Vasiliki died before Yiannis. Shortly after the great earthquake of Thessaloniki in the summer of 1978, a severe stroke rendered her paralyzed and bedridden, her speech became slurred. Mother blamed all on an attempted surgery on her hip. "A quack doctor caused it!" she used to say, but without evidence. Since then, Mother had been using the incident of grandmother's ‘botched’ surgery, and the stroke as the necessary result of the former, countless of times: as a self-evident point of reference and indication of the quality of medical care and surgeons in Greece, and, also, as a valid excuse to avoid at all costs any consultation by doctors or visits to clinics. The blank health-report book was a document of pride until her demise by dementia. Mother’s opinions on the matter are, however, "someone else’s priest gospel", as we say in Greece.
The last time I saw
Grandma alive was a few months before her death. She was lying on the kitchen
divan, unable to stand up. She was mumbling incoherently, with the gravely
ill's pale, gaunt face and hollow cheeks, and a sad, languorous smile. I bent
down and kissed her at both cheeks, as I always used to do when I visited, often
at Mother’s urging -lest I forgot to salute. (Even at the ripe ages of fifteen and
twenty years, she could not help but give instructions on when and how to thank
grandparents and relatives and friends.) I felt the subtle movement of grandmother's
lips on my own cheeks. She barely managed to turn her head and meet my eyes,
and with great effort raised her two trembling arms in a failed attempt to embrace
me. She was still conscious and sensed and felt, I thought. I felt her lover
and tenderness: I was still her pasha.
Her funeral was the
first and only one I attended until Mother’s death more than four decades later.
In that period, several relatives and friends departed the worldly, but only of
the place and time of their deaths and funerals I let known in the aftermath of
their passing, usually over the telephone. Grandmother's funeral was, therefore,
until much later in life, the nearest I came to the spectre of death; an event of
the same magnitude as birth, but in our years of youth still incomprehensible and
fleeting, as it is philosophically unexplored and shrouded in an opaque veil of
mystery. Naturally, event of the funeral became an intense, educative experience
and the impressions from that day on my adolescent mind and feelings remained
indelible over the years. It seems that, as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at the
time, my parents, who still had the first and last word on such matters, deemed
me immature to face up to the occasion and deal with the emotional storm, even
trauma, which the sight of a dead beloved person on its deathbed or in its
coffin might cause. My opinion was not solicited, nor would it have been considered
should it have been.
Mother had come to her
family home the night before for the customary, in rural Greece at least, overnight
quiet lamentation next to the dead person; a lamentation often diffused with
gossip, storytelling, even tales and jokes. Father had brought me in his car
within an hour of the scheduled time of the funeral -typically, and dropped me off
in front of the house in Magnesia. It was Sunday. A hearse was stationed at the
front gate. After parking a little further, Father disappeared. I was left standing
outside the fenced flower bed with the rose bushes, under the branched of the old
mulberry tree, , both, tree and myself, forsaken at the street corner opposite Vasilis’
bakery. Winter was approaching, and its fallen leaves had begun to cover the footprints
from rotten and crumpled berries on the road. The bakery had its blinds shut down,
and so did Petros’ grocery store across.
I did not see Father
entering the house. Maybe he went over to the house of uncle Leonidas and
Mother’s relatives next door, he might have returned to Thessaloniki -an
obnoxious, yet quite possible reaction. I cannot recall his presence at the
ceremony or what followed. From a young age, he showed an obvious disdain for
religious ceremonials of the Orthodox Greek tradition, i.e. christenings,
weddings, funerals, memorial services, etc., unless the circumstances absolutely
necessitated his presence. And his reluctance to attend those was often
manifested by an analogous discomfort and irritation, and, occasionally, by
characteristically dismissive and ironic comments. Anyway, he discharged me
helpless at the street corner and was never to be seen again that day. He might
have judged or been advised by Mother as not to encourage me to see the dead grandmother
and keep me away from the corpse. Of course, that had deprived me of a rare and
rather useful experience towards a philosophical and emotional coming-of-age for
an adolescent. From a different point of view merely confronting the dead
corpse of grandmother would be in-itself insufficient; it would amount to a rather
skewed impression of death. Far more consequential would be to witness its
process, to become an intimate witness of the sequence of moments leading to the
singular event itself. Only such an experience would demystify him, illuminate its
potency, rather than a "made-up" corpse lying in a coffin, am
expressionless face and a body alien to the person who not so long ago had been
revealed to the world through a living soul and spirit, to the person who existed.
