In memoriam

Life goes on, but I can’t stop thinking about you, dad.

Telsiai, Lithuania

Dec 2, 2025

Place of my birth and my dad’s death. Quite symbolic that he brought me here to this moment to this place to this world and now he’s next to me literally in ashes and I am helping him pass to the next world.

Yesterday was the hardest day where I finally saw the dead body of my father and made my peace and allowed my body to weep and release the emotions I wanted my father to feel.

I loved and will always love him.

Not the Hollywood “feel good” movie type of way, not the perfect father-and-son connection type of way, not the ideal or imagined ideal standard way but the most natural to me and most human way where both of us are imperfect but both of us are one, he is me and I am him, and it will be this way forever until my last breath.

I am writing this at 5:47 in the morning, Lithuanian winters are brutal and it’s not just the cold, it’s the darkness.

Right now it’s still very dark and cold outside but I am feeling the light. I awoke early thinking of him and later have to see my mom who sleeps next door, I want to write what I feel, what is going through my mind, to help myself calm down, to remember this moment, to help someone going through the same pain, and most absolutely importantly to remind myself and you that this is what it feels to be alive.

This vibration or more correct word oscillation is what it feels to be alive, it’s what gives everything meaning.

We get so used to our routines, our day-to-day life that we surrender to the illusion that it will always be there, it will always repeat, and nothing will change.

We become apathetic and stagnant and delusional expecting things to last forever but death has this powerful function to release all of the dormant energy and emotions and vibrate and move your body that it becomes uncontrollable in the face of death and may look and feel like a natural force from another world even, as if someone possessed you. All of this is life that is waiting to be lived.

People who have been dormant for too long feel it the most, the shock is so powerful it can even break you and your world. You can’t just deny living, deny the pleasure of life and everything it has to offer just to regret it the moment death comes to equalize things.

You must live today. You must make death your friend.

It’s like a daily alarm clock. You don’t fear it, maybe some of you do, these screaming little gadgets can be spooky at 5 am but it’s a reminder to live.

Ironically, that same gadget that reminds you to get up in the morning, doesn’t die or change its form, but it doesn’t work for the dead. So don’t worry about the death or dying, worry about living the day and the more vibrations and oscillations you feel the more alive you will be.

So what is life in the end?

It’s taking more of calculated risks to keep these vibrations alive.

• It’s thinking of someone you like and rethinking 1,000 times the first word you will say to make contact.

• It’s these butterflies in your stomach going to the amusement park.

• It’s the heat in your face when you volunteer to speak your mind in public.

• It’s the vulnerability you expose saying you are afraid or you don’t know.

• It’s expressing exactly how you feel.

• It’s the “stupid” or “inappropriate” for your gender, age or culture, thing to do or to say.

• It’s the act of stepping forward only seeing one step ahead and shaking and hoping there will another one after, even if it doesn’t make sense.

• It’s creating something and putting it out there, allowing all world to see it.

My father was taking more of these calculated risks in the last 5 years, and I am so happy he did.

He found new companionship, he built new home, he expressed himself more, even if it was a dry and stoic approach.

He drove across the Europe to see my brother in Portugal and to see me in Spain, he drove to Romanian mountains and fed the wild bears that he shouldn’t have, he tried new foods, he dipped his toes in the Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. He tried gelato, he tried Aperol Spritz, he tried jamón serrano and churros, he walked the castles, he saw palm trees, the flamingos and the cute baby flamingos, he was accompanied by his new life partner and his first born son, he asked, he wondered and he was curious and he was vibrating life and he was alive.

You can’t mistake these vibrations for something else than life. Many people die and keep walking dead and even someone’s death can’t reactivate these vibrations in their body.

So don’t be afraid of these powerful emotions and body shaking and heart racing as this is literally life. It’s what it means to be alive and it’s what my father will never feel again no matter how many alarm clocks, churros, flamingos or oceans I bring to his feet.

Whenever you face death, as a daily meditation of mortality, or saying last goodbye to your loved one at the funeral, use that energy and that momentum and that aliveness to live again.

Say what you’re feeling and thinking, create and contribute, participate and help. Follow and lead. Give your dream a shot. Risk a little more to get more of the thrill of life.

