Still here
I was a child of celebrations.
For my mother, all celebratory instinct resided somewhere between food and sparkle, between a can of spray paint and sticks of butter stacked in the fridge. In the early autumn, she would gather acorns and chestnuts from the forest floor so she could paint them gold as part of our Christmas decorations later in the year. The Christmas baking began in early December and involved vigorous lying to the perpetually weight-conscious aunts about how much butter each recipe contained. "It is a diet melomakarono," I heard her declare with brazen certainty one year, as honey dripped from my aunt's full mouth.
In anticipation of Easter, my mother would pick up twigs and make nests, into which she would carefully place the hard-boiled eggs we dyed red during Holy Week. A single week in March held her birthday, my father's birthday, and their wedding anniversary, providing three occasions for outsized cooking, pulling the extended family and neighbours around the table, and having an argument about whether the house was clean enough to host. (It always was, but the argument was as reliable a feature of our calendar of celebrations as the resurrection of Jesus is for those who believe in it).
Celebration cannot be forced. It must be nurtured and inspired. My mother's nurturing of celebration had a sharp edge to it, making little room for non-believers. Though ours was not a religious household, it was one that demanded a kind of devotion to ritual. My mother did not care if I prayed or believed in the Greek Orthodox story of the Immaculate Conception or in the miracle of Easter. She cared very much, however, about my being a participant, not an observer, in the rites of honouring life and relation.
All ritual requires an enthusiast, a person who will insist on remaining the keeper of time. Various members of the family grumbled about my mother's tyrannical commitment to celebration, nursing decoration-triggered minor injuries or harbouring whispered opinions about what is 'tasteful.' When it came down to it, however, we showed up. We sang, we ate, we praised the cleanliness, we told my mother she had outdone herself. We declared this year's roast potatoes to be exquisite and this balcony display of pelargoniums to be better than last year's–maybe the best one ever, even. We did it again and again, with a different cast of characters around the table, until I became the only one who remained.
After my mother's death, I returned to my childhood home in Thessaloniki to confront the objects that outlived her. My mother's relationship to time was a material one. She kept a daily calendar by her bedside. No bigger than the size of a thumb, the paper calendar was the kind that required tearing off each page at the end of the day to reveal tomorrow's date. Each torn piece of paper had the names of saints written on the back, indicating it was a day of celebration for the people named after them. September 17 was my favourite, the day honouring Sophia, Pisti, Elpida, and Agape, celebrating women named after Wisdom, Faith, Hope, and Love. On the day I arrived in Thessaloniki, the bedside calendar was a stopped clock, marking my mother's last day of consciousness.
In the years since my father died, and in the years I had lived away from Greece, my childhood home became my mother's home. We have a word for this in Greek: το πατρικό μου, my parental home, with language supplying the emotional register for marking shifting senses of belonging. In a precise literal translation, 'patriko' shares a root with 'patriarchy.' The father is at the root, but in the wake of my father's death, the home became a maternal one.
As I began the process of sorting and clearing that home, I found forty-one weekly planners stashed in what had once been my bookcase. Many of those planners corresponded to a period of my mother's life before my birth. The pages were saturated with loss. In her barely legible handwriting, she recorded who died, not just on the occasion of the death, but on every annual memorial of it too. Other milestones entered this register, both chosen endings and unwitting losses: Several terminations of pregnancies, a repossessed car due to the non-repayment of a loan, each of my father's divorce anniversaries.
These were not private diaries; in fact, I remember my mother regularly announcing milestones of loss at the breakfast table, just like the radio announced it was the day to celebrate Wisdom, Hope, Faith, and Love. "In three weeks tomorrow," she would say, "it will be six years since your aunt Mina fell down the stairs and bled into her brain." I do not know what that kind of time-keeping and its performance at the table did for my mother. In her own telling, she was the daughter of refugees. She was raised in a recurrent script of catastrophe, in a generational tradition of needing to repeat your histories of loss, lest somebody erase or deny them–or, worst of all, lest you yourself choose to forget them.
In school, teachers expected us to know the precise dates that marked the Ottoman occupation of Greece, the several wars of Greek independence, the different architectural styles associated with friezes on the Acropolis. That knowledge and its performance signalled belonging–to a nation, a lineage of stories, a script of myth-making. In my family, too, knowing how to recognise and perform the script of losses was a marker of belonging. "Fifteen years ago today...," my mother would begin, "...your brother left the house and never returned," my father would complete the sentence. His memory indexed not only an act of witnessing, of seeing my mother's still-present pain, but also a knowledge of which parts of the family chorus were his to sing.
My mother's weekly planners were not sites for recording feelings. In her intimate archive, there was no 'I,' no subjective self. For the saddest of events, there were no verbs either, just compound nouns linking her loved ones to their ailments by a hyphen: "Christos-divorce," "Mina-stroke," "Nella-chemo," "Sakis-13 years dead." In its scarcity, money also became a way of measuring and documenting time. There is no record for April 18th, 1993, other than what my mother paid for a coffin.
