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Ejo #147 – Memories

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My Mum died three years ago.  Saying it out loud anchors that awful event in time, crystallising exactly how long ago it happened.  About a year afterwards, a certain pesky virus barge-assed its way onto the world stage, rudely grabbing time by the balls, warping and skewing it, and rendering us all collectively stranded in temporal limbo.  Multiple lockdowns, bans on travel, social restrictions and endless zoom meetings all served to smudge the days together, leaving us few memory milestones with which to mark time.  My Mum’s death is a pretty major milestone.  And yet, because of the pandemic, I find it difficult to reconcile the time that has passed since she died with everything that has occurred since. 

I have written enough about my Mum for you to know how immeasurable an impact her death has had on me.  Every single day.  You know some of her recipes for traditional Greek foods like tzatziki, stuffed tomatoes, my favourite meatballs with white sauce and chicken in red sauce.  You know about the book she wrote, filled with herbal remedies for all sorts of common ailments and my promise to translate and publish it in English.  You know all about her difficult childhood, her deep love for her husband, and her attachment to our family home.  You know a little bit about what I went through when my mother died, and the grief I have experienced since. 

But there are so many stories about my Mum that you don’t know.  Stories of little nothings, stories of things that left a mark.  Funny stories, sad stories, weird stories.  When someone you love dies, your relationship stops being dynamic.  No new memories are created with them, and what you’re left with is just a series of static snapshots from the past.  And it’s all too easy to fall into a pattern of remembering the same curated catalogue of memories, which can then actually become your entire memory of them.  I don’t want that to happen with my Mum.  I want to remember as much real detail about her as I can.  And so I’m reaching into the past, beyond the inadequate narrative that has already started forming.  I’m reaching back into the history I shared with my family, into the day to day stories that may have felt inconsequential at the time, but which have become precious pearls to be salvaged from the past.  Stories that would otherwise be in danger of fading from memory.  And I would like to share a few of them here, for posterity.  So that a fuller, and more colourful and textured version of my Mum can live on in the world.  Even after I’m gone.  These aren’t necessarily true versions of events that happened, but rather just my personal, fallible memories.  And like I said, they’re only snapshots, marred by time.  But these memories are my truth.  And they are all that I have left. 

So, this is some of what remains.

The time I dropped my bag in the middle of a busy K-mart, frozen as I watched what somehow seemed like a million tampons slowly spill out and dramatically roll across the department store floor in every direction.  Wishing for the ground to open up and swallow me.  Hoping, beyond hope, that no-one had seen it.  Which is exactly the point at which my Mum started bellowing with laughter, bringing everyone’s attention to the errant tampons, pointing at each one as I awkwardly ran around trying to collect them all.  Why Mum, why??

Or the time I fucked around with a faulty bedside lamp when I was six years old and copped a mild electric shock which threw me to the floor.  Mum ran in, naked from the shower, yelling at me, while also lovingly sweeping me up in her arms to give me a comforting cuddle.  And the time I was seven years old and decided to visit the lovely old lady over the fence, kind of forgetting to tell anyone, precipitating a missing persons call to the police and a neighbourhood search party.  While Mum was frantic with worry, I was learning how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the piano, leafing through old encyclopaedias and chatting with “Granny” over tea and biscuits.  When a policeman eventually reunited me with Mum she enveloped me in a tight embrace, tears cascading down her face.  She squeezed me so hard, and then flipped me around and smacked me just as hard on my bewildered, embarrassed butt.  I didn’t know what the hell was going on.  But I felt the love. 

Granny’s house was just over this fence.

Burning up with a fever of 41º when I was eight years old, I remember my Mum on the phone to the doctor, carefully writing down his instructions to fill the bathtub with cold water and ice-cubes, and to plunge me into the tub every 20 minutes until my temperature dropped.  We both cried as she talked me through it, her hand gently on my chest to keep me calm in my delirium. 

