‘We were four shattered souls saying goodbye that night.’
That same night, a storm raged as Helena drove through sheets of rain back to Melbourne, to the hospital, willing Maria to delay her last breath.
In her follow up to the award-nominated ‘When the Past Awakens’, Helena Kidd recounts the final days of her mother, Maria Avraam. Helena embraces her grief and finds a way through it.
Maria came to Australia from Cyprus in 1957, and lived in Richmond behind her brother’s shoe repair shop.
She was a survivor of an abusive marriage and was later deserted in the 1960s.
With the assistance of her children, she became a first-time homeowner at the age of 64 in Brunswick.
Her latest book ‘When The Past Left’, is a fusion memoir filled with short stories, essays, prose, elegies and messages of love, praise and support from a community who shared in Helena’s grief.
Helena explores the past through generational history and accounts of growing old, death and grief.
“The book confronts grieving in three different ways, the first is the declining body and loss of a mother. Second a son’s catastrophic injury and third my daughter’s pain from the past. All of these encompasses grief,” the Cypriot Australian told Neos Kosmos.
It introduces the third generation of Cypriot Australians in her son Leon, a carer to his yiayia and her daughter Calandra, wanting a plaque of her yiayia’s name on the wall of her Brunswick home.
The book wasn’t planned after Maria’s passed away at the age of 98 on November 16, 2021.
Helena had pieces of writing completed of observations she had made of Maria as her health declined.
After Maria’s passing, she started writing to “help somehow process my thoughts and deep grief.”
“Pieces of writing started emerging not only of grief but of what it’s like closing a parent’s home and removing pieces of a loved one’s life, then selling that family home and its memories to another to take up the air my mother once breathed.”
She said there was something calling on her to continue on from her previous book about Maria – intuition.
“There was more to Maria than her painful story, there was my story that entwined as mother-daughter bond and carer.”
“I wanted to remember Maria’s last breath in detail and that night, so I wrote that painful story and to me this is not morbid.
“I hope others that read this book find something for them, I hope they cry for their own mothers or not cry because death has been accepted and our parents want us to continue being happy amongst the living.”
Now Helena is doing just that.
Continuing on in a way that would make her Cyprus-born mother proud and that is representing the Cypriots of Australia at the very first Cyprus Diaspora Forum.
This event in Limassol saw pioneering Cypriots in the diaspora gather and acknowledge the vital role they play in branding Cyprus internationally.
Helena featured on the literature panel and also took home the CYDIA Award for literature.
She said it was an “absolute honour” to represent the Cypriots of Australia whose “voices are finally been recognised in our writing of story-telling of migration and the sacrifices our parents made for us.”
The forum and trip to Cyprus was extra special as her son was there to experience it with her for his first time.
“I was shaking at the awards when I heard my name being announced,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure she would be able to walk onto the stage.
“My son embraced me straight away and I could feel his emotion for not only me but for his yiayia.”
“And that is who the award is for”, Helena adds. Her mother who allowed her to tell her story in the first instance.
While Maria is not here to see this book be recognised, the first story ‘When the Past Awakens’ got shortlisted for a Community Diversity award in the Victorian Community Awards while she was alive.
Now Helena is staying in Cyprus for two months, and while she hasn’t formally planned anything new to write, feeling drained and in need of a break, she has teased that something may be up her sleeve.
“I did get inspired after the forum to write in Maria’s ancestral home that is now holiday accommodation in the village of Skarinou,” she said.
“I’m in the Skarinou home with Maria’s spirit and her photo putting together pieces of writing and making it about Maria’s past life and ancestral home and of me being here in the present.
“We will see what happens, I hope to have something worthwhile.”
