In the winter of 2020 as Melbournians crawled out of their homes, still apprehensive about going out, my sister Aliki, who had returned to Greece after being in lockdown in Spain, called. It was not good news.
“Mum is very sick. She has cancer. It has spread and they’ve given her 2-3 months.”
I was in shock. When I imagined a phone call like this, I thought it would be about our father.
He has been the sickly one, suffering bronchial problems all his life, being prone to colds and viruses, and developing diabetes in his 50s (which he blamed on the stress of having four disobedient daughters and not the copious amounts of sugar he consumed). In old age he’s had a series of strokes, a heart condition, and early signs of dementia.
In contrast my mother had always been a picture of rude health with the energy of three people. She worked in her craft late into her seventies and reluctantly closed her bespoke tailoring shop in Zakynthos due to the crisis. She built a studio on their property and took up painting again, her work forming part of an exhibition on the island. All of this while looking after our increasingly dependent father.
I never saw her sick and couldn’t fathom her dying. It seemed wrong, a mistake.
There was no question that I would be on the next plane to Greece and applied to the Department of Home Affairs for an exemption to travel. My birth certificate was needed to prove I was my mother’s daughter and for the first time and the most inconvenient, the issue of my name blew up. It is a tale of many Greek Australians.
What’s in a name?
I was given my grandmother Dimitra’s name, but my parents never called me that. They called me Jeana, apparently after Gina Lollobrigida, although the spelling of it came about by the person who wrote my name when I was enrolled at school.
Instead of Gina, I got the Scottish version. All official documentation has since been in that name: academic results, student card, vaccinations in school, Medicare card, bank account, driver’s licence and even my passport. This would be impossible today, but I remember the exchange with the public servant after presenting my documentation for my passport application.
“Look, my birth certificate says Dimitra, but as you can see, everything else is in Jeana because that’s how I was enrolled at school, and everyone knows me as that.”
“I think that’s fair enough, love,” he said. “We’ll put it in the name of Jeana.”
It was a different time, but in 2020, my explanations failed. My exemption to travel was rejected.
“You have provided no proof that you’re Dimitra Vithoulkas,” was the Department’s response.
I had to change everything to Dimitra or change my birth certificate to Jeana. Although I didn’t identify with Dimitra, changing it felt like an erasure, severing my connection to my grandmother, disparaging the traditions that bestowed the name, cutting away at my Greekness a little bit.
For the first time, I realised I had an attachment to it. Once, waiting at the bus depot in Cork, I met two elderly Irish sisters, one of whom was a fortune teller. She did a reading on me and looked up barely after she started.
“You have another name. Not Jeana.”
When I explained they nodded knowingly. “It’s very much like the English, anglicising all our Irish names.”
It wasn’t quite like that, but still, I felt uncomfortable at this exposure, like I was a fraud.
I toyed with the idea of changing everything to Dimitra, but I was in a desperate hurry to get on a plane to see my mother, fearful that flights would stop altogether.
And no-one had never called me that name. Not even the relatives in Greece.
A penchant for unconventional names
My parents had a thing about unusual names. They called my youngest sister Maryliz. That name made it to her birth certificate. Lucky for her, she escaped the dramas I endured until she went to live in Greece where people insist on calling her Maria.
“I don’t know,” is the common response. “I’ll call you Maria.”
She had an argument with the policeman who did her ID card.
“‘Ασε μας τώρα! Τι μας λες; Το κανονικό σου όνομα τι είναι;
“Μαριλίζ. Έτσι είναι γραμμένο στο πιστοποιητικό γέννησης.
“Κορίτσι μου, αυτό δεν είναι χριστιανικό ορθόδοξο όνομα. Θα βάλω Μαρία.”
(“Leave us now! What are you saying to us; what is your real name?
“Maryliz. That’s what’s on my birth certificate”
“My girl, that’s not a Christian Orthodox name. I will put down Maria”)
People call out to her when she’s walking down the street in Zakynthos, and she has no idea they’re talking to her.
“Didn’t you hear me,” they ask annoyed. When she says no, because that’s not my name, they think she is being petulant.
I wonder what effect it has that our relationship to labels that identify us formally, legally are somewhat loose. I have always had this idea that people who change their names were pretentious, insecure, hiding something, or belonged to some cult where they were ‘reborn’ into someone else.
To see my dying mother, I became one of them.
Death is a cultural thing
I’m not sure if anyone is ever prepared for the death of a loved one. Not just because you are losing someone you love, but because you are thrown into making difficult decisions and in our case, we were in another country where some things are very different.
It was my youngest sister who posed the question.
“Should we tell mum?” I had a collective understanding in my wider family network that you never tell anyone with a terminal illness that they’re dying.
As a child questioning why this was the case, my parents told me ‘You can’t take hope away from someone’.
