Life After Life

I wish my grandmother would die.

This doesn’t come from a place of contempt or ridicule, but instead a place of love. 

A place where I watch her struggle every day, as I have cared for her over the last three years, and try to be brave for the both of us. It’s hard though. All I do lately is catalogue my life in instances of her, trying to understand my complex feelings for the Greek goddess who raised me.

We have our struggles and she is my grandmother, two things can be true. Same blood, same stubbornness. There are memories with Yiayia that penetrate so deep into my soul they’re basically imprinted in my DNA.

Like the one Orthodox Easter before we went to midnight mass. My family and I gathered around a table covered in enough food for a small village, discussing the week’s events. Small talk, big talk, any sort of talk really. The kind of talk where everyone invades your privacy. You can’t hide who you truly are from those with the same blood that runs through your veins; a mirror image of genetic information spiralling to form a double helix, and oftentimes double your misery.

I mean, we all have our secrets. Mine just happen to be a pair of rainbow sequin booty shorts hanging in the closet. Family knows the very essence of you, sometimes better than you know yourself, and most of my family knows who I am; I think they knew even before I did. To be fair I did dress up as the female Power Ranger for my birthday one time.

Which is why I was surprised when my mother asked in tears if I’m gay because I ‘like cock’ when I came out to her at 18.

No Mum, it’s because I love cashmere sweaters and dirty martinis. 

Of course it’s because I like cock! 

While the ouzo flowed and the appetisers were devoured by a starved dynasty who had been fasting for a week—as Jesus recommended so long ago—I decided to go and sit on my grandmother’s lap as “good grandsons do.” I placed my very gay bottom on her and was met with a smothering of kisses; something I have been experiencing since childhood. After finally coming up for air from our embrace I found myself staring into her tortured eyes. My grandmother is not someone to kill you with a look. If she wanted, you would be six feet under before the spanakopita was out the oven.

This was something else. Pain? Discomfort? 

What did she want to say? She already knew everyone’s business, all yiayia’s do.

It wasn’t curiosity though. This time it cut deeper. 

‘Why couldn’t you be a girl like I asked for, instead of something like this?’

Didn’t see that one coming. Was this how Jesus felt after being betrayed? Was this what crucifixion felt like? The inevitable consequence of being yourself in a world full of people who don’t understand you?

I didn’t realise how sharp the edges of those words were. How extensively they would cut, well and truly into my thirties. I love Yiayia, I really do. But she always takes the tough love approach.

Like the time I was playing make-believe as a child in the front yard at her house. Hidden under my grandmother’s shrub lay a baby possum, frightened in the daylight and wide awake. If I knew then what would happen next, I wouldn’t have fetched Yiayia to show her. She came, she saw, she told me to wait with the possum.

The funny thing about memory is that it’s often unreliable—sometimes you don’t remember what really happened, only what you thought happened.

This, though, I could never forget.

After talking to the possum and telling it about the magical creatures I was fighting, my Yiayia returned with a broom. I thought, perhaps, she had brought the broom to join my game as a witch? But I soon found out she wasn’t there to fly. She turned the broom around and pointed the handle toward the possum. Before I could register what was happening, my grandmother began to hit the baby possum with the broom.

Not just once or twice to make it run away. No, no, no. Old Greeks don’t do half a job. She whacked the possum until it was barely alive.

She finally dragged the baby possum by the tail to the other side of the house where she placed the creature at the foot of the driveway. Next thing I knew, she was holding an axe, had chopped the possum's head off, wrapped it in a plastic bag and chucked it into the bin like yesterday’s rubbish.

Done. Finito. Gone. I was traumatised.

What would you have done in this situation? What would you have done if your grandmother casually placed the hose in your hand and showed you how to wash away the blood down the drain to hide the evidence? If you had known the baby possum didn’t stand a chance against your yiayia? If you saw yourself in the baby possum?

I learnt a lot that day.

There’s a point in your life, when you reach a certain age, that you start to notice the behaviours of the adults in your family. You put together the pieces of your lineage; and eventually discover that while you love these people, most of them are batshit crazy.

You start to realise that your uncle is a hopeless romantic who’s on wife number three, and always seems to be drunk at family functions.

Scotch on the rocks. Short. Sharp. Bitter. Just like his failed marriages.

You start to notice that your aunt can’t help but talk about herself all the time, and after a while of sitting through her monologues, you ultimately understand she is talking to herself. 

Trying to convince a part of herself that despite getting divorced at 21 everything worked out the way she wanted it to, when in fact, it didn’t.

You start to block out your uncle’s rant about the latest conspiracy theory he’s found on the internet, and how ‘we’re all doomed and should prepare for the rapture.’ One thing I’m sure of is having a shotgun under the bed is not a healthy way to process your fears, even though I will concede it is cheaper than therapy.

Growing up does this to you, the unexpected reality check. Family is just there to knock you down or lift you up, depending on their mood, and that’s usually determined by whether we’re having baklava for dessert.

But, when my grandfather passed away at the end of what seemed like the worst year of my life, I was lost and it felt like I was never coming back. I couldn’t comprehend how much I was going through. My athletic career as a cheerleader was over because of a knee reconstruction, and the thought of living on without trusting my body was painful and unbearable. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep because my dreams kept dwelling on it all.

Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something.

