IraHayes wrote: ↑Tue Nov 09, 2021 8:59 am My mother was born in 1947 and married my father when she was 20. She had 4 children. Carol, myself, Sharon and our younger brother Michael. She was always there when we woke up and she saw us to school and was there when we went to bed. She spent her entire life looking after us and even as we all grew up and moved away she was there. While I was studying my A-levels my mum started fostering children. She did this as a short term foster parent with my father and over the course of 25 years they took in and cared for over 120 children from the ages of 5 to 16. She was involved with Social Services a lot during this time and then as they got older my mother stopped fostering and then started a Youth Club in our local village. She ran this with a few other people but she was on the Village Hall committee in our village for many years following this. While she was not educated in the sense of University but if she felt something was not best for the village she would speak up.
She has taken care of Hannah and Daniel the same as any Cambodian grandmother would take care of their grandchildren and she was definitely the "boss". It was always "Nana said no papa" or "Nana said yes papa".
It is only now that she has passed that I am seeing posts from people i never knew but they knew my mum and it has been heartwarming to see how many lives she touched.
My younger sister, who is emigrated to Australia 25 years ago, is going to contact a local Buddhist temple and the plan is for her and the friends and family over there to have a small ceremony and she wants to have a small shrine, like we will have, for my mother in her home. And I have told her the monks at her local pagoda will help her with any questions and if there's a ceremony that maybe she can have for mum, there.

Once this is all over and some normality returns to my life I am going to try and document my experiences with my mums death and hopefully this information will help others who find themselves in this unfortunate situation.
But I will say one thing and that is that Evergreen Funeral services have been beyond amazing in ensuring the ceremony and cremation could go ahead swiftly and without any paperwork issues. Anyway, I will give more details when I make the thread in the future. So, thank you Dusty. You have created order from chaos and for that I am eternally grateful.