Speaking of funerals

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I have written a poem some time ago with the distillation of what follows, but somehow I feel the need to expand the story.

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My mother's family was very extensive. Her grandmother had had 18 children of which twelve grew to adulthood and had families. The village of their origin was deep in Asia Minor, in Kapadocia.There seemed to be an unlimited number of second cousins, half of whom were settled in the US, where they ended up after the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922 (another story), and the others in the Athens area. Family gatherings would get together over seventy people.

My father and mother, as young refugee children met again and got married just before WWII. They raised a family of four through the difficult times of war and the subsequent poverty years. They were devoted to each other in their quiet way. The death of my mother at 82, after years of suffering with osteoporosis and myasthenia was hard for my father. In retirement his interests were in a summer house he built himself and in the olive and pistachio trees he had planted, but it was hard to keep him involved in anything after that.

His elder by ten years sister died the next year. She had been like a second mother to him, because of the age difference, and this was a blow too. But I suspect the heaviest blow fell during the traditional dinner after the funeral of my aunt.

It so happened that a second cousin from the US with his american wife had come visiting at that time, on their way back from a second tour in two years, of Kapadocia, the village of their common ancestral roots. So after the dinner, the cousins came out with a video from their first visit to the village. At the end of the village shots, with no advanced warning, we were watching their visit to Athens, at a time when my mother was still alive. There she was, caught in time, translating to english a story my father was telling in greek. I was shocked , so much so that I do not remember what the story was nor how it tied up with their visit. I could imagine my father's shock. The rest of that dinner is in a haze for me.

My father died of a massive stroke a month later.

In 1998, during the Ancient Sites years, I wrote the following poem:

Videos of the dead
(an epitaph to parents)


I am sure
she called you that day
when her cousins showed us
a video they took last trip,
of the village
where all of you were born
and grown to reason.
At the end
the family, gathering to
to look at the record
brought triumphantly back
deep from inland Kapadocia,
was also immortalized.


Seeing her again,
left us speechless,
her small round face
and bright eyes
her voice not changed
translating to english,
for the american wife,
a story you told
the year before
she gave up the struggle
of keeping her spine straight
and pain at bay.


She reached for you
over the gap of time
and separation
and found you
long ready
to go and play again
in those Elysian
childhood fields,
leaving us
aching in resignation