I talk to my parents on an almost daily basis. Sometimes I dont even have topics so I just ramble and bore them. But why not ? One day they will be no more and that day I don't want to have things that I wanted to tell them. I am sorry for your loss. I am just happy that you were physically present when he passed away. Its been a challenging year so take your time to recover.
I think that at this point it is far easier to just setup a socks proxy with an vloud based machine than to research which firms have shady practices and which dont. I went into a womrhole over NordVPN vs PIA vs ProtonVpn and then just went with a proxy server. Costs peanuts with the cloud compute ecosystem.