My Ikaria

by Tsintziras, Spiri;

  In the days and weeks that follow, I meet many others like this woman, people whose lives have taken a sudden turn for the worse – a fall off a ladder, a debilitating car accident, a stroke that has left them paralysed down one side, face skewed and confidence shattered. For now, hospital routines have taken over their lives, with timetables for physiotherapy, occupational therapy and psychology appointments pinned on a board next to their beds. I walk past small groups in common areas working on art projects, crutches propped beside them. I wait with Mum in queues for meals, other patients shuffling along in wheelchairs and walking frames. After a few days, it starts to feel normal. Mum makes her way to a table where people are familiar, smiles and says a tentative hello. People shuffle over to make room for her.

  After her initial bewilderment, Mum begins to find the routines of the place comforting. We walk arm in arm down hallways, make our way to the kitchen and the lounge, and gradually venture further and further around the hospital. Eventually, the physiotherapist gives Mum permission to walk outside. We wander slowly around the hospital’s sensory garden, set up by one of the nurses to help people with head injuries recover. Various sections extend out from a large golden ash. Mum is besotted with the water feature that gurgles in one corner; she laughs at a gaggle of clay ducks that surprises us as we round a bend. She delights in touching and smelling the herbs. While the garden is very different to her own, it is familiar, comforting. I see her visibly relax for the first time in weeks.

  My brother and I sit with Mum in speech therapy sessions, and smile as an enthusiastic young therapist says over and over siga siga (slowly, slowly). It will be the mantra that defines their relationship over the coming months. Slow down. Take your time. One word at a time.

  As Mum starts making progress, the question we keep asking is: ‘When can Mum go home?’ We are told it’s likely she will need to keep having speech therapy for several months.

  After a few weeks, just when it looks as if we might be nearly there, the occupational therapist tells me that, when asked to make toast, Mum stuck a knife in the toaster to get it out. ‘Does she live with someone? What supports are available for her at home?’ They are concerned for her safety.

  We meet with the hospital psychologist, who tells Dennis and I that we need to be mindful of Mum getting depressed, which is a common side-effect of strokes. She tells us that Mum is making good progress. Her appetite is good, she is active, and she is grieving her losses in a completely appropriate way. As each day passes, I admire my mother more – her resilient spirit, her ability to deal with life’s blows. Finally, her team agrees that with supervision she is at least ready to go home for a weekend.

  Dennis and I fret when we arrive to pick her up and Mum is nervous. Will we cope? What if something happens when Dennis is asleep? We’ve quickly become used to the security of 24-hour nursing care, the comfort of institutional routines and supports. Now we are on our own again.

  When Mum enters the front door of her home several weeks after she left in an ambulance, she is teary, her step over the threshold tentative. She makes her way around the kitchen, looks up at the myriad icons and crosses herself automatically. Next, she grabs a knife from the kitchen drawer. Dennis and I look on, eyes wide. Mum walks out the back door, down the step and straight into the garden. As she climbs into the raised garden bed I stand next to her, ready to catch her if she topples over, as if she is a toddler. Expertly, she begins cutting the newest shoots of broccoli, waves her arm for me to go and get a plastic bag. Instinct, a lifetime of habit, has set back in. For the first time in weeks, I feel that everything is going to be okay. Our mother is back home where she belongs. And even though it’s only for the weekend, it’s a start.

  Several days later, Mum comes back home to stay. There’s a whirlwind of visits from occupational and speech therapists, regular doctor and hospital visits. There are daily challenges that leave Mum frustrated and upset: she can’t remember how to dial a phone number or read, has forgotten how to cook basic dishes, is confused about where things are in her kitchen. Her therapists assure us that at least some skills and language will come back – but slowly. Dennis and I have daily telephone conversations to coordinate her care, and debrief. He has become her full-time carer, feels concerned about leaving her on her own. I try and give him some respite so that he can get out, go for a run, watch a movie. Slowly, we ease back into some sort of routine.