I make few appearances in this archive. The ones I do mostly predate my naming. "Baby-amniocentesis," my mother wrote during her pregnancy, aged 41. There are no recorded outcomes, no reactions to events. There are just the events themselves, and the reader can just about decipher the consequences from whether characters make another appearance a few weeks down the line. On the week I was admitted to university in the United States, I make my fifth appearance in my mother's diary since my birth. "Roxani scholarship," she wrote. No punctuation.
My mother's intimate archive echoes with silences. Did she not record the joys because she trusted herself to remember them, because they floated closer to the skin in ways that rendered them unforgettable? Did becoming a mother rupture time for her, or just the recording of its passage? I know that these are my questions and not hers. I know that my memory of her as insisting on celebration is as fleshy as her registers of catastrophe. I know, too, that her attachment to gold spray paint and her accretive records of loss stem from the same place. It is the same grief and the same love that nurture them.
The weight of some legacies is unwieldy. It is not entirely clear what a daughter is meant to do with her mother's intimate archive. On my second week of clearing my mother's home, in the middle of a heat wave, I am drowning in stuff and memory alike. I realise it is not possible to clear and to remember at once. These are activities that pull the self in different directions, that structure different relationships to time. If I am to return to my own home and to the present, memory will have to wait. I stash the weekly planners, all forty-one of them, into a box heading to Scotland. I manoeuvre them around bubble-wrapped platters, the same platters that once held the 'diet melomakarona' and the roast potatoes that were always better than the ones the year before.
The platters, strictly speaking, are not to my taste. I do not host gatherings of the magnitude of my mother's celebrations, but I insisted on bringing them with me nonetheless. Some inherited objects are records of selves in time, containing the past, and some are aspirational, gesturing towards the future. Both the sender's and the receiver's addresses on that box are my homes, even if the sender and the receiver feel like different selves.
I am an unlikely custodian of my mother's platters and diaries. For most of the year, the platters live at the back of a shelf that also contains spare dishwasher parts, while the diaries sit in a suitcase under the guest bed. What I have most recognisably inherited from my mother is a relationship to marking time.
Two years ago today, a couple of weeks after I returned to Scotland from clearing my mother's home in Greece, I was admitted to the acute care unit of the hospital with sepsis, the cause of which was yet unknown. I returned home three weeks later, with my life radically changed.
"Roxani-hospital" is the kind of event my mother would have recorded. The lasting legacies of illness have been less event-based than my mother's archival practices. They are more porous, lived not in the documented rupture, but in the ongoingness of a blinking cursor: still ill, still ill, still ill.
For weeks, I had known–in that italicised way of knowing in one's body–that something was wrong. I knew, too, that grief lodges in the body, and I willed whatever it was that indecipherably ailed me to be 'just' grief. Grief, I knew how to carry. With the earned arrogance of the serially bereaved, I trusted grief not to kill me.
I knew, too, that I would remember the day of my hospital admission without ever writing it down. August 14th is the day before one of the holiest milestones in the Greek Orthodox calendar, Δεκαπενταύγουστος. On Δεκαπενταύγουστος, believers honour the death of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Many Greeks feel an attachment to Mary, even if they are more likely to observe this day on a beach, rather than in a church. Having lived outside of Greece for years, I still recognise these milestones in the calendar. These are legacies that require no continued observation for remembrance; they are inscribed in an internal clock that ticks regardless of where I call home.
What I did not know is that, once my mother could no longer hold her own lines in the chorus of keeping time, I would step in for her. A few weeks ago, walking in the intertidal zone of my favourite beach in St Andrews, feet carefully side-stepping stranded jellyfish, I found myself telling a friend that this illness anniversary was coming up. "In two weeks, it will be two years since..." I began, immediately transporting myself from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.
The line that connects the seas and the selves is dotted, not solid. Legacies are their own kind of alive, and if we are to treat them as living, we are called to breathe new meaning into them. I notice time, and the ways that illness has shuffled my sense of it, disorienting my grasp of what is over and what persists. But I notice, hold on to, and record the persistence of life too. I insist on celebration, on the chaos of disentangling the spare dishwasher parts from the top shelf, so I can bring out the platters, and fill them with aubergine and feta and crackling grilled tomatoes that bear a kinship to my childhood primarily through memory, not through taste. My roast potatoes are not half as good as my mother's, but I am not looking for praise or for a sense of having outdone myself. I am looking to fill the table with people who are glad to be alive. Illness has not made me wiser, or more patient, or kinder. It has, however, made me insist on life.
As a child, I disliked my mother's litany of remembrance. I did not want to live in the archive of pain; I wanted us to be there together, at the breakfast table, with the bowl of yogurt and honey, the radio, with the saints and their name days. My mother, meanwhile, was saying, in her own way, that we were still here, still here, still here.