(Chapter 20)
The Final Years and the Generation In-Between
I saw my mother very often — I went there two or three times a day. After my father died, my mother stayed on in Parthenonos Street with her husband's brother for ten years — that worldly monk of a man who had stayed unmarried to help his brother's family. The one my children knew as their grandfather. But even we couldn't separate him in our minds from our own father. We felt him as a parent and we loved him.
When I opened my eyes I found three parents standing over me. When my father died, the other two went on living together as before. But when my uncle died and my mother was left alone, we asked her to come and stay with us — one month with one child, the next month with the next, the month after that with the third. My mother wouldn't hear of it. The loneliness weighed heavily on her, but she was too proud to show it to us, her children. She carried it alone.
First of all, when my uncle died my mother lost his pension. Because Uncle Stefanos was not her husband, that income was gone. It was from that pension that they paid the rent, since they had never owned a home of their own. That pension had kept them from any financial worry. In any case we children always arrived loaded down with food and filled their refrigerator. As for clothes and shoes, every Christmas and Easter the three of us pooled our money and provided whatever they needed.
After Uncle Stefanos's death, once we had seen him through the forty-day memorial, we made her the proposal. We told her that we hadn't said anything all this time because 'as you lived together all these years, the three of you, you would have gone on living together as long as God saw fit to give you both.' Now the time had come for us to have our mother in our homes — but by then a grandchild of mine had been born and every morning I had to look after her while her parents worked. In the afternoons I had to be home to look after my husband and cook, so it wasn't easy to bring her to my place, because she would have been alone for far too many hours. My husband wouldn't keep her company — ever since he retired he spent every morning at the coffeehouse. My sister worked long hours outside the house, and my younger brother's children were in high school, studying and needing quiet.
So we thought we would take her in turns, one month at a time. After that there would be a two-month break, and then she could come again. She refused, and said: 'What, am I going to become a suitcase?' But she wouldn't have been a burden anywhere she went — she had her own corner to sit in and she was a quiet person, she wouldn't have imposed on us. But she was proud, and she didn't want to be underfoot.
At one point she said: 'And what about my clothes — what happens to them?' I told her: 'In my house I have the biggest wardrobes for you to keep your clothes. When you go to stay with my brother or sister you can take your underclothes with you and any time you need something you call me and I'll dash over. The other homes are two steps away.' Besides, she would never go out without one of us — she wouldn't even go to church alone. Someone always accompanied her, so they could bring her whatever she needed.
But she flatly refused. She had become attached to that apartment. She said: 'Leave me here where I'm sitting and if you want you can come check on me. If you don't want to, let me be.' So we decided to leave her there, since that was what she wanted.
We gave her six thousand drachmas a month. We also did her shopping and kept her refrigerator stocked. The rent was four thousand drachmas and she paid nothing else — just the water, electricity, and telephone, which came to about a hundred drachmas altogether. So she even had money left over.
I visited her often. After I dropped my granddaughter back with her parents, I would go there for the midday visit, and in the evening, after the day had passed and I'd finished my own housework, I would go a second time. In the end she lived alone for five years until she died in '88. But it was hard for her to be alone — she had grown old and couldn't always understand what was happening to her. Every day I prepared the medications she needed to take.
She had something that my sister also inherited — severe headaches and high blood pressure, she was hypertensive. All the time she would say: 'Goodness, goodness, what is happening in this head of mine!' and she was taking Stendons — a kind of sedative the doctor had prescribed — every two hours like aspirin, because she thought that was her treatment. In the end she began to have hallucinations and to lose her mind.
When we visited during the day everything was calm, but at night, because she had a fear inside her, she couldn't sleep and her mind would construct all sorts of things. She thought the doorbell was ringing, she thought people were knocking at her door. The one who bore the brunt of this was my brother Nikolas, since he lived closest to her. She would call him in the middle of the night and say: 'Come, because the wretch is back again' — because in her mind she had created a figure, a child, dressed it in white, and given it the name Satan. 'Satan came again and hung curtains in front of my window and darkened everything,' she would say. What was actually happening was that the municipal streetlights were going out, and when night fell it was dark.
At first we didn't realize how serious it was because these things came on gradually. And when she began calling Nikolas at night to tell him the neighborhood children were ringing her doorbell, the situation became untenable. So one day I went down to the courtyard in front of her building where some children were playing and I said: 'Children, tell me the truth — I won't be angry with you.' I brought them close to me and asked: 'That doorbell — are you touching it? Are you doing anything with that bell?' They said: 'No, we don't ring the bell.' So I thought perhaps her ears were creating these things.
Then one night she called Nikolas at midnight and told him Satan had come into her house. He went over and told her: 'Just as you are, put your coat over your nightgown and come home with me and we'll wait there until morning.' When dawn came he called my sister and me and we all went over and he explained what was happening with our mother. At that point, whether she liked it or not, we took it upon ourselves to bring her to our homes — taking turns as best we could. She didn't protest then. She understood that she could no longer stay alone.
