Almost exactly a year and a half after J’s suicide, I was faced with the unexpected loss of my mother.
Mum had caught Covid the previous year. While I don’t believe that caused her death, I wonder if it lowered her immune system enough to allow something dormant to take hold.
We had been to Greece to visit in the summer of 2023 and she was different. Quieter, more withdrawn somehow. But what worried me and my sister most was that she couldn’t go in the sea. She said it made her feel off-balance, nauseous. Swimming and being by the sea were what she loved most about living on a Greek island.
We were concerned, but our mother was a force to be reckoned with. She doggedly insisted she was fine. After we left there followed a catalogue of minor-seeming ailments (tooth pain, stomach ache). Then she started to struggle to swallow food. We would message back and forth about what smoothies she could make, to ensure she wasn’t losing too much weight.
Looking back on it I should have been more worried. But at 85 this was a woman who scaled mountains on her daily dog-walks. She gardened, swam for miles, read voraciously, did crosswords and put up with my father (arguably the meanest feat of all). I have a picture of her playing football with Nathan in the garden just the year before. She was categorically not your average 85 year old.
Eventually my parents returned to Athens to have tests done. We got a short message from my dad saying that the doctor had advised her to go to the hospital. This was now in September 2023. We then didn’t hear anything for over 24 hours and started to get worried. My dad is not strong on empathy or even on basic communication. Frustrated and fearing the worst I called one of their best friends, Sofia. She told me it was worse than we had thought and that I should go to Athens immediately. I was three days into a new job, but they were fantastic about it and I booked a flight.
During the week I was there, mum deteriorated beyond recognition. I had to return to the UK after the week but told my sister she needed to go. She was there for two weeks. After my sister returned, on 16 October, my mum died.
I found out on my way home from doing the school run. At the traffic lights in the next village, I looked at my phone. There was a message from an old school friend. “My mum just wrote to me to tell me that your mum passed away. I am so very sad.” I didn’t read past this line. Bursting into tears, I drove home and called my sister. She hadn’t heard anything either and called our dad.
Our mother had passed away at 5 am that morning, but he hadn’t wanted to wake us up. He had, however, told one of our mum’s oldest friends. She had messaged him that morning to find out how mum was doing. And of course she then told her daughter, my old school friend, who messaged me instantly. It was nearly 9am when she messaged, so 11am in Greece.
When I confronted my dad he said that it had been disrespectful of my old school friend to message me. That she shouldn’t have done it. I completely disagree. He couldn’t understand why I was upset. I don’t think I have forgiven him, even over a year later.
01 April 2022, 22:04
I am now in Dallas, we have a 2 hour stop over before a 9 hour flights. His texts were very dramatic. He said he’d told the boys. That he would arrange for them to go to C tonight so that he “could pack.” I tried calling him over thirty times but it wouldn’t connect. Only half my texts (telling him to stay calm and we’d discuss when I got back) were getting through. Which he took to mean that I didn’t care.
In the end I called C and asked him to have the boys. I finally managed to call J via Skype dial-up. He was in a mess, realised he’d overreacted, embarrassed that I’d told C. But he brought the boys into it so what else could I have done. So I have told him to wait until I’m home and we will have a calm conversation. I plan to tell him that unless he agrees to try medication there is no way we can move forward. I have been crying my eyes out the entire flight. He doesn’t do it on purpose and in the moment convinces himself that I’ve moved on. But it was still horrible to have all of this delivered via text when I wasn’t there and couldn’t see the boys.”
WhatsApp message to my mum
I messaged mum again the next day . I told her I’d landed and was on my way home to “face the music.” My sister must have called her after I found J. Mum messaged asking if I wanted her to fly to the UK the next day to be with us. Without a second thought I said “yes please.” By Sunday evening she was here with us. She ended up staying for almost 2 months. I reached a point where I had to ask her to leave so that I could start to stand on my own two feet again.
