Going Home
Once, my friends P and J and I went out to eat with my father. They mentioned Santorini to him—how beautiful it was. He replied, disgustedly, in his signature thick Greek accent, “Santorini is NOTHING.” He then proceeded to explain to them that if they really wanted to see the most beautiful place in Greece, they ought to visit Ikaria.
If you ask S what she remembers about Ikaria, she will mention one of the following: the large number of totally ignored and flea-infested stray cats, which had never been fed or loved as consistently over a two week period as they were during our visit; the two faced man dream that many of us had, which we concluded was proof that our hotel was haunted; the bagful of rocks she picked at the beach on a walk with her college buddy J. Sometimes she’ll say she was stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere for much too long; most of the time, though, she’ll say she had the time of her life.
This isn’t the story I’d tell, but I am glad she has her own. For me, our trip was colored by my father’s sudden decline in health and, while we were on our way back to the U.S., his death. For the last eight days of our time in Ikaria, we felt his presence hovering over us, saw him everywhere: in the faces of strangers, who would light up when they figured out who my father was (they always had a story of how they knew him); in his brothers’ faces, full of grief for his decline and stories they couldn't tell me, not yet; in the violent waves crashing against the giant rocks in my father's home village. We saw him, too, in the elders with whom we worked: in Demetrios, who played dominoes with the same concentration my father applied to backgammon; in Ianni's dramatic displays of depression ("Everything is disastrous here"), in Katina’s way of verbalizing anything that came to mind, no matter how rude or hurtful, as well as in her love of dancing.
There was a darkness in Ikaria I’d never experienced before. For the first time in all of my visits, I didn't feel safe there. One of my students took a ride home with an older man who wasn't safe; the hotel manager was dismissive and rude to us; all of us experienced signs that spirits were among us, and that they weren't necessarily friendly or kind. One student was ill for part of the trip; another suffered a dog bite and had to get a rabies shot, and the owner couldn't give us a straight answer about whether his dogs had been vaccinated.
The elders I’d loved on previous trips, most of them, were gone: Argiro, who shared my name and had the most sincere smile and deepest blue eyes, whom we had watched go from total immobility to movement and joyful facial expressions during our first visit; Rodopi, who had never married or had children but had baptized more children than anyone else on the island, and loved my students as deeply and with the same kind of hope she gave her godchildren; Panagotis, who had sung so beautifully and knew a myriad of regional songs.
Still, there were surprising moments of great hospitality and generosity. My aunt’s sister-in-law had all 16 of us over for lunch one day, even offering vegetarian options. A stranger drove my student to the hospital and called the dog's owner to find out if he had been vaccinated. The elder Katina fell in love one of my students, and tried to give her sweets each day, a scarf, a watch. Georgia and Christos shared honest and heartbreaking stories about the German occupation, sending one of my students out of the room in tears. A women’s group threw two dance parties for us—one at the nursing home and one at a local bar. Maria's willingness,a couple times, to sing for us, despite her severe mental illness and dementia; Stamatoula’s strong grip on our arms; Christos' continual comments about how hard we were working, how he wanted us instead to relax.
In a way, my father’s life, and his relationship with me, was like this trip—there was always a darkness and fear in the backdrop, but there were also always moments of deep and profound generosity and love. In the end, the last two times I talked to him he was both gleeful because he felt good and was surrounded by family, and deeply, piercingly sad because I was where he wanted to be.
In the end, my sister told him the stories of his life and he died happily, smiling up at the ceiling, and we knew he had seen our mother, that he went home peacefully and without regrets, even though he’d lived a life full of mistakes, big and small. But he lived life fully, taking risks, loving deeply and passionately, saying and doing what he wanted in each moment. Perhaps it isn’t the best way to live—but it’s also, definitely, not the worst.
A life full of too much carefulness—if that is a word—is, in the end, not the kind of life that triggers memories so deep they swell with tears or laughter, spill over into who we are and where we belong and what about us matters. Maybe living carefully, planfully (probably also not a word), is admirable in its own right. People who make plans can choose to impact others, but I think that lives lived passionately, risk-ful-ly (definitely not a word), and loudly might, after all, have an even greater, if less predictable, impact, after all.
People always tell me I am like my mother, but I know there are ways in which I am also like my father. I’ve never taken the easy route or the most advisable one. I’ve taken risks based on passion and compassion. I’m terrible with money, overly generous and thoughtless about its worth, some might say (though I hope at least to avoid the severe consequences he faced because of this flaw). I like the pleasures in life, all of them—food, wine, dancing, being with people with whom I feel deeply connected, others I won’t mention here. I also love quiet and contemplative moments and hours alone, something I noticed my father needing more and more as he got older.
There was such an outpouring of love for him at the end—so many nights spent laughing and talking late into the night with relatives and friends before and after the wake and funeral. At the end, my grief finally took hold of my body when I watched more than 100 people go up to his coffin at the end of the service to say their last goodbyes. I wept and wept, remembering the stories that connected each of them to my father, my mother, my sister, me. There were people I’d known since birth--my mother's best friend and her husband, who had not always been able to tolerate my father's harsh honesty; the many Greek men who had worked for him, sticking by him as long as they could, and moving on without bitterness when he was unable to pay. There were also others who came into my father’s life closer to the end—a man in his 20s who had played backgammon with him in his final years; a man in his 50s who couldn’t speak either Greek or English but had somehow managed to forge a deep friendship with my father that seems to have been based entirely on private jokes that transcended language.
