a little cry (was I just being hormonal?) Anyway, I didn't want to offend the local custom, so quickly returned and just played with the children a bit. Apparently, from about 10 o'clock onwards, Tella's house was packed. And people stayed the whole night (Unlike Irish wakes, all without any alcohol).
I believe they just held an incredibly long church service, by the sounds of it.

Today we went to the funeral, which again is quite unlike funerals back home. Basically, people build their own graves here out of bricks and cement. The whole structure is above ground and the coffin gets sealed inside of it. Whilst the men were bricking up the structure, all the children were climbing on the other graves and jumping from one grave to the other. I asked Tella if they were carving or writing Pops name on the grave. But she didn't think so. Still, I wonder if this might be a better way of doing things. Why spend a fortune on funerals, cremations or grave stones anyway? We better spend that money whilst we are still alive. That's a lot more fun.

By the way, my "morning sickness" is more like "morning, afternoon & evening sickness" these days. It's horrible. There are moment when I feel human (like, right now) & the rest of the time I feel awful. I can't remember feeling this bad when I was pregnant with Lucas. The worst thing is that I can no longer drink coffee! Especially my morning coffee I miss. That was always my favorite part of the day; breakfast, coffee & watching the sun come up. It feels so weird to just have breakfast with a glass of water or juice, but coffee makes me feel sick now, even when I just look at it. Again, this is something that never happened to me when I was pregnant with Lucas. Oh well, just another month and a half of this. After the first trimester, I should start feeling much better.