St. Nektarios

 Long before the sleepy island of Ikaria, known for its all-night panagiria, awakes, I walk to the outskirts of the village where my dad grew up and find an old donkey path that leads through the summer brush. I walk, hurriedly, with no particular destination. 

It is 1998. I’ve come to the home of my ancestors to mourn my mother, to come to terms with my father’s complicated story.

A week earlier, my great-aunt Agglaia died while taking her morning swim. The same week, my Thea Sofia began to experience intense stomach pains, and the night before she had been lying on her couch, writhing in pain. I suspect she has cancer--something about the way she describes her symptoms, the hollowing of her face. 

When I wake, I feel restless, overcome with grief. 

And so I walk. 

I come around a bend when it appears suddenly: a small, white chapel a little off the path.

I try the door, but it’s locked. On impulse, I run my hand over the top of the arched doorway and find a key, let myself in.

I cross myself on instinct as I cross that threshold. There’s a faint scent of incense. Everything is covered in dust. St. Nektarios, the saint to whom we pray for a cure to cancer, is on the far left panel of the iconostasis, which is how I know the church is named for him.

I realize suddenly that this is the first time I’ve ever been in a church by myself. Even on Holy Thursday vigils, when the youth group took turns kneeling before Jesus on the cross all night long, we worshipped in pairs. 

And so, I do something I’ve wanted to do all of my life. I walk through the doors on the iconostasis that serve as the barrier between the congregation and the sacred altar, the doors no woman is ever allowed to cross. I breathe, deeply, half expecting someone to burst in and catch me, or, worse yet, for a voice from heaven to ask me what I’m doing.

Nothing happens. 

There is a simple chalice and discos there, where, in a ritual no one but the altar boys ever witness, the priest transforms the sacred bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. They are made of clay instead of the fancy silver and gold of the Greek Orthodox Church in the U.S. 

I touch the chalice, run my finger around the circular edge of the discos. I wonder how long it has been since they were filled with wine and bread. I look out the small window facing east, the direction the church always faces. The sun is rising, and long beams of light are settling across the altar. 

---

For so many years, I was mad at St. Nektarios. I’d grown up on stories of his healings--so many people walking away miraculously from cancer. Why not my mother?

For years after her death I would continue to receive notices from some nun or monk who resided in a monastery named for St. Nektarios was praying for her healing. I never wrote back to let whoever was sending these letters know that she had died. Eventually, they stopped arriving.

I leave the sacred space and stand before the familiar image: a gaunt man with a white beard and black vestments, right hand held up in a gesture of blessing, Bible wrapped in the crook of his arm.

I remember the paper icon my priest had pressed into my hand when my mother got sick. I still have it, tucked away with her funeral notice.

I want to pray to him for my Thea Sofia, but I can’t find the words.

Instead, I go to the analogion, the stand from which the psaltis sings. It is low to the ground, and I smile, imagining an elderly man bending forward to sing from this place. I begin to sing Kyrie Eleison, over and over, until the restlessness and grief and worry that had brought me here begins to slow. 

---

Usually when Carol, my spiritual director, leads me in a guided meditation, I end up at Seychelles beach, a secluded, rocky beach that was formed in 1995 when a long, narrow tunnel was blasted through the formidable mountain, making my father’s village accessible by car for the first time. Rocks and dirt tumbled down until a rocky beach appeared on the island’s south side. 

The incline from road to beach is far too steep for a car. To get there, you have to take a boat from one of the island’s ports or know where to find a hidden path that leads through overgrown brush to the edge of the sea. 

That summer, I hiked down to Seychelles almost every day and swam for hours, opening my eyes in the salty water to observe the most colorful fish I had ever seen. I lay on the beach and read, or just rested, my eyes half-closed, letting my mind wander or be still.

In my meditations, sometimes a non-existent, ancient tree is growing there. I walk to it and rest my back against the rough surface of its trunk. I am warm and calm, awake and present. 

Sometimes my mother shows up and sits beside me, and I rest my head on her bent knees, Sometimes she asks me to swim with her. When I float in the water with her, I’m able to breathe underwater. We watch the colorful fish for hours.

At the start of my 50th year, I sit by this imagined tree when, for the first time,  all of my ancestors arrive at once, raucous, laughing, possibly drunk. 

