Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informative reading.

November 2002 has already reached its twenty-fourth day. My mother, in ward 20 of ELPIS hospital, is counting the last hours of her life. At nine in the morning, intubated in the bed beside me, in the last bed, her eyes are closed and she breathes slowly and heavily. She tries in vain to escape the suffocating embrace of Death. Death, which in her case drags deliverance behind it and releases the soul from the Body that has “oxidized.” Her closed eyelids will never open again. Only her weak breath and irregular pulse betrayed her existence. The decent silence, the motionless body and the absolute loneliness give solid warning of the inescapable certainty that is coming. They certify the only truth: Death.

Ward 20 of the hospital is empty. My mother is beside me, motionless, peaceful, light. Perhaps now her whole life is passing before her eyes in the slow frames of a film that was never made: she sees a thin little girl running barefoot, hurt, through the alleys of the lower neighbourhood. In one hand she holds a small oiled slice of bread and in the other a few pierced ten-drachma coins to buy tomato paste that will make the food tastier.

She watches the same little girl, dressed in alaja or chintz, going to the Girls’ Primary School. There, instead of learning letters, “God’s lessons,” she gathers pesada, greens, to feed the teacher’s goat. What need did a girl have for letters anyway? Where would she use them, in olive picking or in the harvest?

She sees Ifigenia as a teenager climbing high up to Analipsi to water and milk her uncle’s cows. Since her family had no means, she had to work off her bread. Her father the teacher, Xenophon, was such a holy man that he “gave away both his tunics”!
She admires Ifigenia, young, beautiful and vigorous, “lifting” with her back, “like Koutalianos himself,” the mule that had leaned to one side and was about to shed its pack saddle, thus winning admiration for her unnatural, manly strength. The strength she spent on day labour until deep old age, a true serf. Hard work on the stones of Mani, where you survived only if you rooted yourself in them. If you became one with them. You moved forward only when you held tightly the hand of the person next to you, who in order to live sowed every piece of land, every “corner,” every “scrap,” to gather a handful of wheat at harvest.

She takes pride in Ifigenia as a bride, marrying in the storm of 1940, the year that was “ill-starred and sunk,” as she used to say. A great feast, wine, songs, gunshots, shortly before the sirens howled and the airplanes appeared. The great calamity broke loose. The unlucky people were entering the war. Hunger, death and pain were entering their lives for good.

She feels sympathy for her mother-in-law, who, when measuring the dowry, found it xikiki, deficient. Supposedly two cubit-lengths of homespun cloth were missing. As if she owed them to her!
She sees the years of occupation, when she boiled wild greens and ate them with two drops of oil so she would not swell up. She sees the civil war; she sees, sees, sees...

Outside in the corridor various tedious conversations are heard, static in the holiness of the moments. I know that my mother will never speak to me again. She is sunk in an unknown state, somewhere between life and death. She has already raised anchor for her last journey. For nearly a century she fought strongly, “faithfully and trustworthily,” through every weather. She truly loved Life and People. Her giving was unprecedented, endless, selfless. She was never lost. She had an unfailing instinct, and with Love as her compass she struggled through the storms and finally was saved, survived, and reached the end proud.

But now she is tired, she breathes heavily and wants to rest.

In a little while she will finish the marathon of her life without formal honours or prizes. She worthily won the olive wreath of true love, which she offered to everyone without holding back and without ulterior motive. Last night we sang together for the last time, songs from her era. We remembered simple, insignificant, bygone things. We spoke of people who had “gone.” Today she herself is leaving as she wished, quietly and simply. Without pain and medical communiqués. She leaves as true nobles leave, with no need for fanfare, hollow funeral speeches or false tears. Immediate, spontaneous recognition and the pure feelings of their own simple people are enough for them. The people with whom they lived and whom they loved. My mother was ready for her journey and had chosen by herself her simple everyday clothes, which she had kept ready for the occasion. Suitable for “my sleep in the other world,” as she had written on the note she had pinned to the box containing simple clothes like those she wore when she went to vespers at Ai Nikola. Today she leaves proud, owing nothing to anyone. She leaves behind a reserve of love and goodness.

But now she is tired, she breathes heavily and wants to rest.

Her strength has left her. She spent it for Good and Justice. At this moment she raises her left hand a little, as if she wants to bid farewell to this vain world. On her finger she wears her wedding ring, the symbol of her sixty-year marriage, which she honoured and respected more than fully. Her eyes remain closed and will not open again. Her face is peaceful and sweet. Each wrinkle is a deep furrow of pain and deprivation. She loved us all and forgave us all. She leaves with relief; she leaves to rest.