It was a cold, sunny
Sunday morning in early winter. The sun, which was looking down at us from a
cloudless sky, felt as usual heavy and indifferent, its glow unable to lighten
the sorrow that engulfed the house of grandmother, whose soul and spirit had
now abandoned it. Resting on either side of the arched vestibule and the open
front door, resting on their two wooden legs there were a series of wreaths of
laurel leaves, white flowers and satin ribbons with gold-embroidered messages
of condolences with words and names hidden in their folds. Some scattered,
disconnected words like "mother", "adored",
"beloved"... I had been able to discern. I was riding a storm of
sorrow and tormented by the ignorance as to what was to follow, a plight aggravated
by the short distance from the front door that separated me from the deceased. The
door was gaping wide open emitting a black void filled now and then with gray shadows
coming and going in the background. I imagined grandmother lying in a coffin illuminated
by candlelight behind the locked shutters, in the middle of the living room that
grandfather used as his bedroom, a few yards from the mulberry tree. The
piercing smell of frankincense reached me as far as under the tree I was
standing. The few words I could read on the wreaths, the shadowy figures going
in and out of the dead woman's room brought about an irrepressible feeling of
sorrow. I cried a loud cry covering with my face buried in my hands. The street
in front of the house was deserted of people or cars and no one could see or
hear me: it was the solemn and solitary outburst of my grief.
After the few seconds of
an uncontrollable lamentation, moments when all rational thought is set aside
by a heavy and formless volume of emotions, like dark clouds gathering before a
storm, the lanky figure of Apostolis, the village kiosk owner, grandmother's
stepbrother, emerged from the front door of the house and the darkness of the
interior. He was leaving behind a step-sister and a piece of his own life. He
walked down the stairs with his long stiff legs, stood under the old acacia
tree outside the fence gate without acknowledging me, lit a cigarette, and with
the slow and heavy movements of his disability from the frostbites on the
mountains of Albania, walked away hunched, over to the intersection kiosk. He
had drunk quite a bit that morning I was told, before paying his last respects
to his dead step-sister. I did not gather the courage to labour on my own
accord indoors, nor much courage left in me at that unripe age. Even if I by some
divine intervention I had been able to summon its remnants, only after a
command by an adult would I pass through that open door into the dark chasm
behind it. Instead, I went around the house along the side street and entered
through the gate into the backyard and garden. There I swirled back and forth,
aimlessly, among the few naked trees and what remained of bare trunks of the
staked tomatoes. I ended up under the vine in front of the old poor dwelling of
my great-grandparents, devastated and immersed in a tearful grief. Then, Spyros
appeared from the back porch into the balcony and came down towards me. With a condescending
and sympathetic look behind his thick glasses, he stretched out his arm around
my shoulders and guided me around in the front of the house where the hearse
was stationed: "Come on, L, my boy. Don't worry... Come on, let's go
together..."
The covered coffin had
already been placed in the hearse (perhaps, that’s what they had been waiting for
before inviting me by proxy to join) and the funeral procession of black-clad
people, from family, neighbours and fellow villagers, followed on foot, in a
slow and venerable pace behind the vehicle on the way to the chapel of Agios Athanasios in the outskirts, and the adjoining graveyard,
where the village buried its dead. Grandfather, upright, with a grim look in a
black worn suit from yonder years, but with eyes and face dry of tears, and
Mother and aunts in their black dresses, with bowed heads beside him, led the
procession, hidden by a few tall bodies that followed. I was left behind, in
the tail of the procession, with my cheeks still wet from the crying that
preceded, next to Spyros and among other known or unknown fellow villagers.
