Before my father passed, he was very sick. We tried everything we could think of. There were expensive medications, so many hospital visits, and herbal clinics that promised healing from God. If there was a place that offered even a little hope and we could afford it, we went. This started about two years ago. When it became clear he was not getting any better and needed someone to care for him all the time, we moved him to his sister’s place in Togo.

Part of my father’s family hails from Togo, but he himself was born and raised in Ghana. Almost his whole life was in Ghana. His marriage, us three girls, everything was in Ghana. None of us had ever even visited his hometown in Togo until all this happened. His family is spread out between both countries, but he almost never went to Togo. I am thirty years old, and I can count the number of times my father ever mentioned going there. It was only for a funeral, which was rare, or a celebration. That is how little he talked about it, how little he seemed to think about it.

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While he was in Togo, his sister, my auntie, looked after him. She did it in ways that really surprised me. I guess I was waiting for someone to be difficult, but she was not that person. She was the opposite. She managed his hospital appointments, his medicines, and she even helped him with the most personal care when he could no longer do things for himself. For all that time, no one else from his family called to see how he was. No one. It was just us, his daughters, sending money for everything, and then his sister, her husband, her mother, and a few cousins from his mother’s side who did the actual caring. Not one person from his father’s side of the family called for two and a half years. They did not even pick up the phone.

When we got the news that he was gone, my whole world fell apart. My heart broke into a million pieces. I could not rest. It felt like a bad dream I could not wake up from. I was my daddy’s girl. All three of us were. My dad was not the best husband, I know that, but he was a truly amazing father. He gave up so much for us. He was there for every single thing. When our hearts were broken, when we failed in school, when our dreams fell apart, when our little businesses made no money. He was always there. My sisters and I were his whole world. I loved him so much.

We are grieving, trying to understand what it means to mourn while still being expected to function. Day by day, we find strength, mostly from God, but just when night falls, my father’s paternal family stamps it out.

They were nowhere when we needed them. When we needed someone to help take him to the hospital or just to sit with him, they disappeared completely. But now that we want to bury him peacefully, they are everywhere, trying to ruin it.

“You have to bury him in Togo.” That is their anthem. They want to take control of his funeral without contributing financially. They want to plan everything using our money, and they have big plans for our family. The biggest issue is their insistence that he must be buried in Togo. They say if we refuse, sacrifices will have to be made. According to them, if we insist on burying him here in Accra, Ghana, four people will have to be sacrificed to appease the gods.

But I know, in my heart, what my father wanted. When he was alive, he asked us again and again to bring him home to Accra. Even on the last day, we were getting things ready for him to come back. Every time we spoke on the phone, he would tell me how much he missed his home here and how he wanted to come back. It was not about his caregiver. He said it many times. He did not understand the language well in Togo, and the food was not what he knew. We have tried to explain this to his family, but they will not listen. They just keep saying he has to be buried there.

My sisters and I cannot travel to Togo for a funeral. Our friends, his friends, his church community, they will not be able to attend if he is buried there. We also want to be able to visit his grave whenever we wish, to feel close to him. But they insist it is a taboo to do otherwise.

They are supposed to be family, but right now I feel nothing but pain when I think of them. These people, who did not care for him or for us when he was suffering, are now causing us the deepest hurt. I had not seen my father in over five years, and now they are denying us the chance to give him a respectful, loving burial. Now I cannot, and they are even trying to take his final rest away from us.

Why is it that when someone dies, family you hardly know suddenly becomes so loud?

Is there any way in Ghana to legally and traditionally sever family ties?

What Will Make You Leave Me After Forty Years Of Marriage?

For those asking about my mother, she and my father had been divorced for a long time. And for those wondering why I stayed away, I was building a life, and I was coming home soon. I just did not make it in time.

—Aunty Liz

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