This one will be...

...short and sweet today. A short week it seemed and because of stuff that happened this week I can't remember most of what happened.

Mum rang me on Saturday to say my Aunty Joan (Dad's youngest and remaining sibling) had passed away. That opened up a few wounds but we knew she had been ill for years and honestly we thought she would have passed years ago. She went downhill very fast after Dad's funeral. She had always begged him not to die before her as she didn't want to be alone. But she is now the last of that generation and its an end of an era. Dad was the eldest and had two sisters. The middle sister, Edna, passed away 5 years ago from a brain tumour. She had suffered really bad headaches for years but wouldn't do anything about it. Finally her daughter forced her to go to the doctors and she had tests done and they said "you have a tumour". Two weeks later she was dead. And she was the healthiest of all three of them. So sad and so quick.

Now Aunty Joan is gone. She had only the one daughter as well and she is exhausted as they put Joan in a nursing straight after dad's funeral. She had dementia towards the end and that is the most crushing of disabilities to have...no memory of your family or even how to do the basics. It is kinder that she is gone but that doesn't make it any easier. Plus she was a diabetic and was forever falling into diabetic comas and spent so much time in hospital and she had been on dialysis 3 times a week for the past 10 years as well. Dialysis makes you very ill so by the time she recovered from one round it was time for another so her quality of life in the past few years wasn't much but she and dad rang each other constantly. She lived in Ipswich and Dad was here in Brisbane. They could have and should have visited each other more but both became too ill in the end.

So the funeral is on Friday and I will be going with mum and whoever else here is going. Very private ceremony at Mt Thompson Crematorium at Ipswich which is where her parents, sister, brother-in-law and husband are interred. We are thinking we might get dad's ashes interred in the War Section there. Mum still has his ashes at home and undecided if she should keep them at home or inter them. I think he should be with his family but she thinks it is too far away to visit which it is but I keep telling her it doesn't matter where his earthly remains are...he is still with us here at home in our hearts and in our memories and I think she is starting to think that too. Dad always said he didn't care...he was happy to be shoved in a brown box, burnt on the BBQ and spread the ashes where they fell lol. So we will see...we are thinking of doing that on 6 June which will be the first anniversary of his passing...I think that would be nice.

As you will see also I started another blog on my family history research. I thought it would be easier than boring you guys on here that way if you wanted something else to read you could! One of my US cousins found me again after 6 years via Facebook (we both had old emailed addresses so when we tried emailing each other our emails kept bouncing back so we lost touch!) She figured she would try Facebook as a last resort and *voila* here we are again! She has no information at all and rather than having to repeat myself to the 3 sets of cousins I managed to track down in the US I figured it was easier to document it in a blog that they could and maybe share information with me! I have had a sabbatical of a few years but this year decided to pick it up again as I have left my name on several family history sites and have received emails from "cousins" all over the world...some with info and some without. The Montara name seems to be bigger than I once thought! Anyway...read the blog if you are interested and I will try to update it a bit. I have a heap of info still to go up and to explain all the ins and outs of the family "secrets"!