Ancestry 8 - From Istanbul: Two Deaths

Kotis passed away after a brief illness, in 1947, at the age of 63. There was something wrong with his throat, a lethal infection or maybe cancer, which he initially ignored and, then, resisted any medical help, as rudimentary as this might have been under the circumstances, until it killed him. In his last photo, with Vasiliki who grew into a young beautiful woman, at his side, he posed as the strong and determined captain of the family ship in the sea of life he had been, undaunted by the fierce storms along his voyage. Himself, a miniscule subject of history, was tossed by her storms towards the edge of a cliff along with many of his fellow immigrants on the same boat, but he resisted her forces with bravery and courage. He stood upright and strong, walked with decency and dignity the humble path of his maturity, with one acre of garden and another acre of a wheat field, amidst a war, illness and death, poverty, and misery. It was not just the mustache the edges of which twisted downwards on either side of the smiling lips, nor the rolled-up sleeves covering his two sturdy arms. It rather was the determined look at the lens, declaring: "I am here, and as long as I exist, none around me needs not be afraid."

Two images from Kotis' last days were imprinted in the memory of auntie Litsa, one of his granddaughters, a nine-year-old girl at the time of his death. Kotis shunned any participation, either covert or active, in the resistance movement or the guerrilla warfare during the German Occupation of Greece. Besides, he was rather old when the war started for such a struggle. Instead, he devoted that period to his daily chores, to his vegetable garden, his animals, and the wheat field, to his wife and daughter. Nor he was explicit in expressing any sort of political views. However, perhaps influenced by his son-in-law Mr. Yiannis, the then enlightened-turned-enlightener left-wing teacher, and to a lesser extent Leonidas, or, perhaps, carried away by the emotions the liberation and approaching end of the war stirred, he briefly came out of his political shell in the last days of the Occupation. Standing solemnly at the gate, he raised his left arm and fist, the unmistaken gesture of communist militants, to express his pride and support, or even gratitude, towards the guerrillas of ELAS -The Greek People’s Liberation Army, who were marching armed along the road in front of his house. It was more an instinctive and spontaneous gesture, rather than one prompted by some ideological beliefs.

The other event Litsa recalled occurred a few days before he died. Bedridden by his illness, he sensed the indifference and ingratitude in his little circle as displayed by the conspicuous absence of his nephew, Leonidas, the grocer. “Not even a lemon soda, did he bother bring to me… that mean and ungrateful nephew of mine; nor did he even bother to visit,” despite Kotis' generosity and help to him and his late mother Elizabeth during the harsh days of immigration and resettlement.  And he cursed him. "Don’t he dare to set foot here again!" was his late aphorism. But then he died. A few words with a muffled voice, a whisper in the wilderness of human existence in the moments before the end, like the sound of waves or rustling leaves, that is, without consequence. Nevertheless, his last words echoed for years in the family and his village neighborhood.English translation. 

In the very same month, great-grandmother Dominique, who was five or six years younger than Kotis, died too. She was crashed by the body of a cow while she was milking her; the cow they had purchased just before the war erupted for the family dairy needs. After Kotis, with his sturdy arms and strong will, managed to navigate his broader family through the plagues of history and the struggles forced immigration to their survival and resettlement in their new home, in his last years, whilst contemplating the remaining of the lives of the old couple, he prophesized the scenario of their death: “Forty days after one of us dies, the other will follow to the other world." Together in life, together in death, as they say.

Their bones are found in adjacent boxes in the ossuary of Agios Athanasios, near the field that Kotis cultivated when young. They left behind several descendants, who will also die when their time on this earth expires, some furniture faded by the passage of time, the small house with its courtyard and ardor, barely noticeable by passers-by, which, one day, after a few more instances of eternity, a bulldozer will raze to the ground. I hope their minds, whilst alive, rejected vain thoughts of after-life; I hope that whatever they built and created, they did it for themselves, out of daily necessity and for a few moments of pure happiness, that necessary ingredient of human existence for this to be considered meaningful. The did it and enjoyed it there and then, within the confine of their lifetimes, not for some vague goals in posterity. I hope they felt, before they were caught up by their last breath, that they lived worthwhile lives. The above clumsy words are the least I could offer against what I partly owe them: my existence.