Yaya Soup
February 3, 2015
Grief is the worst. It helps to imagine the person's soul being at peace, especially in the cases where pain and suffering were factors in the person's ability to enjoy life. After finishing the dishes left in my sink after two rounds of washing yesterday, I got my phone from my bedroom, and saw that I had missed a call from my sister. When she first told me she had bad news, I thought something had happened to one of her dogs. I guess since my best friend just lost his dog, dog death was still on my mind. So I wasn't exactly prepared when she then explained that our Yaya had passed last night.
I could already feel tears in my eyes as she and I spoke a bit more about what was going on. Services could be this weekend, and she said she'd stay in touch with Ellie and keep us posted. I explained that I had already requested off this Saturday, so if we needed to go down, I could without issue.
After I got off of the phone, I cried. Not a kind of wailing and moaning dramatic cry, just an "I can't keep the tears from falling" type of soft, gentle weeping. My thoughts would circle around a bit, and then I'd come back to the fact that my Yaya was gone, and the tears would restart. I texted a few of my friends. I needed to tell someone. I wanted very much to sit and be with someone, but I wasn't sure why. I wasn't to the point I could start sharing stories about my grandmother. I was still in the crying stage. And I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep it together long enough to get through the class I have tonight, but I'm hoping I can. Either way, I am meeting my mother to drive her home, and I will be able to be with my family a bit.
I remember how frustrating it was when my father died, because life had to keep moving. While there were bereavement protocols to follow regarding work and school, nothing slowed down. Nothing waited for me to get through the most difficult parts of grief. On one hand, it was nice to have motions to go through, things to stay occupied with. On the other, I wanted enough time to feel what I was feeling without my emotions feeling like they were an inconvenience, something interfering with the productivity expected of me. I wanted to be able to break down in public, sob heavy, devastated sobs so that the world knew that someone important had departed the earthly plane.
My yaya. The matriarch of the Greek side of my family. My connection to the old country. Growing up, we were only fifteen minutes from my yaya's house, and my yaya and pappou loved being active grandparents. My yaya had perfected the art of distracting a child. The moment we started to whine or fuss or do something else undesireable, Yaya had a way of capturing our attention and shifting it to something playful, whimsical, or confusing enough that we forgot what we were upset about. She could be goofy; she had a sense of humor that could sometimes be dark, but she often found a way to bring laughter into her interactions. As I got older, she never quite let go of the grandchild she had helped to raise, and even on my last trip to Greece with my Pappou and Yaya, she was constantly attending to me as if I were still not completely capable of caring for myself, suggesting that I button another button because it was chilly, or asking me if I was still hungry.
Food was a major part of my education from Yaya. Countless times I was in the kitchen with her while she rolled out the dough for Kourambiethes. Watching her stir things on the stove. Awed by her knowledge of making things that I thought were only available in the grocery store. My yaya made her own yogurt, picked dandelion greens, had rice pudding that was to die for, and altered other storebought foods so that they suited her idea of what things should taste like. She grew roses in the backyard unlike any roses I had ever seen anywhere else. My pappou had worked as a cook for many years in a restaurant, but Yaya was the primary cook at home. Everything she made tasted amazing.
When I make coffee, I can't help but think of my yaya. She introduced my sister and I to coffee when we were probably still a little too young to have caffeine. But her recipe for our coffee was three parts milk, one part coffee, and one part sugar. As I got older, I had to learn that lots of people drank their coffee black. Grown ups didn't use so much milk and sugar, it seemed. But I preferred the way Yaya made it to the way my dad did.
When I walked into the kitchen during one visit, I noticed that there wasn't a dish with my favorite cucumber dip, dzadziki, in it. I asked my yaya if she had made any, and she asked me what dzadziki was. It was the first time I remember realizing that her mind was going.
