24d - The Old Neighborhood: Grandma & Grandpa (Goodbye, Dear Grandma)

Grandma survived more than two decades after grandpa’s death; despite the privations following the Catastrophe and the wars, despite the consumption that ate up half of her lung, despite the strenuous limping after the fall and the fracture of her hip on that fateful Sunday evening. Many said it was the innate stoicism and inner strength that kept her going, both instilled, as with many people of her generation, by unprecedented struggles for survival.

I remained throughout her conscious life her beloved grandson -her ‘favorite’ to quote uncle Marios. A frequent visitor for lunch in her kitchenette as child and teenager and, later, as a student, we would sit at the table under the blue cupboard and chat – about anything that two people of the same blood separated by 60 years in age could possibly chat. At the end-of-school farewell party with high school classmates in 1981, in a taverna on Delphi Street, I was intoxicated by ashes insidiously thrown into my retsina drinks by the bully of the class. By the end of the ‘banquet’ I was in a state of heavy stupor. Despite my unprecedented intoxication and a nearly unconscious state of mind and body, I managed to instinctively instruct the two school mates who offered to take me home, the always benevolent Zois and Dimitropoulos (perhaps the only persons I was in friendly terms with throughout the high school years) with directions to our grandma’s apartment. Going back to our family home since the previous year, in the Harilaou district of the east side of the city, by bus or taxi was out of question. The two fellows had to carry me by the shoulders, like an incapacitated wounded soldier, for the few hundred meters walk to grandma’s house -the closest harbor. It was past midnight and the lads had to wake grandma up. After they laid me down on her single bed in the bedroom, with the icon of the Virgin Mary and the whole ceiling spinning above my head, they left me under her care.

She was too strong a character to panic and had confronted by far worse situations in life, although it was unlikely she had to deal with similar deadly intoxication states of close family members in the past. ‘Oh, Mum, Mum! Why I did not listen to you...’ I was mumbling in my drunkenness. Thus I was teased by Father and uncle Marios in the following days. After grandma phoned Mother, she gave me to swallow a spoonful of Turkish coffee powder with plenty of water, a known powerful antidote to the effects of alcohol, something that Mother, when she arrived, approved of as the appropriate action. How did the old woman know, given than neither she nor her husband ever drunk more than a sip of liqueur?

After high-school, when I was enjoying university life to the full, socializing with friends or when busy relationships with girlfriends occupied the best and most of my spare time, I always put aside some hours of the week left to see grandma. She used to call me more than once a month to invite me for lunch, invitations I never declined. The meals she offered turned simpler as the years passed. Her physical strength was depleted; dementia was getting hold of her mind. When Father bought my first car, a Yugo, after our lunch, I used to drive her to a pharmacy behind the ‘Euclidean Technical College’ to buy her medication. I never understood why she had to go that far for her medicine, but no less explicable was the fact that she adamantly refused my offer to take her back, but insisted instead on walking the few hundreds of meters distance back home, in her slow limp supported by a cane. It was an unequalled perseverance, an unyielding will, and a rarely seen will to live.

I said my emotional goodbye, after another invitation for lunch in her kitchenette, the last one, in 1986 before taking my own path to immigration. ‘Who's going to drive me now to obtain my medicines, L...,’ she told me jokingly. The first symptoms of her dementia had begun to become more apparent to my uncle and aunt who still lived upstairs, and were also evident to rest of the family and on show during our Easter family meal in the same year. Memory loss, forgetfulness of people and things, and confusion, would be the subject of family discussions for quite some time; an illness impossible to be dealt with by the impatient young.

Against the odds, I saw her alive again several years later, shortly before I was dismissed by my military service in 1992. She came along with my uncle's family to our house in the Harilaou district for a family get together that turned out to be the very last time I saw her alive (and sadly uncle Marios, as well) -for lunch and a photo opportunity in the balcony. Her dementia had progressed substantially - her mind functions virtually limited in keeping the heart beat and the body alive. By then I was  completely erased from her memory banks: ‘Who is this lad?’ she muttered at one point. She gazed at the camera, with eyes squinted due to the bright afternoon sunlight, unsmiling and expressionless, for the family photo on the balcony. ‘What’s going on here?’ she seemed to think, but through her vacant gaze, one could still see remnants of the tenacity and determination.

I could not tell whom from the family party she could identify and name, if any. She did not say much that afternoon, but my uncle's jokes and always joyful demeanor brought a rare fragile smile. It would have been the last time I saw her, either alive or in her final resting place, but I was not moved as much as I was when we parted in 1986, before my departure for America; either because life abroad and the military service had hardened me, or because I knew that a big part of herself had been lost, along with memories of time spent together during my childhood. I heard the news of her death in my apartment in Rochester of England: ‘Grandma burnt out like a candle,’ Father told me over the phone. My uncle, her second son, whom she unhesitatingly donated one of her kidneys a decade before for a transplant that extended his life span by a decade, died a few months before her. When she was brought to the room, where he lay dead in his coffin, grandma asked: ‘Who is this gentleman who sleeps in there?’ Her past and with it her own being had long since died.