She got the worst of me: all the anger and frustration became pointed at her. To the outside world I was coping remarkably well and holding everything together. With the kids I was sad but also upbeat and still able to see the fun in things. My mum saw me break down when the gas cylinder ran out, or when I couldn’t get my bike into the car boot to take the car to the garage. Or when I dropped things, couldn’t remember things, broke things or just plain couldn’t do things. I was irritable and impatient with her, snappy and short. But I was also incredibly grateful. I am thankful that I managed to have those two extra months with my mum. In a normal year I might see her twice. But after losing J me and the boys got to have her to ourselves for almost two months.
I am also thankful that I told her how grateful I was. Grateful that she arrived the following day, and stayed with me for that time. I told her in messages, but I also told her in person when I next saw her in Greece, that I would forever be thankful to her. That I appreciated it more than she would ever know.
Strangely, I didn’t write about her death in my – admittedly sparse – journal entries past Year 1 from J’s death. But I did later enter a short memoir competition with a piece I wrote about her. I didn’t get shortlisted but this seems as good a place as any to include what I wrote:
The Bulldozer
I arrived at the hospital in the afternoon, after an offensively early start and a long, joyless journey. It was late September and still blisteringly hot. My arrival was timed perfectly to coincide with the cleaner vigorously mopping the floor of my mother’s ward. She snapped at me not to step inside the door. I could see my mother lying on a bed at the far end of the room. She saw me and started to cry. I wanted to go to her but the cleaner was having none of it:“Ochi, ochi, na perimenete!” (“You must wait!”). Time stood still.
I just wanted to rush over to her and hug her but I was soon to learn that I wouldn’t even be able do to that. She was too terrified of germs, of Covid. When I finally got close to her and saw how frail she looked, I thought germs were the least of her worries.
I grew up in Athens, with an English mother and a Greek father. I have always had a sense of never quite belonging to either country. At first sent to Greek school, I was quiet and polite, totally in awe of the confident Greek children. They thought nothing of going on strike on a whim because a teacher had annoyed them. I then moved to an International school to do GCSEs and A’Levels. There I met other misfits like myself and ironically, finally fit in. Having now been in the UK for over thirty years I’m still a strange mix of both. I appreciate an orderly queue and the fact that drivers here generally tend to obey the rules. But I am very intolerant of bland niceties and definitely wear my heart on my sleeve.
My mum lived in Greece for more than sixty years. Over this time she gradually transformed into a strange hybrid. It would often catch me and my sister off-guard. Tall, elegant, fair – externally she was the epitome of a well-to-do British woman, complete with the stiffest of upper lips. Her spoken Greek, though fluent, was still English-sounding and riddled with grammatical errors. It was fascinating to me that her ability to speak Greek plateau’d and after a certain point she stopped improving. Where my sister and I were concerned, her English-ness stopped and she adopted the brash directness of the Greeks. She fought for us tooth and nail. We used to affectionately refer to her as ‘the bulldozer,’ though never to her face.
A year after I moved to England I finished my Art Foundation course. I was applying to universities, still completely unclear on what I wanted to do. I was deliberating between Brighton Polytechnic to do Illustration, and Exeter University to do English and Fine Art. My mum had been dropping hints (and by hints, I mean she made it abundantly clear) that she thought I should go to a ‘proper’ University. Despite never having had the opportunity to go to University herself, years of socialising with well-to-do Athenians, diplomats, intellectuals and wealthy ex-pats had turned her into quite the snob. These hints were serving no purpose other than to get on my nerves. My irritation was gradually building and festering like a busy ants’ nest. One day, on a rare call when I was actually at home and bothered to answer, came the final straw:
“I happened to bump into the Admissions Officer of Exeter University…” she started. The ants’ nest exploded.
“What!” I shouted, “you live in Greece! How exactly did you just happen to bump into him?”
I was furious. Brighton Polytechnic was looking more appealing by the minute. It turned out she had gate-crashed a careers event at my old International school. Bold as brass she had gone in specifically to see the Exeter University representative. I’m not sure how she was allowed in, or what she thought she was going to achieve. I was too stunned to ask. Maybe she thought that by waxing lyrical about me I’d stand a better chance of getting in? In her defence, this might have worked if it was a University based in Exarchia rather than Exeter.