The dementia came on slow at first. And while there was a clear progression of her condition from slight to needing 24 hour care, it took many years for her mind to reach the point at which she could seldom distinguish between her past and the present. Even at the end, she began having trouble remembering her daughter, my aunt Ellie, who went almost daily to check in on her at the nursing home. I never saw my pappou at the home. Whenever we went to visit Yaya, it was always my aunt, one or both of my sisters, and sometimes my cousin and uncle. I don't think I could have handled seeing my pappou with my yaya in that state. He struggled with the deterioration of her mind until the end. And I fear that he will not last long now that she has passed. He has expressed his readiness to die, even mentioning suicide a couple of times.
I remember realizing at some point that I was lucky to be so close to my grandparents. Some kids I knew had never really known theirs, and while I only got to see my mother's parents a couple times a year, later in life I had the opportunity to get to know my maternal grandma better while she lived with us. But Yaya was a staple of my childhood. She was the bearer of the culture my father had come from. She was the first person I knew who was religious. She sang songs to me, encouraged me to play and laugh, and reminded me even as an adult not to take things too seriously. She taught me the power of food to bring people together, and was living evidence that one can always nourish the child in us.
I have remarked that I feel I lost my yaya a long time ago. The remnants of her mind that remained in the last years of her life still held an essence that was Christina, and when I sat with her in her bed, holding her hand, I felt as though she could at least understand that my heart was full of love for her.
It is easier to say goodbye to someone who has lived a long life. But death is never easy. No matter how rational and practical I am capable of being, I cannot stop the tears. I cannot deny the sense of loss. I appreciate the time I have today to be alone, so that I can think about my yaya and talk to her, find my own way to accept that her time here has ended. There is a poem I wrote for her years ago, that I had intended for Ellie to help me translate into Greek. The idea was to put it into a frame with the Greek version next to a picture of her grandkids. I never got the thing done, and I hope that Ellie has the poem somewhere. I'd like to translate it. I'd like to use it to help me say goodbye. I love you, Yaya, and I know that the pieces of you that became a part of who I am will continue to take the ingredients of what this life offers and turn them into something that suits the life the living memory of everything you gave to the world.
Grief is the worst. It helps to imagine the person's soul being at peace, especially in the cases where pain and suffering were factors in the person's ability to enjoy life. After finishing the dishes left in my sink after two rounds of washing yesterday, I got my phone from my bedroom, and saw that I had missed a call from my sister. When she first told me she had bad news, I thought something had happened to one of her dogs. I guess since my best friend just lost his dog, dog death was still on my mind. So I wasn't exactly prepared when she then explained that our Yaya had passed last night.
I could already feel tears in my eyes as she and I spoke a bit more about what was going on. Services could be this weekend, and she said she'd stay in touch with Ellie and keep us posted. I explained that I had already requested off this Saturday, so if we needed to go down, I could without issue.
After I got off of the phone, I cried. Not a kind of wailing and moaning dramatic cry, just an "I can't keep the tears from falling" type of soft, gentle weeping. My thoughts would circle around a bit, and then I'd come back to the fact that my Yaya was gone, and the tears would restart. I texted a few of my friends. I needed to tell someone. I wanted very much to sit and be with someone, but I wasn't sure why. I wasn't to the point I could start sharing stories about my grandmother. I was still in the crying stage. And I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep it together long enough to get through the class I have tonight, but I'm hoping I can. Either way, I am meeting my mother to drive her home, and I will be able to be with my family a bit.
I remember how frustrating it was when my father died, because life had to keep moving. While there were bereavement protocols to follow regarding work and school, nothing slowed down. Nothing waited for me to get through the most difficult parts of grief. On one hand, it was nice to have motions to go through, things to stay occupied with. On the other, I wanted enough time to feel what I was feeling without my emotions feeling like they were an inconvenience, something interfering with the productivity expected of me. I wanted to be able to break down in public, sob heavy, devastated sobs so that the world knew that someone important had departed the earthly plane.