My Thea Sofia, who died shortly after I left to return to the U.S. that summer, takes my hand and pulls me into the long line, where we stand shoulder to shoulder. Dancing the Kariotiko, slow and steady, my ancestors sing its mournful words from the pits of their stomachs, their eyes intent with love on one another, and on me. 

In this meditation I am in the middle of the line. I shout that we should dance into the sea, and so we do, until we are neck-deep in its salty heft. We don’t stop singing.  

But this time, four months into age 50, I find myself in the St. Nektarios chapel. I resist at first, trying to will myself to that other familiar place of so much beauty. 

Just settle wherever you are, I hear Carol say, as if she is aware that I’m trying to leave the small, dark space where my mind and heart have taken me. 

I haven’t thought about the chapel in years, but I know what to do. I walk behind the altar and lift the chalice to my lips, rather than using the tiny spoon with which the priest usually administers communion. I drink deeply. The antidoro is on the ceramic discos, a whole loaf, and I tear it apart, ravenously, and eat. 

Just as it had that morning so many years ago, the light shifts, and long beams enter through the window facing east. I open my arms wide to take them in. Just as I do so, the ceiling lifts and floats away, like a scene in the Wizard of Oz, except the world is silent and still; there is no tornado. 

I’m no longer in a dark place. The colors of the rainbow begin to appear in the dusty air. I breathe deeply. As I breathe out, my breath becomes a slow, steady wind that slowly pushes the walls away from their center, opening more space. I am reminded of the village square where the panagiri happens every year, a rare, natural dance floor on this mountain floating in the sea. 

I put my arms out, wider, wider, until they seem to take in the entire island, and the sea beyond. 

And then, as if that gesture breaks open the graves below me, perched on another flat piece of land just south of here, my ancestors come back.

They approach more slowly than they had at the beach, one or two at a time. Of course, they want to dance. We link arms, shoulder to shoulder, and suddenly I realize I am leading rather than following. Because I’m in the lead, I find my body is so strong and lithe that I can crouch to the ground, slap my feet, jump high into the air--men’s gestures, but no one is phased.

My mother is there, and my father. Theo Foti and Thea Sofia. Theo Gerogos and Thea Theodora. Thea Katina and Theo Vangeli. My great-aunt Thea Agglaia, who never danced in this life, who pined for the next life to lift her sorrow,  and Thea Angeliki, her sister, who loved the world deeply, with all her senses. Theo Elias rounds out the line.

Soon the living join us, too: Thea Koula, who will die a couple months after she appears in this dream; Thea Mary and Theo Aleko, the last of my father’s siblings. The aches and pains of their aging bodies have dissolved. 

And then my generation arrives, and the generation after: all of my cousins, even Paula, suddenly healed from the mysterious illness that has left her paralyzed. My Theo Elias lets them in, but he stays at the end of the line, smiling, never missing a step.

And that’s when I see them: my grandparents, standing on the edge of the scene, their faces scrunched in definite disapproval. I am afraid of them. I never met my Papou, but I always was at least a little afraid of my Yiayia when we were together in the world of the living. I don’t know what to do. For no reason at all, I feel shame. 

I want to run away, but instead I reach my hand out, gesture for them to take the lead. They take my hand. They smile. But then they twist my arm, swirl, and take the place behind me. After that, they lean into the dance, their faces growing serious with that deep mixture of joy and wonder and grief and hope and rage that is always embodied when we dance well. 

The walls of the chapel are still there, and just before I’m called back, I see him: St. Nektarios. He’s giving me the side eye as he has for my entire life. I smile at him, and beckon, and he, too, steps out of the painted wood and skips to the line, joins in.

---

It is strange how our bodies hold old wounds.

In my early 20s, I lost an ovary. It could have been preventable if I’d had any awareness of my body’s experience of pain. But, I didn’t, not until it was too late and I was rushed into surgery. I spent a week in the hospital. Something had gone wrong, and I was eating and urinating through tubes. My Thea Koula came and washed and braided my hair. My cousins came and averted their eyes from the bag that was collecting my urine.

And then, suddenly and miraculously, I was well. 

As I approached 50, I stopped going to the doctor. I became terrified I would die before my 50th birthday as my mother had. When I make it to 50, I finally go for a physical, and admit to my doctor that my bladder stopped working properly. She suggests physical therapy, and so I go.

The physical therapist is surprised because I don’t know where the muscle that controls my bladder is, exactly. I can’t find it. She traces the scar across my belly and remarks that I must have never re-learned how to use my muscles after my surgery. 