She told me that her new BFF, the Admissions Officer, felt I would be an excellent fit for Exeter. This, despite him never having met me and presumably based purely on whatever nonsense my mum was feeding him. It is quite possible that he was just trying to make her go away. I did go to Exeter University in the end. I did so grudgingly and only because, to my utter despair, Brighton Polytechnic didn’t want me.
And now my mum, the bulldozer, who a year previously at the age of eighty-four had been playing football in the garden with my youngest son, lay in a hospital bed. Unable to get herself out of bed and to the bathroom on her own.
I had only been to a Greek hospital on a couple of occasions previously. Insignificant ailments with easy fixes, mainly sustained from a childhood spent outdoors. A torn ligament in my ankle after tripping on an uneven pavement. A tetanus injection after I stood on a rusty nail. Stitches in my eyebrow after I tore it open on the step-ladder of a swimming pool. In and out quickly, I don’t remember the hospitals themselves. Just my mum making up animal stories to distract me from the pain.
This hospital, the Sotiria (‘Saviour’) was like nothing I could have imagined still existed in the modern world, let alone in Europe. At its imposing gates the guards stopped me to enquire where I was going and then instructed me to follow the faint yellow line painted on the road. It snaked through an unexpected forest of tall pine trees, their brown needles carpeting the ground beneath them. Buildings were scattered among the grounds, each bearing no resemblance to the next. Some looked like crumbling ‘60s hotels, rounded and pale concrete. Others were deserted sandstone mansions with enormous gaping windows, weeds spilling out of them.
My mum’s building was at the very end of the road, at the top of a gentle hill. I walked straight in and up the two flights of stairs to her ward. There was no reception, chairs were propping all the doors wide open. Anyone could walk in, and it felt like everyone did.
There was a huge window right next to her bed, wide open to let the heat out and what little breeze there was, in. Her window also let in the cigarette smoke from the people smoking directly outside it, sitting on the wide balcony. They dragged chairs out from the room so that they could sit right next to a large column that had a ‘NO SMOKING’ sign stuck to it, right above their heads. The irony was lost on them.
“Please would you mind not smoking here? The smoke is going in through the window and is bothering my mother.” I went out and asked, politely in my fluent but by now too-formal (through lack of use) Greek. It is worth noting that this ward was a specialist unit for health problems connected to the lungs.
They looked at me, at first surprised, and then apologetic: “Of course, you are right! We are so sorry, of course we will move!” And they moved further down the balcony. A few minutes later, for their next cigarette break, they were back in the chairs outside her window and were smoking. Again, I went out to ask them not to smoke, again, they apologised and agreed they shouldn’t be smoking there and moved on. Eventually I stopped asking and my mum stopped complaining about the smoke. So they stayed puffing in their spot next to the ‘No Smoking’ sign. I was back at Greek school, secretly in awe of their sheer front but too polite to continue fighting it. If the tables were turned and it was me in that hospital bed, would my mum have held back?
When she came to visit us in England she would tell anyone who’d listen that she lived in Greece: the taxi driver, the person at the check-out at Marks and Spencer, my neighbours, random people in the street. It was as if she was afraid of blending in, perhaps she was too used to being different (and therefore interesting) in Greece. She needn’t have worried about blending in – her Greek-ness would make itself known in the most unexpected places.
On one occasion she was here visiting her sisters and we all arranged to meet at a Toby Carvery. I can’t imagine she had ever been to one before. She went up to the man behind the counter to choose her meal. In Greece when you go into a food shop or a deli the language is to-the-point and casual. There are no: “might I trouble you for some…?” Or: “Could I possibly have….?” Or: “Would I please be able to get…?” You point and say: “one spanakopita,” point again and say: “and give me two of those.” It’s not rude, it is efficient and friendly, there are no barriers or formalities.
So now at the Carvery, my mum pointed at the various items she wanted: “I’ll have that (points to chicken), and that (points to potatoes) and that (points to mixed carrots and peas).” She looked up, expecting the man behind the counter to have leapt into action. He had been watching her very carefully and eventually said with a twinkle in his eye: “Please.” My mum became flustered, she flushed pink and said: “Of course, I’m so sorry, please!” And, standing behind my mother, I mouthed “sorry” at the man and shrugged my shoulders in mock despair.