A cousin from Greece who was living in Australia for several years was appalled when my aunt who was dying of cancer was put into palliative care.
“The very notion that you put someone in a place to die is cold hearted and cruel,” she said. Ensconced as I was in my Western superiority and knowledge of the ‘proper’ way to do things, I was confused and concluded she was peddling old-fashioned views that weren’t standard in contemporary Greece.
Until we encountered the same views from my mother’s doctors.
“I certainly wouldn’t tell my mother”, one said.
“What on earth for?” was the other’s response. “It is a very cold, inhuman thing to do.”
She looked at us with a mixture of shock and contempt.
Family and friends gave us the same response.
“It’s unspeakable,” my uncle said. “We are not animals.”
This approach, I discovered, is also common in Italy and Spain and Asian countries including China and Japan.
My sisters and I decided to make up a story that involved a diagnosis that was related to her actual illness. We put on a brave face, reassured her she would get better.
If she wanted custard, we made custard. If she wanted jelly, we made jelly. We were not going to quibble about the nutritional value of the food. I lay on the bed with her, and we talked. Her spirits were good, considering, her mind sharp and still focused on what was happening.
Are the communists supporting the endangered fish?
Aliki had attended a function one evening about endangered fish. Various environmental groups and dignitaries were there. The next day my mother was eagerly awaiting news.
Who was there, what happened, what’s the plan? She wanted to know if the Communists were supporting the initiative.
“Who knows mum? They’re all over the place. Most of them are communists for sentimental reasons, but Kostas was there.”
My mother nods in agreement.
“I think he came because he is interested in that Greek American woman, the oceanographer.”
“Oh well, at least he was there,” my mother responds, trying to put a positive spin on things.
I started to think maybe not telling her wasn’t a bad idea.
Occasionally she would say, ‘I don’t feel I’m getting better,” but we would be encouraging and tell her not to give up. After all, that was the point of it all – the not telling her – so she wouldn’t give up, in case she could will herself to live.
As the weeks progressed and she struggled to get herself up, suffering pain more acutely it was harder to hold the line. We wanted to keep her at home as long as we could as she hated the hospital. We secured a bed that elevated at the head for her to sit up properly. That alleviated things for a few days, but when she stopped eating, we were at a loss. The doctor came to visit and said she needed a drip, surprised that we had kept our mother at home for as long as we had.
“I understand you want to keep her home but,” she switches to English, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. Your mother will die of dehydration.”
She recommended a nurse who came and inserted a catheter and showed us how to use the drip. For a few days we tried but felt unsure if we were administering the right amount, worried we would inadvertently kill our mother before her time.
Saint Dionysius’ mummified hand
The relatives came and went, their despair increasing with every visit. Some had ideas about what might help. Let’s get the saint’s hand, they suggest. Saint Dyonisius, whose mummified body lies in the church named after him, had his hands cut off by Saracen pirates in the 1700s and a hand is taken by the priest to people’s home as a kind of blessing. I had gone into that church one afternoon to escape the heat and to listen to the liturgy. I watched in horror as many people kissed the icon, their lips touching the surface already contaminated by others. This was only four months after the COVID deaths in northern Italy. Perhaps these people thought God would help them.
The whole idea of a mummified hand seemed macabre, and my mother was not a particularly religious woman. But when science fails us, miracles are the only thing we can hope for. And so, the priest visited with the saint’s hand. I guess it made some people feel good to have tried everything, but it didn’t work. Despite everything, our mother ended up in hospital and passed away a fortnight later. Those two weeks were gruelling as we did shifts around the clock, so she was never alone. This is standard. My mother shared a room with a young woman who was ill and either her brother, mother or sister-in-law were constantly present. The doctors were surprised that our mother held on as long as she did, but we were not.
Charos waits in the underworld
Observing her final days, I couldn’t help but remember Charos, the personification of death in the ancient and folk traditions, who people battled to live. She battled him, for sure.
At the funeral, the priest said people had phoned him from Australia ‘to educate me about this woman, the life she led, the person she was.’
The mourners came one by one, protecting themselves from another death, enveloped in their masks rendering some of them unrecognisable. There was no wake, forbidden as it was under the restrictions, but back at my parents’ house, with the very few gathered, all of us physically and emotionally exhausted, I opened a bottle of champagne. I have always liked the Irish Australian tradition of focusing on the celebration of one’s life.
“Here’s to my mother,” I said, to a few dumbfounded faces of the close relatives, as I explained something unknown about rituals in the place from where I had come.
“Yes,” they murmured in response, some of them nodding as if they understood that hers was a life worth celebrating, whichever cultural traditions we live by.
Jeana Vithoulkas is a communications professional in government, political, social, environment, and health sectors. She is also a published author.