Mum rebelliously sneaking a McDonald’s cheeseburger into the hospital when I was recovering from ear surgery when I was fifteen.  I greedily scarfed the burger, basking in the glow of our conspiratorial secret.  And then I threw up, everywhere.  The nurses were not impressed with me, or Mum. 

One night when I was a baby and Mum was heavily pregnant with my sister Mary, she heard a noise in the backyard and called the police.  Dad was on the road, trucking interstate and she was always so anxious and scared when he was gone.  When the cops arrived, they took one look at the bear trap she’d set up outside the back door (oh yes, I did say bear trap), turned to her incredulously and said, “Uhhh no, lady!  Nooooo!!” adding that she’d be the one in trouble if a burglar was injured by the trap.  She didn’t quite understand what the problem was, but she promised she wouldn’t use it again.

I’ll never forget the feeling of drama and excitement the day Mum won $1000 on a scratchie ticket.  She made a grand entrance through the front door of our Elwood flat with an enormous smile on her face and four brand new, big, puffy doonas stuffed under her arms.  Being relatively poor at the time, a feather duvet was the epitome of posh luxury.  As a ten year old, I remember thinking, wow, so this is what it feels like to be rich!

Celebrations!

When I was transferred to the country town of Albury/Wodonga for work a few months after my Dad died, Mum decided to come with me for the first couple of weeks to keep me company and help me settle in.  We developed a routine, including daily walks along the Murray river where she taught me which wild grasses were edible, and which ones to avoid.  We’d cut them out of the ground with my crappy Swiss army knife, and carry them home in a plastic shopping bag to cook and eat them together, savouring the quiet comfort of each other’s company.  We didn’t have to say the words but we were both desperately missing my father.    

My Mum was the most accommodating person I’ve ever known.  But she developed a dramatic flair for stubbornness in her later years.  On our way home from that trip to Wodonga, tension started running a little high.  After nearly three hours on the road, we’d just reached outer Melbourne in peak hour traffic and it was pissing down with rain.  We got into a “disagreement” about the cause of my father’s lung cancer.  Red flag territory.  We were waiting for a traffic light to turn green, and I demanded that she admit that Dad’s history of smoking had to have contributed to his illness.  She obstinately refused, citing his work with asbestos and other toxic chemicals as the main cause.  Tempers flared and I insisted, declaring that I wasn’t going to continue driving until she admitted she was wrong.  Obnoxiously, I pulled on the handbrake and turned the engine off for emphasis.  We were parked, baby.  At a busy highway intersection.  In rush hour.  In the rain.  I knew she would be uncomfortable with this, but, unexpectedly, my mother wouldn’t budge.  The light turned green and the cars behind me started going crazy, honking and beeping.  My windshield wipers were no competition for the rain bucketing down in sheets, and the windows were fogging up from all the hot air in the car.  I desperately wanted to prove my point but I was also starting to freak out.  This wasn’t the way I had expected my little stunt to go.  Cars started driving around us as we continued shouting at each other.  Me shouting at her to please, please, please just admit it so that we could go.  Beseeching her.  And her shouting at me that she would do no such thing.  Stoic.  Defiant.  She parked herself in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and a stony look in her eye that I’d never seen before.  In the end I caved, releasing the handbrake and turning the car back on in defeat, inching forward towards the traffic lights that had cycled back to red.  We sat in heavy silence for a minute, and then looked at each other and burst into laughter, falling into each other’s arms.  Discovering this stubborn streak in my mother shocked, and (I’m not gonna lie) impressed, the hell out of me. 

As you might be able to tell, I didn’t always have an easy relationship with my mother, and that was especially true during my adolescence.  Between the ages of 15 to 23, I was an insufferable asshole to every single person in my family.  When I was 18, Mum spent three months in Greece after her father died.  I remember the day she came back.  Mary and Pieta were jumping up and down with joy when Mum walked in the door, while I hung back, wearing “trendy” new clothes, heavy eyeliner and a big, fat attitude on my face.  Too cool for fucking school.  I know that my icy reception must have hurt her, but at the time I didn’t give a shit.  Memories like this bring me a great deal of pain, but they still deserve to be remembered, just as much as the good memories do, because they are part of the deep and complex relationship I had with my mother. 