At the hospital, she was sharing a room with five other women, and there was no privacy. When the doctor came to examine her he would hoist up her night-shirt and her breasts would hang there, pale and remarkably smooth, in front of all the doctors, nurses, cleaning staff, patients, their extended families and anyone else who felt like wandering in. My dignified mum, who was too proper to ever sunbathe topless, even on the most deserted of beaches.
The woman in the opposite corner was in the final stages of lung cancer, lying on her side with her nappy clearly visible under her night-dress and her soft moaning cutting through the clatter and bustle of the room. Next to her was a large balding woman, wisps of grey hair on her head and enormous arms and thighs the colour of sour milk. She was clearly fascinated by my mother, probably because she was so obviously ‘xeni’ (foreign). In turn, my mum was just as fascinated by the bald woman, probably because she was so loudly Greek, constantly surrounded by and bickering with several members of her extended and equally loud family. And so they watched each other intently.
Occasionally my mum would get distressed, she complained that the bald woman was staring at her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was staring right back, so I would attempt to pull the curtain around her bed. The curtain reached the nearest corner of her bed and only succeeded in blocking out the patient directly to my mum’s right, who was respectful and perfectly quiet. The curtain also failed to block out the noise of the TVs that were attached to the bottom of each bed, playing at full volume, most often on different channels.
My mum’s idea of happiness had always been sitting on her balcony on Andros enjoying the pure silence or floating on her back in the sea, allowing the water to envelop her, She was now in a jungle of noise and chaos, with no privacy or time to herself. She refused ear-plugs or headphones, saying they hurt her ears.
“I want to write about this experience one day,” she said to me, in one of her more lucid moments,“if I ever get out of here.” In less lucid moments she complained about the doughy bald woman, or she would whisper to me that the doctors were experimenting on her. She wiped her hands repeatedly, obsessively, with antiseptic gel and tissues.
Each of the six patients were only allowed one visitor at the a time. My family tried very hard to comply, but it often felt like we were the only ones. There was no nursing care at the hospital other than the overworked team that administered medication and did the necessary tests. Their solution to my mum not being able to get herself to the bathroom would have been to just put her in a nappy. My mum refused. So my dad paid two Ukrainian ladies, 60 euros per twelve hours, to sit with her around the clock. It was normal practice, there was another woman at the hospital who was in charge of organising everything.
This also went some way to explain the men with the cards. When I was sitting in the waiting room calling my sister, I saw stacks of business cards on the table with pictures of women on them. I didn’t pay much attention, but caught a glimpse of a tight nurse’s uniform and red lipstick and assumed they were sex phone-line cards.
Every day in my mum’s room, a man would come in carrying a satchel, and he would put these cards on every available surface: on top of the light switch, on the window ledge, he would lean his whole body over my mum to put a card on her little bedside table and she would become agitated, worried about the germs and of course, Covid. I soon realised that they weren’t sex-lines, they were cards for cash-in-hand nurses, ambulances, medical equipment. The system was so broken that the only way to get an ambulance was to pay for it privately, like a taxi.
If I was in the room when the card-man arrived I would try and say “Ochi, ochi!” and gesture ‘No’ at him so that he would’t get close to her. On those occasions he would skip her bedside table. But I couldn’t be there for all the card-men.
One man would come in and put all his cards out, then half an hour later another man would come, remove the first lot of cards and replace them with his own cards. Then the cleaner would come and remove all the cards while she was cleaning and wiping down. Once the cleaner had thrown out the cards, it would all start again and a new man would come back and redistribute cards. This cycle would happen two or three times each day. A bit like the smokers, the card-men wore me down in the end, and after a day or so, I didn’t try and stop them putting their cards on the bedside table.,
When I left Greece as a nineteen year old, I didn’t even glance back over my shoulder. My mum came with me, to settle me into my shared room in a hostel in Farnham, but I didn’t really need her.
My childhood was perfect. The freedom, the weather, the food, the sea. My younger years were spent outdoors, my sister and I disappearing for hours on our bikes, exploring our leafy Athens suburb. In the summers we spent all of August on Andros, swimming, snorkelling, playing cards by paraffin lamps, having friends come and stay, sitting on the roof watching the stars, going on excursions in my dad’s inflatable boat, hooking up a tiny black and white TV to the car battery to watch Wimbledon.
