My father died a few weeks ago in Togo, and ever since that phone call, I have felt like grief has been competing with rage inside my chest. Some days, grief wins. Other days, it is anger that refuses to sit quietly. I am thirty years old, and until the last two years of my father’s life, Togo was almost a foreign country to us, even though part of him hailed from there.

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My dad was born and raised in Ghana. His life was here. His friends were here. His children were born here. If you asked him where home was, he never hesitated to mention Accra. In all my years of growing up, I can count on one hand how many times he ever mentioned going to his hometown in Togo. It was never a place he spoke about with longing or attachment. His world revolved around his three daughters, all girls, all hopelessly devoted to him.

My father was not a great husband. That truth sits plainly on the table. My mother and he divorced years ago. But as a father, he was exceptional. He lived sacrificially for us. He made sure we lacked nothing. He showed up. He loved loudly. If “daddy’s girl” had a textbook definition, my sisters and I were it. He adored us, and we adored him right back.

When he fell ill, everything in our lives rearranged itself around his condition. Hospital visits became routine. Expensive medications became normal. Conversations revolved around test results, specialists, and next steps. Two of us lived abroad, and the third was still in school and later doing her national service. We did what we could from where we were, pouring money, time, and emotional energy into making sure he got better.

Eventually, reality forced a hard decision. He needed full-time care, the kind we could not provide in Ghana given our circumstances. That was how he ended up living with his sister in Togo about two and a half years ago. It was never meant to be permanent. It was meant to be care, nothing more.

His sister surprised me. In fact, she humbled me. She took care of him in ways I will forever be grateful for. She was meticulous with his medications, diligent with his hospital appointments, and patient with the indignities illness sometimes brings, including incontinence. Her husband, her mother, and a few cousins from her maternal side also supported. For all those years, it was us; the children, handling the finances, and them handling the daily care.

What still haunts me is this: in those two and a half years, not a single person from my father’s paternal family reached out. No phone calls. No messages. No concern. Nothing. Silence so loud it now rings in my ears. Then my father died. And suddenly, the silence broke.

Now they have appeared in full force, armed with opinions, authority, and demands. They want to control his funeral. They want to dictate every detail. They want to do it with our money, yet they have contributed nothing. The audacity alone is painful, but what has broken us completely is their insistence that my father must be buried in Togo.

Their explanation is culture. Ewe culture, they say. A man who dies in his hometown cannot be taken elsewhere for burial. To do so is taboo. They insist this rule is absolute. That if we defy it, four people will be sacrificed. They say it calmly, as though they are talking about weather. What they refuse to hear is my father’s voice.

My father begged us, several times, to bring him back to Accra. Even on the very day he died, he said he wanted to come home. We were already making arrangements for him to return that weekend. He missed his home. He missed his friends. He missed familiarity. It had nothing to do with mistreatment. He said it himself that there was a language barrier, food differences, and a deep loneliness that sickness made worse.

We explained all this to his paternal family. We told them his wishes. We told them our pain. We told them that my sister and I cannot even make it to Togo. That his friends, his church, and the people who truly loved him cannot attend a funeral there. That we want to be close to his grave so we can visit him, talk to him, and grieve properly. They refused to budge.

I have never regretted being associated with a family the way I do now. People who never cared for my father while he was alive are now obsessed with controlling him in death. They have caused us more pain than his illness ever did. I haven’t seen my father in over five years, and now they want to deny us even a dignified farewell.

It has made me ask questions I never thought I would ask. Why do extended families, especially those who barely cared, suddenly adore the dead? Why does death awaken a sense of ownership that life never inspired? And is there any legal or traditional way in Ghana to denounce family ties when those ties do nothing but harm?

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My mother is not part of this story. They divorced long ago. And for those wondering why I hadn’t seen my father in so many years, life happened. School happened. Immigration happened. I had planned to come home this December. Death arrived before I could.

Now I am left with grief, anger, and a desperate need for justice, not revenge, not war, just respect for the man my father was and the life he lived. All I want is to bury my father with dignity, love, and truth.

—Sandy

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