I remember Mum’s beautiful singing voice.  When she was young, she harboured a secret desire to be a professional singer, and she worshipped the popular Greek musician Marinella, closely following her career for decades.  Whenever my Mum broke out in song, she would get a faraway look in her eyes. I don’t know where she went, but she owned the world when she sang.  To my untrained ear, my Mum sounded just like her idol and now, whenever I listen to her favourite Marinella tracks, I get shivers.  All I can hear is my mother’s voice. 

A stunning head shot.
This magical song from the late seventies was one of my Mum’s favourite Marinella tunes, and we grew up listening to it. I know every single word, and hearing it now fills me with such joy and such heartbreak at the same time. Watching the video, I am struck by how similar my Mum’s fashion style was to Marinella’s. Also, that they both had asspiles of sass!!
And they say never meet your heroes. What a load of bullshit. Look at the joy on my Mum’s face when she met her idol Marinella.

Spending time in the garden with Mum during our more recent visits back home, I was pleasantly surprised to see how popular she was in the neighbourhood.  All day long, people would drop by, or stop to have a chat.  I had been concerned (from afar) that she was becoming too reclusive, so it helped me to worry less about her, knowing that she had a strong network of friends to keep her from getting too lonely.  When Mary, Pieta and I were living at the house after Mum died, we had to tell the postman that Mum had passed away. The man handed us our packages and cried on the doorstep.

There are many memories of Mum intently leafing through the pages of a book of dreams when I was 9, 13, 17, 31 explaining to me that the snake I’d dreamt about represented something to be wary of, perhaps a person who didn’t have my best intentions in mind.  Or telling Pieta that her dream of losing a tooth meant that she needed to be careful about losing something important in her life.  I never really believed in these things, but I did enjoy being entertained by the mystical spirituality of it all.  And I respected my Mum’s belief and conviction in the symbolism.  She was also passionately interested in fortune telling, numerology and astrology.  Perhaps because she wanted to believe that life could be influenced by things greater than us.  That there was a chance that things could always get better, despite the odds.

The infamous and shocking morning that Judy, a family friend staying at our holiday house, brushed her teeth and notoriously spat it out in the kitchen sink, casual as you’d like.  Mum nearly fell on the floor, absolutely apoplectic in disgust and horror.  The incident became folklore in our family and we talked about Judy’s unforgiveable crime for years, long after we lost touch with her. 

I have so many memories of my Mum’s vivacious smile from every time David and I arrived at her house in a taxi from the airport, suitcases in tow.  The excitement and joy in her heart so easily expressed in her big, beautiful smile is forever etched in my memory and in my heart.  Twelve times in eleven years I saw that look on her face.  The flip side was how sad and deflated she would become on the day we had to leave Melbourne to return to Dubai.  We’d be watching TV, waiting for our ride to the airport and I’d glance over and see Mum looking at me, quietly soaking me in, with her doleful brown eyes.  Clutching onto her unspoken wishes that we could just stay, forever.  I’d go and sit next to her, holding her in my arms, squeezing her hand tightly, my heart burdened with sadness and guilt.  It never got any easier. 

Timeless.

I’ll never forget the messages that Mum and I exchanged the day before she died.  I was burning the candle at both ends in Tbilisi and WhatsApped her to conceitedly complain that I was suffering from a migraine headache.  She was worried about me.  Even though she was in a great deal of pain, her primary concern was the wellbeing of her daughter.  I remember that so clearly.  And I also remember her telling me about the change in Melbourne weather.  She told me that she was cold.  And a few hours later she was dead. 

In the months after my Mum’s death, crushed by the weight of my grief, I struggled to remember our last day together, or the final time we said goodbye.  Can you even imagine?  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen my mother alive.  All the farewells we’d shared over the years melded into a blurry melancholic montage, and I couldn’t pinpoint that one single very important moment.  Over the last three years I believe I’ve accurately recreated it with the help of David and my sisters, and the messages that were sent on the family WhatsApp group that day.  But I’m still not really sure.  That’s the problem with death, and it’s the problem with goodbyes.  Every single time you say goodbye, could be the last time.  You never know which moment is going to turn from just another everyday interaction into one of the most important moments of your life. 