Later, as I hit my late teens, I discovered the Athens nightlife: underground acid-house clubs, raves in disused cinemas with laser light-shows, early breakfasts in the meat-market district. Always safe, never any violence, no drugs, no aggression. Just music, dancing and a Long Island Iced Tea so strong it would fuel us for the whole night. All of this made me fiercely independent, I was ready to leave home at nineteen, ready to spread my wings and find my place in the world. In my case it meant not only leaving home and my parents, but also Greece. No mobile phones, no email, usually just a shared landline in grotty student digs, but I was never in anyway. My parents relied on my sporadic handwritten letters to get my news.
And how lucky was I (and how popular)! University summers were spent using my parents’ house as a backpacker hostel, with a revolving door of young, impressionable guests, some close friends of mine, others not so much. Swimming, eating out, and exploring Andros’ almost non-existent nightlife.
Once I started working I would still go to Greece every summer, to get my fix of the sea, sunshine and the food. Eventually I had my own children and summer holidays, still on Andros, became about teaching them how to swim in the crystal clear Mediterranean, going on boat trips, jumping off rocks, introducing them to ‘kalamarakia’ (fried squid) and boiled greens with lemon and olive oil, and the pure wizardry that is Greek chips, with salt and oregano. They would go up to my mum, batting their lovely eyelashes, and say “Pagoto, parakalo” (“ice-cream, please)”, the only phrase I ever successfully managed to teach them, and then only because they got paid for it in ice-cream.
“You really should talk to them in Greek,” my mum would scold me. “Go on then, why don’t you try?” She would last a couple of sentences before slipping back into English and would then have to put up with my smugly arched eyebrows: “I notice you seem to have reverted back to English…” I would go on to say, unable to let it go.
She had that effect on me. When I was first pregnant and I told her that our plan was that I would go back to work after having my son and that my partner would be staying at home full-time with him, she instantly replied: “No.” It wasn’t an exclamation of surprise, or a shocked slip of the tongue – it was firm and final, and prompted me to remind her in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t asking her permission, merely telling her how it was going to be.
My mum, the bulldozer. It was only once I had my own kids that I started to wonder what it had been like for her to lose both her daughters to England, to watch us slowly slip through her fingers as we settled and rooted and made our own families in another country. I took for granted that I could just get on a plane and go and see her, but then Covid changed that and I didn’t see her for over a year. And it was only now that she was in hospital and I had to make frantic arrangements for my new job, my kids, the dogs, transport to the airport, just so that I could race out to see her for a few days, that I considered that maybe this was now time to pay for the perfect childhood my parents had given me.
I left after a week as I needed to get back to England. I snuck out of the hospital while she was trying to swallow some greasy creamed chicken soup, carefully spitting out small lumps of un-blended onion and meat into a tissue. By this stage she couldn’t hold down any other food.
I remember thinking that I wasn’t sure if I would see her again, and I was right. She died just over two weeks later, despite the doctor’s assurances that she would “bounce back.” “Don’t look at her now,” he would say, “she will make a full recovery!” Eventually my dad got angry hearing it as he watched her wasting away in front of his eyes, and demanded that they tell him the truth. The doctor in charge finally admitted that she probably had two to three days. He explained that most Greek families don’t want to be told the truth if it’s bad news. She lasted four.
We’ve had the funeral, it happens quickly in Greece so few people were able to make the arrangements to attend. It was in late October and still warm, it was a positive experience, a celebration of her life, and I was happy that my two young sons experienced it. I look at them now and am torn: I want to gift them the same fierce independence that my mum gave to me; for them to explore the world, live wherever they want to live and not settle for ‘good enough.’
At the same time, while trying to set them free into the world, I want to carry on protecting them. Most of all I want to spare them from experiencing the overwhelming guilt I now carry: guilt for leaving my mum so easily behind; for taking her for granted, for resenting her interference, for snapping at her well-intentioned advice and for just naively assuming she would go on bulldozing forever.
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