In the end, it was S who held me up when I said my last goodbye, who reminded me that it was only his body there. I knew he was listening to everything I said to him, even though I’d missed the chance to tell him in person. Still, I feel he would have stayed alive until I returned if he needed to hear me tell him something or say something to me. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I think I might be right.
Before the wake, S carefully washed her three favorite stones: a tiny blue square with swirls of white, a perfectly white, smooth globe; a small, white triangle that might have been a tooth. She wrote him a note saying she was sorry she hadn’t been able to say goodbye, that she loved him, that the three stones represented the three of us: father, daughter, granddaughter. I love that those stones and that note were buried with him, beside the place my mother was buried. I love that I don't know which one is which--maybe because, in many ways, we are so much alike.
Ikaria is mixed up with my father’s pride and humor, his violence and love. Its clear blue waters, sometimes calm, sometimes fierce, are mixed up in the way what he felt and thought was always on the surface, visible even if it wasn’t beautiful, though it often was. He thought Ikaria was the most amazing place on earth, and he wanted everyone to love it the way he did. This desire to share what he knew and felt was selfish and selfless at the same time, and I see that same mix of selfishness, of selflessness, in my daughter, in myself.
Sometimes our greatest weaknesses are also our greatest strengths. Again and again, I learn this lesson.
I want to write here about the memories I have of him, or the stories I heard in the weeks I was home from others who loved him. But instead, two images keep coming back: my daughter and her college buddy J climbing the rocks by the ocean in Manganiti, how the looked perched there together, staring out into the sea, and how, suddenly, they were overtaken by a giant wave. They scrambled down the rocks toward flatter land, laughing and screeching at the same time, and we had to explain to my uncle why we'd shown up soaked from top to bottom.
And, on the 16 hour drive from my hometown back to where I live now, in my father’s car, which I shouldn't have been driving: we drove into snow and fog so thick we couldn't see, and I wanted to turn back, but couldn't bare the thought of more days among the boxes of his things. So I stuck it out, and suddenly, an hour later, we were out of it, in clear blue skies, clear roads, and sun for the rest of the way.
I know these images are cliches about grief and loss, how they encompass us, how they become the smooth but cloudy glass through which we see the world, how they overtake us quickly, unexpectedly. But there is also the sound of J's laughter, and S's, the pure glee of surprise mixed with a little fear.
It’s snowing again now, but we made it home.
If you ask S what she remembers about Ikaria, she will mention one of the following: the large number of totally ignored and flea-infested stray cats, which had never been fed or loved as consistently over a two week period as they were during our visit; the two faced man dream that many of us had, which we concluded was proof that our hotel was haunted; the bagful of rocks she picked at the beach on a walk with her college buddy J. Sometimes she’ll say she was stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere for much too long; most of the time, though, she’ll say she had the time of her life.
This isn’t the story I’d tell, but I am glad she has her own. For me, our trip was colored by my father’s sudden decline in health and, while we were on our way back to the U.S., his death. For the last eight days of our time in Ikaria, we felt his presence hovering over us, saw him everywhere: in the faces of strangers, who would light up when they figured out who my father was (they always had a story of how they knew him); in his brothers’ faces, full of grief for his decline and stories they couldn't tell me, not yet; in the violent waves crashing against the giant rocks in my father's home village. We saw him, too, in the elders with whom we worked: in Demetrios, who played dominoes with the same concentration my father applied to backgammon; in Ianni's dramatic displays of depression ("Everything is disastrous here"), in Katina’s way of verbalizing anything that came to mind, no matter how rude or hurtful, as well as in her love of dancing.
There was a darkness in Ikaria I’d never experienced before. For the first time in all of my visits, I didn't feel safe there. One of my students took a ride home with an older man who wasn't safe; the hotel manager was dismissive and rude to us; all of us experienced signs that spirits were among us, and that they weren't necessarily friendly or kind. One student was ill for part of the trip; another suffered a dog bite and had to get a rabies shot, and the owner couldn't give us a straight answer about whether his dogs had been vaccinated.
The elders I’d loved on previous trips, most of them, were gone: Argiro, who shared my name and had the most sincere smile and deepest blue eyes, whom we had watched go from total immobility to movement and joyful facial expressions during our first visit; Rodopi, who had never married or had children but had baptized more children than anyone else on the island, and loved my students as deeply and with the same kind of hope she gave her godchildren; Panagotis, who had sung so beautifully and knew a myriad of regional songs.
Still, there were surprising moments of great hospitality and generosity. My aunt’s sister-in-law had all 16 of us over for lunch one day, even offering vegetarian options. A stranger drove my student to the hospital and called the dog's owner to find out if he had been vaccinated. The elder Katina fell in love one of my students, and tried to give her sweets each day, a scarf, a watch. Georgia and Christos shared honest and heartbreaking stories about the German occupation, sending one of my students out of the room in tears. A women’s group threw two dance parties for us—one at the nursing home and one at a local bar. Maria's willingness,a couple times, to sing for us, despite her severe mental illness and dementia; Stamatoula’s strong grip on our arms; Christos' continual comments about how hard we were working, how he wanted us instead to relax.