  Though I am still spending every spare moment with Mum, my own life returns to some semblance of order. As if returning from a dream, I see from my long list of unread emails that my writing group is due to meet. Though I’m tired, I make an effort to go. They ask after Mum, and it feels good to debrief about the last manic month. As a group, we have been meeting at a pub every six weeks for over a decade, and there have been many stories to share in that time – personal crises and creative milestones, ill health and the death of a few close friends. Much of the time, it feels more like a support group than a writer’s group. I mention that a trip to Ikaria feels even more elusive now with Mum’s ill health. They encourage me to keep the spark alive despite the challenges.

  Fellow group member and friend Sam texts a few weeks later: ‘Jamie Oliver on television now – in Ikaria!’ I leave the sink, where I am scrubbing pots and switch on the television. And there’s Jamie, with camera crew in tow, cooking up a feast with Ikarian islanders as he makes his way around Blue Zones locations. Jamie is looking much trimmer than I remember him, and I wonder if it’s a happy side effect of putting into place some of the practices of the world’s longest-lived peoples. I watch, amused, as he tries to outdo Maria the matriarch when making dough for herb and spinach pies. There is no competition – Maria wins hands down. I want so much to join them as they sit around the table, three generations of Ikarians and Jamie Oliver, eating pies and drinking the local brew. But Mum needs me now and I’m about to start a new job teaching – once again, the time is not right.

  At any rate, the segment reminds me that I am lucky enough to have already been shown how to make pies by my octogenarian friend, Theia Georgia. On her outdoor garden table, she showed me how to roll out homemade pastry with a broom stick. When it was the size of a large disc, she patiently pulled at the edges, until it looked like a translucent tablecloth. She cut this in squares and layered it across several trays, which she filled with a mixture of chopped greens, herbs, feta and eggs. This she covered with pastry. She made many such pies in one batch, and would give these to neighbours and friends. She still makes them, despite being in her mid-eighties.

  Enthused, I defrost some pizza pastry that George prepared last week. There’s a bunch of spinach in the fridge, some mint in the garden. I wash it, let it dry. In the morning, I will chop it, and mix it with eggs and feta to make improvised pies to take to Mum’s for lunch. It feels good to offer her something that I’ve made with my own hands, inspired by competent elders Maria and Georgia.

  Teaching

  After the last manic few weeks with Mum, I barely have time to take stock before starting my new job teaching. There’s lots to do: preparing for new classes; in-house training; meeting students; negotiating educational administrative systems. These are all new things to me. My colleagues are patient and understanding, often asking how Mum is, empathising with any small challenges I describe. I feel like I am flying by the seat of my pants, not having had as much time to prepare as I would have liked. But despite this, I feel well supported, which helps me cope with all the new things I must learn. I am alert. My mother is slowly on the mend and I have an exciting new job.

  A few weeks in, my colleague Jacqui and I are teaching students the craft of writing immersion essays. When we introduced the concept of immersing themselves in a new experience and writing about it, some of the students got excited about the extreme things they might do – stop eating food altogether, go out clubbing all night, take lots of drugs.

  Jacqui and I looked at each other, our mothering instincts coming to t
he fore. ‘Don’t do anything that will put you in danger . . .’

  At the start of the semester, I knew very little about each student except for those we’d been told would need special consideration. One has anxiety and panic attacks, another Asperger’s syndrome. Someone else is afflicted with chronic depression. Their essays fill in the gaps and suddenly they become more than their ailments – they have parents and siblings, interests and passions, desires and fears. I am reminded yet again of the privilege of being let into people’s lives, of hearing their stories, being allowed to wind and meld them into the pastiche of my own life.

  I’m reading a student’s work as he looks on expectantly. He describes himself running in the back streets of Preston, trying to avoid stepping in dog shit. The early morning hush transports him, reminding him of walking with his mother in Ocean Grove. The rain comes down and the stitch he’s expecting doesn’t materialise . . .