She spent the first month with me and things went well. My husband started coming back a little earlier after his morning coffee at the coffeehouse and kept her more company. When I came home from my daughter's place, where I'd been looking after the baby until the parents returned, I would sit with her, and sometimes we'd walk — just a short stroll around the neighborhood, so she could stretch her legs a little. When she went to my sister's things were even better, because my sister's husband — God rest his soul — was not a man who haunted coffeehouses. He would go out briefly in the morning for a short walk around Koukaki and then stay home for the most part. While my sister worked outside all day, he kept her company, since he had already retired.
In the end she never made it to my brother's — she suffered a major stroke. She had always had trouble with her blood pressure, which is why she kept saying 'What is happening in my head?' — no matter how carefully we managed her condition while she was with us. One morning my sister's husband, who was the cook in that household, made her chickpeas. He served her a full plate and had also fried a piece of liver, which he placed beside the plate. He said: 'Grandma, I'm going for a short walk and I'll be back.'
When he returned from his walk he found everything on the floor, glasses shattered, because my mother had had a stroke and had knocked everything down — including her own eyeglasses. He went to her and called out: 'Grandma! Grandma!' But she didn't respond. He thought: 'She's either dead or she's in a coma.' He called my brother and his wife, and then they wanted to call me but couldn't reach me because I was at my daughter's.
That day, as I often did, I had taken the baby for an outing to a neighbor — a woman called Voula who had a courtyard. I had left the stroller outside; the baby was playing and another child from the building had joined in. But they kept searching for me, and as I was coming back I could hear my daughter's home phone ringing from outside. We had no cell phones then — only the landline rang. When I answered, I told them: 'What can I do right now with a baby? Unless one of the parents comes home, I can't leave. You need to take her to a hospital, and whatever hospital you go to, call me and tell me where you are. Whoever of the parents gets home first — the moment they walk in, I'll hand over the baby and come find you.'
I don't even remember which parent came in first, the mother or the father. I handed the baby to an adult and left and went straight home. I got home, pulled my husband to his feet and told him: 'Get up — we're leaving, we have to go to the Red Cross Hospital.' And when I finally got there I found everyone already gathered. They had reached my sister too, called her back from work. My mother was in a coma.
They put her in a ward, and when she opened her eyes she couldn't speak to us. She had soiled herself, she was soaked, she was in a terrible state. A woman in the next bed — whose husband was there with a stroke of his own — gave us a diaper to change her. I brought a nightgown from my own house and changed my mother. The next day my brother Nikolas, who had private insurance and the rights that came with it, made arrangements and had her transferred to a room with just two beds. Because at first she was in a ward with ten other people — it was a dreadful situation.
Fifteen to twenty days passed. Many days, more than they should have. After all that time the director called me to his office and said: 'We can no longer keep her here. We have done everything we can. Her condition now may persist indefinitely. Your mother may go quickly from another stroke, or she may remain like this for years. You must take her — we can't hold the bed any longer. There is nothing more we can offer beyond what we have already done.'
We took her and transferred her to a clinic here in Makrigianni. It wasn't a nursing home — it was a regular clinic that performed surgeries. It kept her for six months in that condition. Kyrios Sotiris, my husband's friend, was a great help throughout because he was a director in a central branch of the national insurance fund and had considerable influence.
My mother never fully recovered. She was no longer in a coma — she had opened her eyes and was eating — but she didn't speak, and we didn't know whether she understood us or recognized us. But she would look at us. We fed her, though by then she was paralyzed on one side, both arm and leg. The clinic kept her for six months and could hold her no longer. So Kyrios Sotiris made further arrangements and found another clinic in Kallithea. She stayed there for another nine months, but her condition kept deteriorating. In the end, she went. Peacefully.
One morning my sister fed her — everything was fine, she drank her milk. She looked at us but couldn't speak, couldn't say 'I need something.' I was at my daughter's place again, I don't remember why. My mother died in my sister's arms. My sister had been about to leave the clinic — after her it was my sister-in-law's turn to come, and after that mine. I wouldn't have gone home at all; I would have gone straight from my daughter's to the clinic, and whoever was there would have left. At some point, as my mother was looking into my sister's eyes, she seemed to make a movement of letting go — a rattle, a sigh. Her eyes fell closed and she was still.
The doctors came, the nurses came, and they said: 'There is nothing we can do.' They confirmed that she had gone. My daughter's baby was two years old then, so grandma Maria had seen great-grandchildren — more than one, in fact. I remember that I used to bring my older grandson Telemachos to visit her back when she was still living with Uncle Stefanos. I would take him to see them and both of them were overjoyed.
— But grandma, you've told me another piece of your life that was a sort of parenthesis — we haven't been moving through the story in order. I still have so many things to ask you, I protested, sensing that with that last sentence she had tried to put down an epilogue.
— My life had its good moments and its bad ones. But during that period I suffered greatly because I couldn't be there for my mother. It was always one or the other — either my child or my mother.
I did promise I would go and see my friend Evanthitsa, who has been ill. Could you walk with me as far as her house, come in and say hello?
Alright, let's go, Kira — because the stories we tell never end. I've told you a great deal about myself today, but now it's your turn to tell me yours.
THE END