Goodbye, my Mum. 💔

Ejo #135 – Promises

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This one’s about my Mum.  As many of you know, her life as a girl in Greece was difficult.  At the age of four, she fell down a well and broke almost every bone in her body.  She was forced to work as a shepherdess from the age of eight and unceremoniously yanked out of school when she was 12.  She was beaten, berated and told that she’d been born only to provide an extra pair of hands, while at the same time castigated for being an extra mouth to feed.  Her parents never told her they loved her.  And when, at the tender age of 16, she resisted their attempt to sell her off to a man three times her age in an arranged marriage, she was shipped off to a country she’d barely even heard of, in order to work and send back her earnings. 

My Mum’s resilience was remarkable.  She may have been scarred by her formative years, but her ability to rise above her past was something I’ve always admired.  A wonderful example of her courage was when, at the age of 44, she enrolled to study a course in natural medicine at the local college.  The year was 1991 and, after years of dreaming about it, and talking about it, and thinking about it, she finally just did it.  She went to school and learned, academically, the healing properties of plants.  She overcame a lack of confidence in her English, a lack of formal education, overwhelming social anxiety and a damaged self-esteem in order to pursue her passion.  Like I said, remarkable. 

Nerd. ❤️

Being a self-absorbed, 19 year old asshole at the time, I can’t remember what gave her the courage to finally take the plunge.  I know that my Dad would have supported her unconditionally.  Had it been a new year’s resolution?  Had someone challenged her?  Did she just wake up one day and decide to do it?  I’ll never know.  Of course my Mum was an exemplary pupil, and I remember her spending hours studying every day (while I, in my misspent second year of university, wasted my hours drinking copious amounts of beer and playing cards in the university common room).   Mum graduated, and then spent the next several years continuing to study, continuing to learn, reading books, posting on forums, asking questions – always striving to know more about her craft.  Thirsty for more knowledge.  She grew her own plants, her own garden laboratory, and constantly experimented with them (OK, fine, sometimes on us kids).  She made tinctures and creams, oils and poultices.  She was always concocting something for someone, always drying herb cuttings, always fermenting, infusing, mixing, soaking, powdering.  Always. 

A few of my Mum’s thousands of handwritten labels. She literally had a remedy for everything, always within arm’s reach.

In 1999, my Mum took all the knowledge she’d acquired over the years and actually wrote a goddamn book, a compendium of plants and their uses.  Years of study and personal experience finally culminated in her life’s work.  My parents spent a shitload of money to self-publish thousands of copies of the book in Greek.  She actually wrote most of it in English, but because she felt her English wasn’t great she hired a translator to transcribe her notes to Greek.  I kind of wish she hadn’t done that.  Over the years she sold a few copies here, a few copies there.  But selling books on consignment is a real bitch, and it’s hard to make money in Australia from a niche book written in a minority language.  Not that getting rich was ever my Mum’s goal.  Her goal was to heal people.  To help them.  My Mum was driven.  Single minded. 

The title loosely translates as, “A Family Guide: Herbal Remedies”.

Perhaps that’s something I inherited from her.  Growing up, I was rather goal oriented.  I wasn’t necessarily great at achieving the goals, but boy did I like setting them.  I used to be quite the new year’s resolution queen.  I’ve come a long way since my very first attempt at new year’s resolutions, possibly inspired by my Mum but, let’s be honest, also possibly inspired by Dolly magazine.  I was a 16 year old maniac cultivating an elaborate and detailed sub-world inside the four walls of my bedroom.  Here, lifted straight out of my handwritten diaries, is a taster of the chaos and mayhem that emanated from my addled teenage brain that first day of 1987:

  1. Learn to dance and sing like Madonna
  2. Fill my wall with Madonna posters
  3. Meet five new, gorgeous guys
  4. Lose weight (still at it, 34 years later)
  5. Become a good photographer and create a portfolio of self-portraits.
  6. Get mostly As and some Bs in my half-year report
  7. Buy lots of cool, trendy clothes
  8. Enter, and win, the Dolly covergirl competition (I’m so embarrassed)
  9. Get some really good disco tapes
  10. Become the biggest flirt – watch out guys, here comes Chryss Stathopoulos!!!!  (I actually wrote these words in my diary, and I am now crying from shame)

OK, so I sucked.  Big time.  The only one of these I achieved was having a wall full of Madonna posters.  And even today, I still have no idea how to flirt.  Jump forward two years to January, 1989, and I’d somewhat figured this shit out: 

  1. Kiss at least one guy.
  2. Don’t eat any chips.

Definitely more attainable.  I easily ticked both of these off and got a taste for how good it felt to achieve annual goals (also: how good it felt to kiss boys).  In 1990, ten years before I’d even heard of Dr. Atkins, I gave up bread for the year.  Just because!  And yeah, I totally got off on people’s reactions when I told them about it.  I liked the incredulous attention.  Yes, I was a weirdo.  But I was doing me, and for an angsty teenager with low self-esteem, that actually felt really good.

The next year I went without chocolate for 12 whole months.  Sounds impossible, but it was pretty easy once I decided that it was going to be a “no matter what” situation.  I simply wouldn’t put chocolate in my mouth.  You don’t even realise how ubiquitous chocolate is until you decide to give it up.  That shit is socially difficult to say no to.  Especially at easter.  People are always like, c’mon just have a little bite.  But I resisted and it felt like a great achievement.  I learned the value of not always giving into your impulses.  And for a young teenage girl who’d regularly polish off a family sized block of Cadbury’s Snack chocolate in my bedroom whenever I felt sad, I reckon that’s pretty impressive.  For the next two decades, I alternated between not eating chocolate for a whole year, and not eating bread for a whole year.  It was just something I did for discipline.  To prove to myself that I could. 

I think the reason that I stopped, in the end, was age.  Just getting older, wiser.  You could say I became more mature.  Doing something for the sake of it held less appeal than when I’d been younger.  I gave myself free rein to eat chocolate and bread whenever I wanted, at around the same time that my friend Nicole introduced me to her version of new year’s resolutions.  Her unique selling point was that she’d set the same number of goals as the number of the year itself.  So in 2009, she had nine goals.  And in 2010, she had 10 goals.  I loved this concept and immediately started planning my 11 goals for 2011.  To me, a resolution veteran, this felt revolutionary.  It was a fresh new take and I was totally onboard.  I can’t remember all of my goals for that year, but I definitely remember one of them.  And it was to write an ejo a month.  As you can see, ten years later, this is a goal that I am very proud to still be fulfilling.  I can’t imagine not writing these ejos.  They have become part of who I am, in a far healthier way than being known as the girl who doesn’t eat chocolate. 

Some of my 15 for ‘15 goals included making my Mum a photo calendar of her and my Dad (which she loved) and taking a self-portrait every single day of the year (which was an incredibly rewarding challenge in terms of how I saw myself, and also with the improvement of my photography and editing skills).  I also set myself the goals of running in a 10km race (didn’t do it), doing yoga three times a month (didn’t do it), attending a writer’s group once a month (didn’t do it), studying a photography course (didn’t do it), having a massage once a month (I couldn’t even do this one) and losing 7kg (sound familiar? didn’t do it).

As you can see, my goals were becoming more difficult to achieve.  And I’d regressed back to the kind of bullshit nonsense I’d been mindlessly slapping together as a 16 years old.  Also, the fact that I wasn’t able to tick off so many of them was actually starting to tick me off.  And really, I was just finding it more and more difficult to think of so many goals as the years went on.  Eleven goals was no problem.  But coming up with 16 new goals for 2016 was tedious. It wasn’t fun anymore and I wasn’t really getting much out of it. So, when 2017 rolled around I simply decided to give it all up.  For the first time in 30 years, I was resolution and goal-free.  And it was so liberating.  Just “being” was a luxury.  Just living my life was a treat.  I somehow continued to achieve things that I wanted to do.  And I didn’t go crazy on bread or chocolate or ice-cream or chips.  I was just kind of a grown up about it all.  Ha, imagine that.  Me, adulting!

