Memories of Thea Angeliki

The night I learned Thea Angeliki had died, I was on an annual retreat I take, and I had briefly interrupted the silence to spend a couple hours in a writing workshop about belonging. The facilitator asked us to list the people and places to whom we belonged, and then to choose two of them and write about them. For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time, I wrote Thea Angeliki’s name down—and then decided to write about her. This is what I wrote. Two hours later, in my room, I was weeping because I had a message on my cell phone telling me Thea was gone. I’m sorry she never got to read this, but I wanted to post it here and to pass it on to others who loved her.
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In my first memory of Thea Angeliki, she is standing at her kitchen counter talking to her cat, and my sister and I are looking at each other across the table and smiling. My mother was with us, as was my aunt Katina, and because my mother was well, I know I must have been younger than 10 (unless this trip happened in one of the brief six-month periods of remission between 1980-1984). My sister and I had been in plenty of Greek widows’ homes, but we’d never known a Greek woman to own an indoor cat, much less to talk to it.

I remember I kept staring at her. She looked like my grandmother in the face, but she was so small, and she moved so quickly and confidently. It was hard to believe she was family. On the ride home, I asked my mother some questions about her—why did she seem so different from Yiayia? My mother and Thea Katina laughed. By way of explanation, my mom simply said, “She’s one of a kind, all right.” That phrase stuck with me because I didn’t remember my mother ever using it before.

I know I saw Thea Angeliki several times between that visit and my 20s, but my next clear memory of her is a raucous Thanksgiving we spent together at her nephew Chris’s apartment in Phoenix when she was visiting while I was in graduate school there. At some point that evening, Thea Angeliki told me she had the family gift of reading fortunes and asked if she could read mine. I said she could.

She took one look at my cup and got the most worried look on her face. “You are going out with a really bad person,” she said. “This person is going to really hurt you. Is this true?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I looked away from her. I couldn’t admit the obvious to myself, even though the signs were already there. I would like to say I left that Thanksgiving dinner and broke up with my significant other immediately—that would make a much better story to tell--but unfortunately I pushed what Thea had said out of my mind and stayed for two more years. Things got continuously worse and worse.

One winter afternoon a little more than two years later, after a fight, I drove to the base of South Mountain and climbed to the peak without stopping once, without even noticing the blooming ocotillo and saguaro or the view, without even bothering to put on the hiking boots I always kept in my trunk. What am I supposed to be doing? I asked out loud when I got to the peak to no one in particular. And then I screamed, How did I end up here?

That’s when I saw the rattler. It was right by my foot. I tried desperately to remember what I was supposed to do—run? Stomp on its back? Stand still? I don’t know exactly what happened, but the next thing I knew, I was startled awake by the sound of Thea Angeliki’s voice: “You are going out with a really bad person.” I was sitting on a rock with my head on my knees—I am not sure if I had simply curled up out of fear, or fallen asleep—but either way, the snake was gone, and I was certain Thea was sitting right next to me. She wasn’t of course—she was in Detroit, probably totally oblivious to this experience.

I hiked down the mountain, slowly. Everything, I realized, was in bloom. I didn't have to be afraid of anything, because no matter what happened, cacti would still bloom every year, the mountain would still be there, and sometimes I would be able to avoid dangerous situations--and when I couldn't, I could draw on the strength of the people who loved me and on my own inner strength to find my way out.

I went home and began to pack my things. It took two years for her words to work on me, but eventually, they gave me the strength to get out of that relationship.

About six months later, in 1998, I went to Greece for the first time as an adult, something I never would have been able to do if I’d stayed in that relationship. I needed to see Ikaria, to reconnect with family I hadn’t seen in almost 20 years—but I also needed some time away from Phoenix to figure out what I was going to do next.
I ran into Thea Angeliki in Evdilos and ended up staying with her on the first floor of Thea Aglaia’s home.