Now I’m not saying sell your house and buy chocolate, or jump of the roof expecting to fly, but you know exactly what you should do now, as you were thinking and rethinking it for a long time. It runs in your mind like a movie, you have lived it in your mind but you didn’t allow your body and your wholeness to live it because you fear it won’t be like it’s in your mind, the master script writer, your ego, wrote it and you won’t allow the spontaneity and randomness of life to ruin it, so you stash it all inside of you and start strangling these vibrations and ironing them into a plain straight sheet of paper with the cold fear of imperfection.

There’s the irony, that imperfection is the goal, the purpose, the essence, the being and the life.

I believe that life is for the living. It’s not for the dead we gather at funerals.

Yes, we’re here to honor my father, to remember him, but also here because of what he meant and means to us, the living. We are here because he did what the most alive person can’t ever do right now, he reminded us that tomorrow’s not promised and the death won’t make any exceptions when it is your time to go.

We are here because we received and accepted the alarm clock of life and we awoke from sleepwalking expecting to live forever.

We are here because we feel the life vibrations more strongly than ever and we are here to accept the pain of loss, we’re here to weep, we are here to remember the good and the bad, we are here to scream uncontrollably, to release what was strangled inside for so long, we are here to accept each other with our most human imperfections, we are here to accept my father in his other, dead shape and form that doesn’t vibrate life anymore but still keeps reminding us all that this is it and all of us are traveling to the same place.

Yesterday was the day I saw his cold body peacefully resting forever. While I knew about his sudden and tragic death 3 days ago and had a lot of time to cry and remember and rethink and come to peace with it, there is something your mind can’t do with days what physical presence can do in an instant.

If you don’t see it, don’t touch it and cry your guts out, your mind is trying to make sense of all of it, logically, but then when you see it, when you feel the eternal cold in his hands, it registers in your wholeness in an instant that it is over. Unmistakably clear.

Your mind can’t play deception games anymore and your human nature joins the show and offers you two choices. Surrender or fight.

You have been surrendering most of your life, just letting it flow and letting it become monotonous and passive. But now, in this moment of suffering and extreme explosion, perhaps the biggest eruption of emotions and energy and shivers in your life, human nature is whispering to FIGHT IT! Don’t accept it. Deny death.

Now? Now you pick your enemy?

After all these years of dormant surrender you pick a fight with death? You and I already know how it will end.

But then there’s another choice other than fight. You surrender. You accept.

• Accept that you won’t share a meal together.

• You won’t feel the unconditional love, protection and safety your father provides even living thousands of kilometres away.

• You accept he will never see your newborn niece, or your dog, or your kids, or your wins or your losses.

• You accept that he will create a permanent void that never be filled again but you also accept that all he lived was the way it was supposed to be.

There is no another go, no retry button. No tomorrow.

Human nature in me screams to fight it, don’t accept such a shitty deal, it is a loss. Human nature looks for its allies in bitterness for life, in blame of oneself for being not enough, of doing not enough or picking the horror cinema and running series of “what ifs” and “what could have beens” of looking for hidden meaning and deception of life, but there’s none. No one to blame, no one’s fault, no matter how tragic and heartbreaking it may sound.

When you were introduced to the game of life when you were born, you accepted the terms of service and now act as if you haven’t, or as if they won’t ever be enforced.

So in these moments when death brings life to all us, when it activates all of these dormant alarm clocks, bells and sirens all at once, it’s impossible no to feel alive, it’s impossible not to tremble.

It’s my dad who gave life to me. I am him and he is me. In that moment, I squeezed his cold hand, I chose not to fight. I chose the imperfect son I am. I chose the imperfect father he was. I chose the imperfect funeral and imperfect circumstances and I choose imperfect life.

These moments brought a lot of pain, full body sorrow and heavy heartache. But it was life that I felt, not death.

I couldn’t stop replaying the last time I saw my dad. We spoke, we laughed, we ate, we shared each other’s presence and while my father was never much of a talker or expresser of emotions, I always felt his love. The love that your dad loves you and if it means going on a 3 hour trip without saying much, it was how we loved each other and I wouldn’t change it for anything or any “perfect” Hollywood depiction of a father and son relationship. He was who he was and that is why he is my father.

