We decided to bury my father at a small Orthodox cemetery in a small town near Montreal. He was a lifelong Orthodox believer, which is no small thing for somebody who lived in the USSR. The cemetery is right by a tiny Orthodox church which my father loved.

Of course, the moment we went to explore the cemetery, we discovered that there’s a large monument to “brave Russian warriors.” We had to insist that my father should be buried as far as possible from the Russian warriors monument because he was also a lifelong Ukrainian patriot. Again, for somebody born in the USSR in 1951, this wasn’t easy.

I’m sure that the Ukrainian diaspora has its own church and its own cemetery but we don’t know anybody from the diaspora. The Russian-speaking immigrants are annoying, with their Pushkin statues and all that crap, but at least they are our annoying immigrants.

Seriously, I had to spend time around two different Pushkin statues today as we were making arrangements for the funeral, which is 50 Pushkin statues more than I need in my life. My father hated Pushkin because he could never get over the pedophilia in his works.