Walking on the dirt road that led out of the village in the dry and cold air of
the winter noon, helped me to somehow overcome the paroxysm of sadness that had
overwhelmed me in the backyard. Apostolis had stayed even further behind,
dragging his awkward legs, tired and drunk.
The hearse stopped in
the churchyard and the gravediggers carried the coffin through the gate in the
white wall that enclosed the cemetery towards a grave dug open from the evening
before the coffin with grandmother lying enclosed. The crowd followed silently.
Spyros, who was walking until then next to me, joined the crowd. I was left
behind. For some unspecified reason, either because, having given up to an
instinctive fear and the scruples of the moment, I vacillated and hesitated.
None from the greater family condescended to invite me, possibly because there
were explicit instructions, likely by Mother, not to attend what would have
been a painful sight for many. I paused, I stood forgotten, under a tall
cypress tree. I could not summon again the will or courage to walk on my own
accord through the gate to witness the spectacle of the burial. The coffin and
the people disappeared through the gate and behind the wall of the cemetery,
which enclosed graves of decades old dead souls. I moved away at a distance, a
soul floating, towards the ceremony hall behind the small church. I could not
get closer to the dead body of my grandmother than those few meters I had been
standing away from the cemetery wall and the gate. I did not dare to peek through
out of both shame and fear and heard none of the priest's ‘absolution of the
dead’ prayers, nor the heartbreaking cries of grief that accompanied the
lowering of the coffin into the grave.
At the end of the
burial, the priest, followed by the people who "accompanied grandmother to
her final resting place", flanked by grandfather and the master of the ceremony,
gathered in the funeral hall, a room whose bare walls echoed every human
whisper, for koliva, coffee and brandy. The hall, despite the presence
of the cypress tree in front of the door of a small building that looked like a
side-chapel, was brightly illuminated by the rays of the incongruous and brazen
sun of the day through the windows of the façade and a small window of its
side. By noon its brightness peaked and the white walls of the church and the
cemetery fence turned from a light grey color to dazzlingly white. I sat
silently next to Mother and grandfather. Many words about the deceased were not
spoken; story telling about her life might have been exhausted during the
nightly lamentation. Just some idle chat and the typical condolence wishes to
the close family member. Something like "we will always remember
her", "may you live to remember her" or the supernatural "eternal
will be the memory of her" were caught by my ears, in a peaceful
atmosphere where the sobs had subsided. The people who accompanied grandmother
to her ultimate resting place, after coffee and brandy and a handful of koliva
in a napkin, began to leave one by one. Some formally shook grandfather's hand,
a few tapped his shoulder as evidence of emotional support. At the end, it
seemed to me, in an atmosphere from which sadness had long abated, I must have
been the only one among the funeral crowd who cried so much and shed so many
tears for grandmother, however in solitude. Yet, I was overcome by doubts and
guilt as to whether I paid a sufficient tribute to a woman who –I knew and felt
this deeply– had genuinely loved me, and showed her love, with her pitas and
patties, pasties and cookies, with little things that overflowed with kindness
and love, with the few means at her disposal and even less strength from a
weakened body and a crawling leg.
The closest relatives gathered
at home for a humble post-funeral meal, in the kitchen with the large table and
the divan where grandmother was lying when I saw her last alive. There again,
many words were not spoken. Most remained silent and melancholy, hunched over
their soup and deep in their thoughts, some in low tones were chatting about anything
but the deceased. Grandmother had not been forgotten by the living world yet, yet
none was seeing any benefit in expansive references to an inglorious life that
had come and gone unnoticeable from the world. Understandably, it does not make
much sense for the living to prolong their suffering indefinitely by being recounting
the loss of a life that is irreversibly gone.