The hour of the doctors’ visit has now arrived. Before her stands the upright and unapproachable Director of the Clinic. With a cold expression and raised eyebrow. He is accompanied by his assistant, a simple, kind doctor, an excellent human being. The Director gives us no attention, and neither do we give him any. My mother is no longer interested in the Director, since nothing depends on him. She has made the great decision. She wants to leave and envisions what comes after. The Director passes us by, cold and indifferent, since he has “diagnosed” no financial benefit. That is, he has realized that we are not going to visit him at his private practice, where every day he amputates without anaesthetic the Hippocratic oath, greedily enriching himself. Let him enjoy it; worthy is his wage. Congratulations, however, to his assistant, who gave lessons in rare humanity, since he spent the whole day attending to the dying mother, who for him was a patient like all the others, and cared for her with the same kindness and attention.

As for me, I need no briefing; my mother’s decision is enough. I follow it with respect and pain. Right away the nurse sister approaches and mechanically changes my mother’s serum as part of her regular eight-hour shift. My mother continues to rest and to seek her freedom. Beside her stands the lord Michael. He waits for her with unusual discretion and patience to climb into his boat so he can take her Across. Great is her honour and grace.

As I close my eyes for a moment, holding her hand with one of mine and writing with the other, I feel that I am taking part in what is unfolding. Slowly I disappear into a mystery. Everything around me moves magically and asymmetrically in a multidimensional space-time where past, present and future coincide. Everything revolves around an endless sequence of memory, desire and imagination compatible with the birth of the universe, leading surely to transcendence, to the dilation of the senses, to asymmetric chaos. And there: I see my mother in the village church square, standing before her parastate torturers, the Chites, who beat her with unprecedented violence. She, with a nursing infant in her arms and two children pulling at her dress, stands upright and with a bloodied face looks up to the narthex at “Panagia the Ypapanti.” And she whispers: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The Chites were looking for her husband, the guerrilla, and had become wild beasts.

I see my mother hiding, hunted, in the armpits of wild Taygetos to save herself and her nursing baby girl from the merciless slaughter of civil strife. “The yataghan fell like the wolf inside the fold.” Then, when brother killed brother over nothing. Then, when life and death played hide-and-seek.

I see my mother bursting out of the guerrilla burrow and, with an armful of wildflowers, running to decorate the Epitaphios. Then following the procession, chanting “All generations,” kneeling at “be astonished, O heaven, and let the foundations of the earth be shaken.”

I see my mother in the bloody stone years of the Civil War, among the “defeated,” declaring herself a voluntary prisoner to the “victors.” She was certain that only prison offered safety. Outside, blind revenge and violence were raging, ruining the land and cutting down its flower.

I see my mother, when the evil had passed, descending from the peaks of untamed Taygetos, loaded with branches and greens, to feed her animals. She used to tell me that after me she nursed another child too, because she was “full of milk” and had milk to spare.

I see my mother, when the weapons had been hidden, baking in the oven and then feeding us warm oiled breads, which she called “kouzounia.”

I see my mother being called by the animals she cared for as if they were her children. I see my mother joking in the neighbourhood lane, singing at weddings and lamenting at funerals.

I open my eyes and see this woman who is now struggling for breath. This woman who loved me strongly and solidly. For her I was her eldest son, Fotos, whom she taught from the time I was a small child to load responsibility onto my shoulders and walk proudly along the roads of life. I was her own person, to whom she courageously whispered her needs. Did I love her as much? Perhaps. But I know that I tried always to be beside her in good times and bad. I tried to bring her light, as she herself often told me.

It is certain that she deprived none of her other children and grandchildren of even a dram of love. The life of her children was her first and last concern. What is the little one doing, the younger girl, the older one, Theodoris who stood by her better than a child of her own? Where are her grandchildren, Gogo, Thelma, Fenia, who also carries the weight of her own name, Panagiotis the emigrant, Takis, Vasilis, Lia? I confess that at the wedding of her granddaughter Gogo, my mother was in one of her greatest glories. She was literally flying. She felt completely vindicated. She spoke into the microphone and sang songs of wedding and joy, the ones they sang in Mani. She never complained, as long as she had good news from her darlings, even if she did not see them often. She always had an excuse and a good word for everyone, just as she always had abundant food and wine, which she multiplied like Christ at Cana of Galilee.