In a way, my father’s life, and his relationship with me, was like this trip—there was always a darkness and fear in the backdrop, but there were also always moments of deep and profound generosity and love. In the end, the last two times I talked to him he was both gleeful because he felt good and was surrounded by family, and deeply, piercingly sad because I was where he wanted to be.
In the end, my sister told him the stories of his life and he died happily, smiling up at the ceiling, and we knew he had seen our mother, that he went home peacefully and without regrets, even though he’d lived a life full of mistakes, big and small. But he lived life fully, taking risks, loving deeply and passionately, saying and doing what he wanted in each moment. Perhaps it isn’t the best way to live—but it’s also, definitely, not the worst.
A life full of too much carefulness—if that is a word—is, in the end, not the kind of life that triggers memories so deep they swell with tears or laughter, spill over into who we are and where we belong and what about us matters. Maybe living carefully, planfully (probably also not a word), is admirable in its own right. People who make plans can choose to impact others, but I think that lives lived passionately, risk-ful-ly (definitely not a word), and loudly might, after all, have an even greater, if less predictable, impact, after all.
People always tell me I am like my mother, but I know there are ways in which I am also like my father. I’ve never taken the easy route or the most advisable one. I’ve taken risks based on passion and compassion. I’m terrible with money, overly generous and thoughtless about its worth, some might say (though I hope at least to avoid the severe consequences he faced because of this flaw). I like the pleasures in life, all of them—food, wine, dancing, being with people with whom I feel deeply connected, others I won’t mention here. I also love quiet and contemplative moments and hours alone, something I noticed my father needing more and more as he got older.
There was such an outpouring of love for him at the end—so many nights spent laughing and talking late into the night with relatives and friends before and after the wake and funeral. At the end, my grief finally took hold of my body when I watched more than 100 people go up to his coffin at the end of the service to say their last goodbyes. I wept and wept, remembering the stories that connected each of them to my father, my mother, my sister, me. There were people I’d known since birth--my mother's best friend and her husband, who had not always been able to tolerate my father's harsh honesty; the many Greek men who had worked for him, sticking by him as long as they could, and moving on without bitterness when he was unable to pay. There were also others who came into my father’s life closer to the end—a man in his 20s who had played backgammon with him in his final years; a man in his 50s who couldn’t speak either Greek or English but had somehow managed to forge a deep friendship with my father that seems to have been based entirely on private jokes that transcended language.
In the end, it was S who held me up when I said my last goodbye, who reminded me that it was only his body there. I knew he was listening to everything I said to him, even though I’d missed the chance to tell him in person. Still, I feel he would have stayed alive until I returned if he needed to hear me tell him something or say something to me. Maybe I am wrong about this, but I think I might be right.
Before the wake, S carefully washed her three favorite stones: a tiny blue square with swirls of white, a perfectly white, smooth globe; a small, white triangle that might have been a tooth. She wrote him a note saying she was sorry she hadn’t been able to say goodbye, that she loved him, that the three stones represented the three of us: father, daughter, granddaughter. I love that those stones and that note were buried with him, beside the place my mother was buried. I love that I don't know which one is which--maybe because, in many ways, we are so much alike.
Ikaria is mixed up with my father’s pride and humor, his violence and love. Its clear blue waters, sometimes calm, sometimes fierce, are mixed up in the way what he felt and thought was always on the surface, visible even if it wasn’t beautiful, though it often was. He thought Ikaria was the most amazing place on earth, and he wanted everyone to love it the way he did. This desire to share what he knew and felt was selfish and selfless at the same time, and I see that same mix of selfishness, of selflessness, in my daughter, in myself.
Sometimes our greatest weaknesses are also our greatest strengths. Again and again, I learn this lesson.
I want to write here about the memories I have of him, or the stories I heard in the weeks I was home from others who loved him. But instead, two images keep coming back: my daughter and her college buddy J climbing the rocks by the ocean in Manganiti, how the looked perched there together, staring out into the sea, and how, suddenly, they were overtaken by a giant wave. They scrambled down the rocks toward flatter land, laughing and screeching at the same time, and we had to explain to my uncle why we'd shown up soaked from top to bottom.
And, on the 16 hour drive from my hometown back to where I live now, in my father’s car, which I shouldn't have been driving: we drove into snow and fog so thick we couldn't see, and I wanted to turn back, but couldn't bare the thought of more days among the boxes of his things. So I stuck it out, and suddenly, an hour later, we were out of it, in clear blue skies, clear roads, and sun for the rest of the way.
I know these images are cliches about grief and loss, how they encompass us, how they become the smooth but cloudy glass through which we see the world, how they overtake us quickly, unexpectedly. But there is also the sound of J's laughter, and S's, the pure glee of surprise mixed with a little fear.
It’s snowing again now, but we made it home.
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