Since then, I haven’t really missed “doing” new year’s resolutions.  I live my life as best I can.  I do yoga every day, I try to eat well (shoutout carnivore), and I try to be a good person.  I meditate every day in the shower.  I give to charity.  I read a lot.  I have therapy.  I think about how my actions and words affect other people, and I strive to be the best version of myself on a daily basis.  Without pressure.  I no longer need the gimmick of a yearly goal in order to “improve” myself.  I just aim to do that in every moment.  I am proud of myself for that, and I know my Mum was proud of the woman I turned out to be. 

My beautiful Mum died two years ago today.  Nothing will bring her back, but I have thought of one way in which I can keep her spirit and memory alive.  I have decided (resolved?) to do something this year to honour her.  And, along with three other projects, I’ve set myself a target date of the end of this year.  I’m not calling them new year’s resolutions, because they’re not.  They’re just things I want to do. 

So, what are they?  OK, first up I want to learn the lyrics so I can sing along to the 1980 song “The New Rap Language” by Spoonie Gee and The Treacherous Three.  Yep, I am a 49 year old white woman.  Who gives a shit?  I love the idea of the mental and linguistic challenge of learning this eight minute, densely-worded rap.  Studies have shown that mental exercise, things like learning a new language or how to play a musical instrument, can stave off degenerative, neurological conditions.  So this is my fun way of fighting dementia.  Yay!

Next, I want to learn how to pick a lock.  I’m not talking about using a bobby pin to jimmy open a flimsy suitcase fastening.  No, no, I mean using a lockpick toolkit to open a serious padlock or door-lock, secret agent style.  I promise I’m not planning on using this skill for any nefarious reasons.  I just reckon it’d be a pretty fucking cool skill to have.  And, once again, learning a new skill, learning how to use my fingers in new, dexterous ways, creating new neural networks; it all has to be good for my brain, right?

My third goal of the year is to plan my funeral.  Nope, I’m not intending on dying any time soon, so don’t worry about that.  I’ve just been thinking about this one for a while.  Planning my Mum’s funeral brought my sisters and I together, giving us something to focus on other than our excruciating grief.  It was all-consuming and helped to fill our days.  But it was hard, man.  It was fucking hard.  You’re making big decisions at a time you’re barely capable of getting out of bed in the morning.  When I die, I don’t want David and my sisters to have to go through that.  Also, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of my parties, but bitches, I throw down an epic event!  I don’t mean to brag, but we’re talking about the kind of party people talk about for years afterwards.  People are still talking about the 7am cucumbers in the jacuzzi from the first house party David and I threw in 2011.  Living in Dubai has always been hard for me, because I haven’t made many friends.  So whenever we visit Melbourne, it’s become a tradition to throw a massive shindig, get everyone I love together and go a little crazy.  Drink, dance, carouse!  Over the years, I’ve honed my skills as a party planner and I’m pretty proud of some of the bashes we’ve thrown. 

There was the gorgeous garden party at Madame Brussels, the 80s party complete with awesome tunes, daggy fluoro outfits and plenty of jello shots.  There was the picnic in the park with bottles of rosé, yummy finger food and a crazy thunderstorm.  In 2016 we held a weekend-long, ten year anniversary party at a log cabin in the mountains, and most recently, we celebrated David’s 50th birthday with a wild Studio 54 party.  Yes, there was a white horse.  Yes, the police were called.  I guess what I’m saying is that I like planning the details, I like creating the invitations, making the music video teaser, getting my creative juices flowing.  And most of all, I love all my friends gathering in one place to celebrate an occasion.  So why wouldn’t I want to plan the biggest, best, and most amazing party of all to celebrate my own life.  I know exactly what music I want played, and I want to make the video.  I don’t need eulogies. I won’t be able to hear what you say anyway, coz I’ll be dead. Instead, I want to tell you, my friends, how I feel about you. And what you mean to me. I’m gonna turn the whole fucken funeral thing on its head.  I’m going to do it my way.  And you’re all invited.