Maybe I wasn’t ready to move on to the next cycle of me?

No, that’s not it. I was ready—or willing to try— to move on from that dark place I had dug myself into. The honest truth is, I just didn’t know how to get out.

God, apparently, did.

Every Saturday we would journey to the Springvale Botanical Gardens Cemetery—full of vibrant colours, especially in autumn when it looks like the trees are on fire—and go visit Pappou. The place is like Eden, if Adam and Eve threw a rager before they got their asses thrown out, floral and overgrown and intense.

Every time we went, Yiayia would have me wash Pappou’s tombstone with soapy water, but only after I had dusted the cobwebs away with the handheld brush—that I could have sworn was used to smack me with when I was trampling the flowers in her garden as a kid. When everything was sparkling clean and my grandfather’s portrait felt lifelike, we would light a lamp and do a cleansing ceremony with charcoal and livani—a sort of dried-up frankincense and rose incense that, “represents the prayers of the faithful rising to Heaven.”

I always wondered who was in Heaven listening when I was praying for Pappou to live while he was shriveling up in hospital? Who was listening when I was laying on a stretcher after my last cheerleading performance because I knew I had just ripped my knee in half? Who was listening when the tears were running down my face after walking up to the open casket where I touched my grandfather’s cold face and gave him one last final kiss?

That’s the thing about faith, you can’t see it. You can’t touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it. Yet, you have it. Without it, the other side is fear, and that just seems like more of a shitshow than continuing to believe what I’ve been taught my whole life.

So, I prayed. And I whispered promises to the ether. Hoping someone on the other side would listen, even if it is only once—even if it is only the smallest prayer, coming from someone questioning their faith.

After the cleansing ceremony I would carry a lighted candle down the aisle to my grandfather’s sister-in-law’s plot. Together alive, together in death. It seems like family really is forever if you have the money and there’s enough vacancy. The hardest part about leaving the cemetery was waiting for my grandma to finish crying. Sometimes it took a couple of minutes. Once it took two hours.

She has never been good at adapting, that much I’ve figured out. She didn’t learn English when she came here to Australia; she refuses to accept that there are other human beings on this planet aside from Greeks. She most definitely wouldn’t understand that her beloved grandson, who has been looking after her for three years after Pappou’s passing, is more than just a pair of sequin booty shorts—he’s also the matching rhinestone thong.

Jokes aside, she’s a tough one, always has been. Pappou on the other hand was passive, sweet and humble. I guess that’s why after gathering up Yiayia and helping her back to the car, I returned to Pappou’s plot to pick up the bag of cleaning products and paused. I looked directly at his picture and sighed with relief, well now you know.

In the three years of adventures I had with Yiayia, we became best friends. I would laugh while helping her get in and out of my car as she swore at me profusely for having a tall car, her stumpy legs not making the climb any easier. I would smile from ear to ear while she stood in line at the pharmacy, pretending her walking stick was giving way so they would hurry with her script. I would giggle under my breath because the two-dollar store had the wrong candles, so she would throw horrible words to the storeowner in her native tongue.

It wasn’t all just fun and games, though. There were moments over the past three years that broke my heart and left me sitting in my car, sobbing for a grandfather I couldn’t talk to anymore, and a grandmother who was dying from a broken heart and a list of medical issues that always seemed to be getting longer.

If I told Yiayia I was gay, it would probably end all of this misery for the both of us.

I’d feel lighter, and she’d have a heart attack. She would finally be with Pappou.

I’ve always wondered what Pappou would say if he were alive. Would he be okay with my “gayness”? Would he even understand what “homo” meant? I know the Greeks basically invented anal, but somewhere along the line Christianity took over most of the world and everything changed—sexual modesty and all. One has to ask then if gay even existed in a small northern Greek village after the war, where all they had were crops of corn and a misogynistic upbringing of Orthodox values.

Life is fleeting when you don’t want it to be, and enduring when all you want to do is end the pain. Over the past three years I’ve observed Yiayia go from heartbreak, to hospital, to rehab, and finally, to a retirement village with dementia.

Lucky bitch, she doesn’t have to remember it all. Or maybe she does, in a different way. Not through the rational brain, but in a subconscious way that everyone experiences when they get close to the end.

Life after life.

That’s what’s happening to her right now.

That’s what’s happening to me right now.

We’re both living in another world where I have to book appointments to go visit her.

A world where she sometimes forgets who I am. It’s tough, I’m not going to lie. It feels impersonal. Thinking about it too much hurts, and so I try to just go with the flow, experiencing a different cycle of life that I’m unprepared for, and was not expecting.

Over the dinner table my parents and I would laugh and say that since being in the retirement village she’s gotten a second wind. That beneath the pain and medication she’s taking to numb what lingers beneath the surface, she’s experiencing a whole new life with people just like her. It’s nice knowing that she’s not alone in this second life.

My grandma, heart of an ox, soul of warrior, and queen to my kingdom. 

I fear her, I love her.

I used to feel so much resentment towards her for not understanding who I am, but I understand that she’s from a different age—a different life that was not meant for me.

In just three years, one can heal childhood trauma through circumstance and routine. In just three years, one can reconnect the family bond that you once thought was well and truly broken. In just three years, your life could end and begin anew.

As much as I wish she would die, I guess I wish Yiayia would live. 

Slow. Spirited. Free. For me.