She herself used to tell me that she would leave satisfied. Now what else can I do but listen to her breathing slowly as she approaches the exit? What else can I do but hold her hand, cool her lips with water, stroke her forehead and speak to her, perhaps seeking the final recognition or one more blessing. The day outside, though autumnal, is sunny. It looks springlike. With the breath of the wind, yellow leaves fall from the shedding trees, like my mother, who slowly, slowly is being lost, fading.

Because now she is tired, she breathes heavily and wants to rest.
At two in the afternoon my brother relieved me, coming close to her with his family.
November 24, 2002, Sunday, nine o’clock at night.

I returned to the hospital. The condition is unchanged. My mother breathes spasmodically with oxygen. She has lost almost all contact with her surroundings. She lives with artificial support... “and false purple robes him who clothes the sky in clouds.” And yet this untamed beast with manly strength and divine goodness has become artificial breath and spasm. Each spasm of hers is accompanied by a movement of her head backward, as if she repented and no longer wished to leave. She refuses to submit to the inevitable. “Let this cup pass from me.” She is not afraid of death, which she has known for a long time. All her life she had it in her arms, in the Civil War, in persecutions, in prisons. She never reckoned with it. She believed that death was like a journey, to the mountain, to the sea... to Paradise. Her great love for life led her to transcendence. She always instructed me and told me not to fear death.

Each spasm brings to my mind a piece of her hard, turbulent life. The contractions in the holy wrinkles of her face recall and animate memories and paths from 1940, the resistance, the Civil War. From the merciless battle for survival in Athens in 1960, where she took refuge with her seven-member family. When she washed stairways and cleaned houses to earn her bread. Now why am I writing? Will I read these things to her? Am I writing for others? For my own vanity? For my own psychoanalysis? I believe that in the end I am afraid of becoming an orphan. I am afraid because I will lose my reference point and my shelter; I will be deprived of her presence, her speech, her thought, which was water in the desert, fire in the snow. Which was home base in the rush of everyday madness.

WHICH WAS ABOVE ALL THE MOTHER
She was care, the call to an open embrace, the sweet life-giving voice and the velvet caress... laughter in grief, the source of giving... She was Mother Teresa who throughout her life placed the wants of others above her own desires. She always ate last, the smallest portion, standing, so she could satisfy our wishes. We all took from her Light. The Light of Life and Love. She never bothered anyone, but she never yielded unjustly to anyone either... I lived beside her countless hours. Every day she patiently transfused into me the meaning of true love, compassion and forgiveness. For her the world was one large family without distinctions and borders. She turned bitterness into honey and offered it to everyone. She believed in the true God without fanfare and cosmetics, without Phariseeism. She believed in the God of True Love and Forgiveness.

Ten o’clock at night. I look at her neck and see that her pulse is disappearing imperceptibly like the flame in an oil lamp flickering out because the oil has run dry. She opens her eyes a little. But her gaze is blank. She sees nothing. A deathly silence reigns. I hold her hand tightly, close my eyes, and see her little soul fly like a newly fledged swallow, slowly growing and becoming a seagull in the vast sea of the unknown sky.

My mother is already travelling toward eternity. I open my eyes and remain speechless. With a tight chest I look at her, hold her hand, stroke her forehead and speak to her constantly, believing that she hears me. The day before yesterday I was teasing her and she was laughing. Now she is leaving and leaves me to continue alone. She did me a great honour by leaving in my hands. I live rare moments. I live the climax of a mystery. For a little while I feel that I am elsewhere, that I am absent, that I am outside myself in the eye of the cyclone, the storm of death. I move in the constellation of vanity and utopia. Just now the good doctor comes out of the ward and, with due seriousness, certifies her death.

The truth is that the pain is great, unbearable. But fear has withered. Without fear before death, you walk even beyond land. You do not fear falling, because you hover and balance in the void. From there, as you rise, you see things and people small and meaningless, grey and indifferent, vain. Your gaze looks far toward the Infinite, Eternity, the Divine. These were what my mother saw when she left, her face peaceful and bright, clear and indivisible.

With open eyes I now see her on the highest peak of Taygetos, bridling the horses of Ai Lia and yoking them to his bright, flaming chariot. She has already sat beside the Prophet and travels with him, modestly, through the Heavens.

On November 24, 2002, at ten o’clock at night, the MOTHER, Ifigenia, left her last breath in ward 20 of ELPIS hospital. From there departed a rare Human Being, ONE Unique Christian, the TRUE MOTHER.