And finally, my passion project.  The goal that has the most meaning to me this year.  I want to translate my Mum’s book into English.  I want her knowledge, her work, her sweat and tears and inspiration to reach a larger audience than it currently has.  Hundreds of copies of my Mum’s book are sitting in a storage facility in Glen Waverley, gathering dust.  That’s not what she intended, it’s not what she wanted.  And it’s not what I want.  Maria Stathopoulos, the author, deserves to be read.  She deserves to be recognised and lauded and celebrated for her work and for her small, but worthy, contribution to humanity.  She wanted everyone to have access to the world of natural medicine, the healing properties of plants and herbs.  She wanted everyone to share her joy and enthusiasm and love of the natural world.  Her own personal antidote to our industrially, and corporately, manipulated existences.  And I will help her to fulfill that desire.  I will honour her. 

I’ve already started working on it.  Last year I commissioned my talented artist friend Anka to illustrate the plants that my Mum had photographed for her book.  There were 36 in total so it was a huge undertaking.  Each illustration took her between two to five days to complete, working with archival inks on heavyweight cartridge paper.  The project happened over five months, from May until October 2020, a period during which Anka, who is London based and works in hospitality to support her art, was locked down and not earning an income.  The assignment gave her some breathing space, a small, regular income and the opportunity to focus on her work.  I am so grateful that my Mum’s book was able to facilitate that.  I love every single one of Anka’s illustrations, and I know my Mum would have too. 

Anka’s beautiful drawings of my Mum’s dandelion, echinacea, rosemary and horseradish root.

I also asked my sisters to check if we kept any of Mum’s records or notes that might help me to translate the book, and Pieta actually found a bunch of floppy disks labelled “Mum’s book”.  Perfect.  Except who the hell has a floppy disk reader?!  No-one.  Pieta had to buy a FDD to USB drive and then convert the text to word documents.  I’ve been practicing my Greek too, so that I can fine-tune the translation (because google translate can only do so much).  Last year I picked up a few Greek magazines and I’ve spent hours just reading the words, not even understanding most of what I’m reading, in an attempt to re-familiarise my brain with the language that is actually my mother tongue. Three of my goals this year are just silly promises to myself. The last one is a very serious promise to my Mum. It’s not easy. None of this is easy, but I’m driven. Single minded.

Ejo #123 – Anniversary

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One year ago today I was snuggled up in a very cosy bed, in a small hotel in the Sololaki neighbourhood of Tbilisi, Georgia, sleeping off a horrendous hangover after a night of cavorting. We had a 5pm flight back to Dubai that afternoon, and plans for a very lazy morning. I did hear my phone buzz a couple of times during the night, but definitely wasn’t in any hurry to check my messages. At around 8.30am I got up for a quick dash to the toilet and casually glanced at my phone as I lay back down in bed. There were a couple of messages from my sisters, but more alarmingly my youngest sister Pieta had tried to call me. I called her right back and asked her, “What’s going on, is everything OK?” trying to ignore the mounting, irritating sense of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. I can’t remember exactly how she started the sentence – something about Mum being prepared for emergency surgery. But the world stopped when I heard the words, “She didn’t make it”.