But it’s been nearly 30 years, I say.

Yes, she says briskly, but it’s not too late.

And so, slowly, I learn to feel a part of my body that had remained numb for three decades. Slowly, I come to know the difference between a clenched stomach and a clenched bladder, learn to breathe while my muscles contract and relax. I learn to do the most basic of functions all over again: how to urinate.

---

In the midst of the physical therapy that was addressing this old wound, Derek Chauvin is convicted for killing George Floyd. 

A 20-year-old father and a foster child are shot to death by police officers. 

The pandemic drags on. 

I get my vaccine. 

I get back my mammogram results back--all clear.  

And, I had my first routine colonoscopy.

I don’t tell anyone this, but I am certain I have colon cancer. I believe this for no reason at all except that I am running out of luck. That urination issue? Nothing, really. The mammogram results delayed for over a month? It didn’t mean a thing, just a back up at the lab. 

So, you see, I convince myself it just isn’t possible that I am actually going to be OK. It isn’t possible that I will outlive my mother by more than a couple of weeks. 

When the doctor asks, just before the nurse wheels me in, if I have a family history of colon cancer, I tell him my uncle died of it. He assures me that this does not necessarily increase my risk. 

And then, 30 minutes later, I wake up and view photos of my colon. There is nothing there. He’s never seen such a healthy colon. I won’t need another colonoscopy for 10 years.

My spouse is waiting for me, and I ask if she knows whether Cody, our dog, is still alive. I didn’t even know for sure why I am asking the question (he is). It isn’t until much later that week that I remember.

---

While under anesthesia, I had this dream. I am standing in the doorway of the garage of the first house in which I ever lived, the house my father called our “good luck house.” Nothing bad had ever happened there, according to him. 

My Theo Elias is leaning against the old Buick my father had when I was very young, and I ask him where everyone else had gone. 

“They went for a ride in Theo Vangeli’s fancy car, and his truck,” he tells me.  This seems plausible. I imagine the white Ford pickup and the fancy red sports car with the hood down. I imagine all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins (the ones in the U.S.) crowded into the bed of the Ford, which my cousin Argie is driving, and my Theo and Thea in the convertible, three or four kids crammed into the back seat. They are probably driving fast, the wind whipping their hair into their faces. I am sad I arrived to late to take the ride with them.

“Why didn’t you go with them?” I ask him.

“I stayed behind to tell you you don’t have to be afraid. You’re not going to die. In fact, you’re going to thrive,” he says to me. That’s when I notice our dog Cody circling his ankles, pawing at the ground, looking up at me as if to say, what am I doing here?

And that’s when I wake up.

In the world of the living, I never had a one-on-one conversation with Theo Elias. We were never alone. But in this world-between-worlds where anything can happen, he had stayed behind to tell me I would be OK. 

----

My 50th year stretches across a pandemic, a reckoning about our country’s conflicted relationship with race. It stretches across two presidents, one whom I hate, one whom I love (at least in comparison). It stretches across the adoption of one of my children, the hospitalization of another, the dramatic ups and downs of a third, the upcoming adoption of a fourth. It stretches across a myriad of changes and challenges at work. It stretches across 30 pounds regained after so many years of eating well, exercising daily.

It holds too much. 

I hold too much. 

Most days, I can barely breathe.

I tighten my pelvis and release it. I walk. I run (though not as often as I used to). I look at my face in the mirror and tell myself I look younger than my mother ever looked. 

I have outlived her, and my uncle comes to tell me I will thrive. 

I have outlived her, and she shows up again and again, wanting to dance with me.

I have outlived her, and the saint who could have saved her but did not has welcomed me to the table set only for men, has watched while I fed myself there, with wine and bread that shouldn’t have been there at all. 

Perhaps he conjured it, a consolation prize for the years without my mother. Perhaps I conjured it, a solace, a reckoning, a reminder that (unlike the church in which I was raised)  I do not turn anyone away, will always have food and drink for those who are weary, grieving, seeking hope.

I have outlived my mother, and the saint who could have saved her but did not steps out of his two dimensional wooden arch and joins me in a dance. 

He takes Theo Elias’ hand, and Theo Elias smiles and winks at me, and I jump and slap the soles of my feet and squeeze my yiayia’s hand and keep on dancing.