  ‘Is it any good?’ he asks when I’ve finished.

  ‘It’s very evocative. You’ve got some great imagery, a good eye for detail. Perhaps you could tweak this a little here . . .’

  Among the awkward first drafts, the ill-formed sentences and the spelling mistakes, there are nuggets of beauty in all the students’ stories – an amusing interaction with a sibling, the feel of rain on hot skin, a surprising conversation with a stranger. We find that a disengaged young man who spends most of his class time watching and tittering at YouTube clips has a dark sense of humour and a talent for writing snappy dialogue. The quiet woman at the back of the class makes us salivate with her vivid description of a shared family meal.

  One afternoon while all the students are busy working on their essays, Jacqui and I turn to each other.

  ‘I’ve got a new book for you. You’ll love this,’ says Jacqui, handing over another novel, which I swap for the one I have for her. In the few months that we’ve been teaching together, we’ve discovered a shared love of reading, our tastes surprisingly similar. During this time, we’ve waxed lyrical about the evocative landscape in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rights, argued feverishly about the merits and downfalls of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, and broken down the elements of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies.

  While talking to Jacqui, I’m reminded of a conversation I had with friends in high school about what we wanted to do with our lives.

  ‘Imagine being paid to read and write books,’ I had said wistfully. I think how important books have been in my life, I spent hours at the local library as a teenager, escaping into worlds that I couldn’t have imagined, rejoicing in others’ words, discovering new ideas and stepping into the shoes of characters with lives far from my own. As a surly teenager, I would lie in bed for hours on end reading, while Mum grumbled for me to get up and help her in the kitchen.

  Now, as a writer, I hanker to create something meaningful, beautiful, perhaps something that will make a difference. It took a long time for me to arrive at this point – I became a social worker first, working in various health education roles for over a decade – but the need to write, to express myself through words, to tell my story and those of others, never went away. I took the leap of leaving my salaried job several years ago to start a writing business and to have more time to write creatively.

  The risk has paid off. Now I write for a living. I teach others to do the same. And I’m surrounded by people who share a passion for stories. I’ve finally found my calling. As Jacqui and I run into Nic in the corridor and stop to have a chat, I experience a happy sense of having arrived, of having found my people. Now that I’ve got my sociable corridor discussions, I couldn’t be happier.

  It’s Sunday morning, and the kids are still asleep. George is out in the backyard, watering the garden. I’m in the kitchen, savouring the quiet while I create meals from the offerings in my fridge and pantry. I enjoy the feeling of making something from seemingly not much at all, the unhurried improvisation and the sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing I have cooked a few things for the week when I will have less time.

  I move between the lima beans bubbling on the stove, and the vegetables in the sink waiting to be washed and trimmed. As I’m chopping and grating and slicing I sink into a reverie, a meditation of sorts. Thoughts float in and out of my head and I think about the week ahead.

  I need to finish marking essays, I should book a follow-up GP appointment for Mum, and it would be good to call my cousin, Kathy, who I haven’t spoken to in a while. I stop and add some points to my running list of things to do. Now that I’ve cleared my mind, I can afford to get creative.

  I’m not quite sure what might result from the ingredients on the bench and stove, but I’m thinking we will have beans in a spicy sauce and a finely grated coleslaw salad wrapped in wholemeal Lebanese pita bread. So long as they kids haven’t filled up on snacks, they are willing to try most things that I cook. The beans and salad will carry over to dinner, accompanied by the snapper that George picked up yesterday. He’ll bake this with some olives, tomatoes and zucchini. We should have enough leftovers for our lunches tomorrow. Some of the cooked beans will go into the freezer and I can add them to a stew during the week.

