04/05/2023 Thursday Compline/Απόδειπνον - My grandmother died this week.


I woke up to a text from my dad saying “call me when you get up” and I just immediately knew. She had been ailing in recent months and it was a matter of time. I cried a lot that morning. I still am crying pretty frequently. She meant so much to me I can’t even begin to say.

Some of my earliest memories take place at her house in the neighbourhood of Apostolos Andreas, Limassol, during the many summers I spent in Cyprus. That house - which started out as a single room, built by her and my grandfather, to which they added more and more over the years when they had the money - was my favourite place in the whole world. It still is. The kitchen, where I would play as a kid while she cooked. The living room, plastered with photos of relatives I’d never known, led out to the veranda where she took her coffee and gossiped with the neighbours. That was her favourite thing to do. Her house was like a community centre for the old people of the neighbourhood - at any given moment, there would be three or four old ladies sitting around drinking her coffee, gossiping, and leering judgmentally at passers by (old ladies are Cyprus’ version of CCTV).

When I was there with my brother and cousins, we spent most of our time in the garden. Her garden was a thing of beauty. Inside the front gate there was a patch of chard, which in Cypriot we call lachana, along with beans, taro, zucchinis, and various herbs, all staples of the diet of a Cypriot lady advanced in years and tender in gut. Around the side of the house we would play in the shade of the fruit trees - lemons, mandarines, and avocados oh my. Every house in Limassol has at least one citrus tree. In the winters, when the trees are full of fruit, I would always go and pick the ripe mandarines from my grandmother’s tree for a sweet treat after lunch or dinner. They were chock fucking full of pits, something my pampered West European-raised ass was not used to, but they were incredibly sweet. And every time it was time to come back home to Germany or France or wherever we were living at the time, we made sure to fill our suitcases with the lemons from her tree, which I still believe are plumper and more flavourful than any others I’ve had anywhere else.

The olfactory memories are nearly overwhelming. All the food she cooked, the cigarettes she never managed to convince us she’d quit, the jasmine tree that bloomed in August and drowned the veranda with its sweet odours - fragrant smoke from the censer of the Church of Gossip. As I got older, I got closer and closer to her. I was the only one of my cousins that showed any interest in the family history and the stories she had to tell. Truth be told, I was one of the only people who really listened to her - me, my dad, and one of his sisters. Everyone else basically tuned her out, which I was always furious about. When we were in Cyprus, my dad would go see her every day, sometimes twice, and while my brother and my mum opted to sit most of them out, I came along every single time. I wanted to spend time with her. She spoilt me! She fed me treats, mahalepi and baklava and kolokotes and bourekia and honey fritters, and chocolate and milopita and kataifi and coffee when I was definitely too young to have coffee. She told me about her youth, in the village, about her brother’s gambling problem, about Cypriot history, about her time in Canada, about my grandfather, whom I never met. Anything she could think of. Of my cousins, I have the best knowledge of the family history, thanks to her and her alone. I became her favourite, and I CHERISHED that status.

She was a real character as well. She had a teasing, wisecracking sense of humour. She had the classic old lady quality of giving no fucks and saying whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She was headstrong and stubbornly independent all her life, til the very end. We only managed to wrestle the car keys away from her around her 87th birthday, much to the relief of the driving population of the Republic of Cyprus. She smoked like an edgy male film noir protagonist, undeterred by the three heart attacks and quadruple bypass that resulted. She was a diva - I’ll never forget her 80th birthday party, where she insisted on having her little star moment, grabbed a microphone and sang a popular Greek song from her youth to the whole restaurant (30+ of our relatives plus a bunch of randos from the neighbourhood). She was completely lucid until the last few months of her life, though she was deaf as a door hinge, which did complicate communication, no thanks to the hearing aid that she flat out refused to ever use. And most of all, if there’s one thing I’ll remember about her until the day I die, it’s how cheerful she was. Don’t get me wrong - she complained a LOT (it runs in the family). But behind the bitching and moaning was a cheerful, cheeky, resilient spirit, a joie de vivre that was never dampened despite the many tragedies and medical problems that befell her.

I will never forget how she would hug me, kiss me, slap my cheek and smile up at me, with such intense grandmotherly love in her eyes. “Koukle mou, agapi mou” she would always say, aged voice emanating from a frail and withered frame that even at its many years of age retained a glint of youthful cheer in its eye. “My beautiful one, my love”.

It’s hard to imagine I won’t ever hear her say that again.

I will love her forever, I will remember her forever. She lives on in my memories, in the stories I tell, in my family’s inside jokes, in the food I eat, recipes passed down from her through my father’s generation to me. I miss her now, and I will miss her forever. I’m trying not to let myself regret - I spent the maximum time with her that I could. I never missed an opportunity to go see her. It’s too easy to beat myself up, thinking one more time I could have called her, talked to her, told her I loved her. But she knew. We always made sure she knew. And on nights when the sunset is especially beautiful, I know I’ll think of her.

-A