The small cosy room
with the wood stove, the
divan and the flokati on its wooden floor became, after lunch, the
final refuge of the remaining household, including myself, to contemplate the
loss and the emptiness death brought to the home, to reflect on the portentous
themes of life and death, which always transcend the human mind and existence. We
were sitting on a circle, myself crouching on the divan, with my elbows placed
on my knees, Mother and one or two of her sisters, grandfather on a chair against
the balcony door. The sun of that winter afternoon began to set. The heat from wood
stove drugged us and drove everyone, already mentally and physically exhausted,
close to one of the limits of human endurance. No one wept as the cycle of
heavy grief was closed. Domna said something: "I don't know, but I feel
calm. I couldn't feel the need to cry today. Maybe I'm still under the
influence of the sedatives I took in the morning.... I don't know...", and
she sighed.
Grandfather, who until
then had been sitting quietly in one of the old black chairs of the cafes with
the semicircular back, with his hands resting on his knees, said -with
satisfaction- something about the large number of people grandmother’s funeral
attracted, whom paid the due honours she deserved; and how everything had been masterfully
organized by the funeral parlour. I thought that this had no significance whatsoever
for the person who died, since, from the realm of death where she was
transported, she could not have witnessed her funeral, neither sensually, nor
spiritually. (How would we all wish for this posthumous impossibility, as it
would help somehow evaluate our lives by the number and types of people who
were affected, in one way or another, by our loss enough to accompany our dead
bodies to the grave?) For the meticulous grandfather that everything was done
in a perfect order and to the last letter of the protocol mattered. But at the
end of his contemplation, he addressed me in the inexplicable plural of
unfamiliarity, with a sad, as well as a cold and stern look from his small round
eyes under the broad wrinkled forehead, with pauses of silence between
questions, short as well as unbearable, as if in these pauses he expected
immediate rational answers from an immature teenager: "L., when did you
find out your beloved grandmother got sick? ... How many times did you come to
see it since you found out? ... Were you aware how much grandmother loved you? Didn't
you feel the need to visit her all this time? Not even to attend her
funeral?"
I didn't know the
answers to that bitter questioning, which looked more like a rudimental
moral trial by a man who might have wanted to deflect his own deep sadness or
dispel a personal guilt. I felt that I had committed an almost unforgivable
moral misconduct and started to cry again. A guilt of similar nature to the one
I had felt in the churchyard outside the cemetery resurfaced in my consciousness.
An emotional turbulence reappeared came and overpowered me. I didn't say
anything in response, only wept with my head lowered, staring at the flokati, incapable
to meet grandfather's gaze. Someone intervened, auntie Litsa I think, dissuading
grandfather to continue with more aphoristic phrases, nearly an anathema:
"Leave the child alone, Dad. He loved his grandmother as much as anyone and
cried for her."
After a while, when grandfather
withdrew to his room to rest, my aunt tried to sooth my feelings with her own
ambiguous interpretation -fabricated or genuine I could not tell, about what grandfather
wanted to say and what he really meant behind his harsh words and corrosive
tone. He never, I was told, intended to question my love or care for grandmother,
neither to doubt how adequately I performed my moral and ceremonial duties to a
grandmother who adored me. Such duties, as we know, do not constitute an
obligation and bear no substance, but they are merely mandated for the sake of
form and the eyes of the community and, maybe, the Lord. On that score, I was forgiven
a priori: I was ignorant of such "moral duties", the formal aspects
of them. (After all, the ethics of the Economou family that grandfather adhered
to, nurtured and imposed to his wife and offspring were founded on a basis and had
a structure different than mine, and separated by the chronological distance of
two generations, even before they began to appear eccentric and anachronistic.)
Grandfather had just felt – so my auntie told me – a deep sadness, after having
seen me outside the gate of the cemetery, deserted, lost, forlorn. And he felt the
urge to hold me by the hand, to bring me closer to grandmother who was disappearing
into nothingness and whom we would never see again. In
hindsight, it betrayed an own hidden guilt.
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