I feel so lucky that I was able to spend that week with her. We made coffee every morning—she said she needed a little time to enjoy the morning before going upstairs for breakfast with Aglaia. I don’t remember much about what we talked about, only that our time together felt peaceful. Then we would go upstairs to sit with Aglaia. Angeliki would try to get her to smile, to tell a story, to interact in some small way with us. Sometimes she would tell part of a story, or affirm what Angeliki had just said, smiling a little to herself—but that was all. Then we would try to get her to take a walk with us, to do anything besides sitting in that little dark kitchen. She would always decline.

At first, Angeliki was gentle, but toward the end of the week I spent there, she began to get frustrated. “You need to take off that black dress and enjoy your life a little, Aglaia,” she said one day over breakfast. “It has been years since he died.” The “he” was her son, who had died in childhood. Aglaia blamed herself, and she had never gotten over it. Aglaia ignored her, but she told me over coffee during the siesta one day that if she could, she would burn all of Aglaia’s photos of the long-dead, and force her to stop living in the past.

I didn’t say anything. I felt for Aglaia. I was even strangely comforted by how much time she spent at her altar, where photos of her son and others long gone were situated beside icons of the saints they were named for. I wasn’t really over my mother’s death, even though it had happened nearly 15 years earlier. Coming back to the island was making me realize how little I knew about her—everybody I met had a story that I hadn’t heard, and while I loved to take them in, they also made me sad that I hadn’t been able to have more time with her. I felt both more at home in Ikaria than I had anywhere else and less at home, at the same time—and the contradictions the trip was bringing up in me would serve as the basis for much writing and self-reflection after the trip.

Of course, I also wasn’t over my break up. In a few weeks I would go back to Phoenix for my last year in graduate school, the year that promised to be hardest. I had no idea what was happening next. I felt caught in the middle of the past and the future—even though I was in the most beautiful place in the world, I couldn’t just be in the moment. It was impossible for me—there was simply too much grief and fear.
But then one day Angeliki walked me around the village and showed me places that had been a part of her history— her childhood home, the stone where her mother would grind wheat for bread, and, finally, her elementary school. “I had a teacher who was so mean to me,” she told me, “so now whenever something bad is going to happen, I dream of her.”

For some reason, that story reminded me of how I had dreamed of Angeliki that day when I was finally at the end of my rope. I said to her, “Remember how you read my cup when you came to Phoenix a few years ago, and told me I was in a bad relationship?”
I couldn’t read her face, so I’m not sure if she really remembered, but she told me she did.

“I got out of it,” I said.

“That’s good,” was all she said back to me. And then, after a long silence as we walked back toward the house, she added, “Life is too short.”

For the rest of that trip, I kept my eyes open. I stayed in the present. And because she taught me to do that, I knew I belonged to her as much as to my grandmother, and to my Thea Agglaia—but that I was going to choose to live life fully, to defy any old world ideas if they didn’t sustain me while also honoring my ancestors and being grateful for them.

The next day, I planned to go back to my father’s village, so that morning, I asked if Angeliki would read my cup. “I don’t think you need to have it read,” she said, not explaining why, but I understood. She had already given me the only advice I really needed. I was going to have to figure out the rest on my own, and instead of being terrified by that possibility, I was going to have to learn to rest in it, even to celebrate the uncertainties and unexpected twists and turns.

Thea Aglaia died a week later, and I went back to the village for the funeral. It was heart-wrenching for me; I suddenly realized how awful it was that all of her life had been focused almost exclusively on death and on what happens after, rather than on being present with the joys and sorrows of the present. I owed it to my mother, to Aglaia, to everyone who loved me, to live life in the present.

Angeliki lived to age 96. I saw her for the last time last year at the Pan-Ikarian convention in Detroit. She had dementia and was in a wheelchair, but she was so incredibly happy to be surrounded by family and friends. She looked radiant. I know caring for her at the end was not easy for her family, but when I saw her, at least, she seemed so incredibly and completely and deeply herself.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that those who know who they are, who define themselves based both on their web of relationships and on their own inner truths, live longest--but I do believe that in her case, the fact that she was, as my mother told me so many years ago, both "one of a kind" and truly in love with her place and her people made a difference in the length and quality of her life. I am grateful for this lesson.