Now sitting there, having 1 hour to make sense of everything, very willingly staring at his face with a typical dead man make up, my mind was trying to play games with me.

I guess that’s the coping mechanism we humans have, that we will find any reason to hope. I turned to my mom on the right and whispered to her, do you also feel like your daddy is going to come back? That he is alive in your mind and memory? I said that for some reason it feels like this mannequin here is a lookalike of my father, I left him at his home, he made me breakfast, hugged me and told me to close the gates and drop the key in the post box and he left and now I am waiting for him to return. She responded that she feels the same way of her dad, my grandpa, who passed away couple of years earlier.

So this coping mechanism and voluntary self deception might be the way to live the contradiction. My dad is alive but my dad is also dead. He is alive in me, I am him, I see the world through his eyes and I breathe the air through his lungs, he continues to live within me through the new things I will do, new things I will see, touch, taste, feel and create.

He lives in my memory, in all these adventures we had. He lives in all that, often uncomfortable, silence. He lives in all the daily, insignificant in the moment, episodes like seeing him patiently sitting on the couch waiting for me to prepare to go out, or him showing me around his garage, or cooking me one unexceptional lunch. All these memories instantly become priceless.

These little movies full of life are mine to keep until my last heartbeat.

Now writing all of this I can’t stop thinking of him, I am crying, but the tears are of joy. I stop as I get overwhelmed with emotions and need to clear up my tears as I can’t see through as I type this on my phone, but in these moments I extend my arms, clench my hands and wiggle my fingers to feel alive.

I whisper to myself with already dry mouth “this is what it feels to be alive, I am alive!”

I clean up, smile and feel joy to be here. I feel joy for having a father, I feel joy for the time we shared, I feel joy he lived and I was part of his life and now I can take these memories with me.

But wait, here comes the twist of the story.

We have the coping mechanism of remembering the precious moments with recalculated pricing. Where it felt like there was a low price of eating just another lunch with your dad, now writing this, I know with all of my body, that it was the last lunch, and it was priceless. The moment and memory of it is recalculated as priceless and it will remain priceless, and in that moment, you realize the grand impotence you face when your loved one dies. You’re naked, helpless, you can’t do anything and suddenly you start going down. You dig for more of these memories and you let them feed that impotence, that extremely clear preview of what eternity means.

Dec 5

Alicante, Spain

Returned home. Feeling lighter and calmer. Funerals are powerful. It’s designed to help you close the chapter. To make your piece, and as my friend said, everyone who shows up to express their condolences, take a piece of the burden and heartache with them, instantly alleviating you.

It’s incredible how just looking at some of your photos bring back all the distant memories. I don’t regret of not taking more photos or videos of you, but now having just some moments captured in photos and video feel priceless, hearing your voice, seeing you throughout the life.

I understand now. All these movies about the war make so much sense where people risk their lives just to save a photo of their loved ones, as I would not trade the last photo of you for anything.

I can’t stop thinking about the words the funeral cantors recited when saying the last goodbye to you.

There will be new springs, but you won’t be there, there will be new moons, but you won’t be there, a lot of water will flow through the rivers, but you won’t be there, you will be forever gone.

These are some of the most painful and comforting words I could hear in that moment and they still echo in my heart, my mind and my presence experiencing the world through the eyes you gave me.

I remember now bringing your ashes in that urn to the hotel room and looking at it the way I look at any other inanimate object, like a chair or bed, and thinking, or more accurately wondering, how come someone who had consciousness, had the ability to contain universe inside turned into something static and lifeless like a wooden box with a bio capsule inside with ashes? What is life then really?

If the tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to experience it, did the tree really fall?

I wonder if it is the same with the human life, if you didn’t ever make contact with anyone and there is no one to experience your life but you, did you really live?

I realize how episodical and infrequent our real life encounters where as of lately, I would see you for 1-2 days per year but my mind would make a continuous story of your life, filling out the rest of the year as if we saw each other every day. It makes me wonder, how other people saw you, what side they got to know you, what side of me did you get to know, what is life really if not these limited moments?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I know that no matter what questions you ask or want to ask, can only do it while you’re alive. Death is a reminder to live.

Life goes on, but I can’t stop thinking about you, dad.