My yaya. The matriarch of the Greek side of my family. My connection to the old country. Growing up, we were only fifteen minutes from my yaya's house, and my yaya and pappou loved being active grandparents. My yaya had perfected the art of distracting a child. The moment we started to whine or fuss or do something else undesireable, Yaya had a way of capturing our attention and shifting it to something playful, whimsical, or confusing enough that we forgot what we were upset about. She could be goofy; she had a sense of humor that could sometimes be dark, but she often found a way to bring laughter into her interactions. As I got older, she never quite let go of the grandchild she had helped to raise, and even on my last trip to Greece with my Pappou and Yaya, she was constantly attending to me as if I were still not completely capable of caring for myself, suggesting that I button another button because it was chilly, or asking me if I was still hungry.
Food was a major part of my education from Yaya. Countless times I was in the kitchen with her while she rolled out the dough for Kourambiethes. Watching her stir things on the stove. Awed by her knowledge of making things that I thought were only available in the grocery store. My yaya made her own yogurt, picked dandelion greens, had rice pudding that was to die for, and altered other storebought foods so that they suited her idea of what things should taste like. She grew roses in the backyard unlike any roses I had ever seen anywhere else. My pappou had worked as a cook for many years in a restaurant, but Yaya was the primary cook at home. Everything she made tasted amazing.
When I make coffee, I can't help but think of my yaya. She introduced my sister and I to coffee when we were probably still a little too young to have caffeine. But her recipe for our coffee was three parts milk, one part coffee, and one part sugar. As I got older, I had to learn that lots of people drank their coffee black. Grown ups didn't use so much milk and sugar, it seemed. But I preferred the way Yaya made it to the way my dad did.
When I walked into the kitchen during one visit, I noticed that there wasn't a dish with my favorite cucumber dip, dzadziki, in it. I asked my yaya if she had made any, and she asked me what dzadziki was. It was the first time I remember realizing that her mind was going.
The dementia came on slow at first. And while there was a clear progression of her condition from slight to needing 24 hour care, it took many years for her mind to reach the point at which she could seldom distinguish between her past and the present. Even at the end, she began having trouble remembering her daughter, my aunt Ellie, who went almost daily to check in on her at the nursing home. I never saw my pappou at the home. Whenever we went to visit Yaya, it was always my aunt, one or both of my sisters, and sometimes my cousin and uncle. I don't think I could have handled seeing my pappou with my yaya in that state. He struggled with the deterioration of her mind until the end. And I fear that he will not last long now that she has passed. He has expressed his readiness to die, even mentioning suicide a couple of times.
I remember realizing at some point that I was lucky to be so close to my grandparents. Some kids I knew had never really known theirs, and while I only got to see my mother's parents a couple times a year, later in life I had the opportunity to get to know my maternal grandma better while she lived with us. But Yaya was a staple of my childhood. She was the bearer of the culture my father had come from. She was the first person I knew who was religious. She sang songs to me, encouraged me to play and laugh, and reminded me even as an adult not to take things too seriously. She taught me the power of food to bring people together, and was living evidence that one can always nourish the child in us.
I have remarked that I feel I lost my yaya a long time ago. The remnants of her mind that remained in the last years of her life still held an essence that was Christina, and when I sat with her in her bed, holding her hand, I felt as though she could at least understand that my heart was full of love for her.
It is easier to say goodbye to someone who has lived a long life. But death is never easy. No matter how rational and practical I am capable of being, I cannot stop the tears. I cannot deny the sense of loss. I appreciate the time I have today to be alone, so that I can think about my yaya and talk to her, find my own way to accept that her time here has ended. There is a poem I wrote for her years ago, that I had intended for Ellie to help me translate into Greek. The idea was to put it into a frame with the Greek version next to a picture of her grandkids. I never got the thing done, and I hope that Ellie has the poem somewhere. I'd like to translate it. I'd like to use it to help me say goodbye. I love you, Yaya, and I know that the pieces of you that became a part of who I am will continue to take the ingredients of what this life offers and turn them into something that suits the life the living memory of everything you gave to the world.
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