  I’ve been trying to think like an Ikarian yiayia when it comes to stocking up, even though we have a range of food shops within a kilometre of our home. I’ve been more conscious of having enough staples in the pantry so I don’t have to head out to the shops as often – so I’ve been spending less and avoiding impulse buys. Dried and canned pulses and legumes, rice, couscous and quinoa, passata and canned tomatoes, eggs, olive oil and dried herbs are now rarely absent from the pantry or the fridge. From these, along with whatever vegetables are in the crisper, I can usually create something my family will eat. George and I might supplement these with a nice piece of fish we’ve picked up from the local fishmonger, a few chicken thigh fillets or some lamb shanks.

  It’s a challenge feeding a family every day, and the aisles at our local supermarket are still doing a good job of trying to seduce me with their pre-prepared wares – meat that has already been marinated, rice that has been parboiled, pizza that only requires twelve minutes of heating on the cardboard tray it comes on, meals that come in a plastic container that just require a zap in the microwave. Even now, I’m very tempted by these things, but one look at the long list of ingredients – some of which I can’t identify and many of which are added sugars, salt and fats – and I force myself to put them back. Yiayia simply wouldn’t approve.

  It’s getting more challenging to find good things to eat at the supermarket, so I have widened the net, shopping more at the Asian, Italian and Greek food stores not far from home. At the Asian grocery, ten dollars buys me enough vegetables and tofu for a substantial and quick stirfry. At the Greek deli, the same amount buys me enough dried beans to last a month. At the Italian greengrocer, I might land several kilos of stone fruit in season, keeping my voraciously hungry teenage son in snacks for a few days. In the absence of flavoured rice crackers and chocolate biscuits, he eats plums and bananas. And though he still complains that there is ‘nothing to eat’, he seems to have a snack in his hand every time I see him.

  I think back to the boxes of fruit my parents used to buy from the markets in summer and early autumn – a box of grapes, a whole watermelon, a tray of passionfruit that we would finish in a matter of days. Eating a hunk of cool watermelon on a hot day and trying to spit the pips as far as possible is one of my fondest childhood memories.

  The beans are almost ready when I hear the kids starting to stir. George comes in from the garden and says he’ll cook some eggs. He has just brought in the first of the silverbeet from the garden, and a few stalks of thyme. I pull some crusty homemade bread from the freezer to accompany the eggs and greens. It’s still early in the morning, but George and I have got breakfast, lunch and dinner covered. Now we can get on with our day.

  Emmanuel and I are sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon after school. When I’m home, I make a concerted eff
ort to sit down with the kids to touch base about their day, even if it’s only for a short time. Offering something delicious helps to keep my son sitting and talking – today it’s leftover lamb.

  ‘What does it all mean, Mum?’ Emmanuel asks.

  ‘What does what mean?’

  ‘Life.’

  ‘Mmm, that’s a question that people have been asking for a long time . . .’

  ‘You’re born, you go to school, you get a job, buy a home, maybe have kids, get old, and then you die.’ He says it all really fast.

  ‘Yes, I can see how you might think about it like that,’ I say carefully. ‘But you’re forgetting all the stuff in between. Lots of people think there’s more after you die, that you go to a higher place. Like a continuum. And other people think this is it – one life.’

  ‘What do you think?’ asks Emmanuel.

  ‘It’s reassuring to think that there is something more, but how would I know?’ I say. ‘Mostly I think we should make the most of the time we have. Try and be good to each other rather than worry too much about what will come next. Enjoy the little things – like you and me sitting here having this leftover lamb, and talking about life.’

  He frowns. ‘I worry that that’s all there is. It feels like you work for things, and then what? It all has to end.’

  ‘I know that’s sad. Perhaps that’s why some of us have children – so that it doesn’t end. Maybe you’ll have your own children one day, and enjoy teaching them things, and looking after them.’

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ says Emmanuel.

  ‘It’s easier if you don’t jump forward too much, or even backwards. Try and enjoy what you have right now.’

  Emmanuel nods, but I can tell he is still thinking about it. Is it natural for a teen to worry about the meaning of life? I wonder. Then I figure it’s probably as good a time as any to be considering these things – he’s about to launch into young adulthood. And I’m glad we’re talking about it.