Sometimes, the brain knows and doesn’t know, at the same time. My brain heard what my sister said, but definitely didn’t want to compute what it meant. In a two second period, my brain tried to convince me that the surgery had been called off, for some reason. That my Mum didn’t make it to the operating theatre because… she’d been moved to another ward, the hospital had been evacuated, the doctors had rescheduled the surgery. Anything.  Any other translation.  On another level my brain grasped that my Mum was gone. And so, my adrenal glands shot adrenaline into my circulatory system; causing my pupils to dilate and my muscles to tighten to the point of shaking. Causing my heart to race and my breathing to became shallow. I sat up in bed, ramrod straight. I could suddenly see everything in the room in the sharpest of detail, all the colours brighter. I could actually hear a conversation outside our window, even though I couldn’t understand the words. I heard a motorcycle starting up. “What do you mean?” I asked Pieta. I can’t remember her response. In a state of fight or flight, I desperately reached for words. “Is Mum dead?” I needed to hear the word no. I can’t remember the response, but it wasn’t no. The response, whatever it was, was not one which my reptilian brain recognised. I asked Pieta again… “Is Mum dead?” There was a pause, and this time the answer was yes.  Our Mum had died.

I think this is the point at which I went into shock. I cannot remember the rest of the conversation. David reckons I said the word fuck, several times.  That seems about right.  I cannot remember saying goodbye to my sister. I know I didn’t cry, not right away. Not yet. I remember just being confused. My brain simply refusing to comprehend. I remember turning to David and saying, “I don’t understand” over and over again. I remember looking into his eyes and not even really recognising him. I remember curling into a ball in bed and holding onto my husband for dear life. And I remember wailing. I remember actually willing my body to go back to sleep, wishing for the blissful oblivion of sleep. And my body complying, shutting down.  Thank god.  I drifted in and out for a couple more hours. Wailing every time I gained consciousness, every time I woke up to the nightmare of remembering. And finally, the tears did come. Sobs that racked my whole body. And, “I don’t understand” on a loop. Over, and over again.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand.

We had to check-out of the guesthouse at midday, so I do remember having to get up and shower. Like a robot would shower. Knowing how to shampoo, when to rinse, programmed to scrub the right spots for the right amount of time (maybe a little longer than the right amount of time), eyes glazed. I remember having to pack, somehow I packed. I remember checking out, my eyes red and swollen from crying. Smiling when the lady asked if we’d enjoyed our stay. Knowing that she must have heard the cries of despair emanating from our room all morning. Not caring.

We left our bags at reception and wandered the grey, bleak streets of the city. For hours. I wasn’t hungry but I drank Georgian wine. A lot of it. I wanted to blot out the pain, but of course this was pain that couldn’t be blotted. David was wonderful, of course. He arranged time off work and booked us on the first available flights back to Melbourne. I remember being at Tbilisi airport, crying uncontrollably and not caring about all the people looking at me, with discomfort. I don’t remember the flight back to Dubai. I do know that I cried so much, my eyes swelled shut. I didn’t care.

This is grief. This is what the death of a loved one looks like. I bet if I asked my sisters for their account of the same day, it would be similarly full of details and blurs. I hate that it’s been a whole year since this day happened. I hate that the magnitude of it slips away, day by day.  I no longer cry myself to sleep (much), but I still feel the bewilderment and dissonance of the finality of my Mum’s death. I still don’t understand. A small part of me is used to not seeing my family for a year at a time, and that part of my mind is going to get a real fucking shock when it realises that this is it. There is no next time. She’s not there anymore. The house is sold. There are other people living in it. Walls have been knocked down. The world has continued to turn, without my Mum. An entire part of my life is gone. Forever. The world still turns.

This morning I sniffed a bottle of my Mum’s favourite perfume. Her signature scent, Lulu. It smells like her, but… not really. My Mum’s pink sweater still does smell like her, but, after a year, that scent is fading. As though everything about her is retreating further away. Is grief misplaced love? Love with nowhere to go? Maybe. It sometimes feels like that. A dead person is just a memory, a concept. Loving a real person is expansive, it’s infinite. Loving a dead person is an exercise in futility. I don’t believe that my Mum can still hear me or see me.  I don’t believe that she’s still around. I wish that I did. I’m sure that would bring me some comfort. What I do believe is that I hold all the love she ever gave me, I hold it all in my heart. And I hold it very, very close. It’s all I have left of her.  And that’s something that will never fade.

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My beautiful Mum.  I love you so much. I miss you more than anything.