MOST OF my family elders went to heaven in their 90s in the middle of summer, when 40C and dust made it difficult to breathe. We smokers know this at 60 – never mind 90 – not that we’ve an iceblock’s chance in hell of ever getting there.
My Lilliputian aunt Despina is still laughing. She’s 93 years old and has laughed most of her life. The difference now is that she is laughing through her nose in a nursing home – St Mary’s in Strovolos – where she shares a room with a lady 10 years her junior at a cost of €920 a month each, plus plusses.
She is being force-fed through her nose via a tube, mushy trahana-like meals dripped from a plastic bag, syringed a mix of water and powdered drugs via the same tube every hour.
I used to visit her at her daughter’s home every few weeks, where we’d sit, chat and reminisce, mostly hilariously, about other members of the family dead and alive. We would also regularly review the standing bet on whether she’d live to receive the president’s telegram.
Not unnaturally, she always betted against and during my past few visits asked the good Lord to take her unto Him, saying, ‘my little black suitcase is packed and sitting ready under my bed.’
She lived happily with her daughter, my cousin, for the past 25 years in a nice house with all the mod cons: air/con and TV operating all day with the kitchen door wide open. While there, she was visited regularly by her other two children, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
(A sure sign of diminishing returns – three of her grandchildren are confirmed bachelors and a fourth is married but still childless at 30-something. A King Charles spaniel, belonging to one of her unmarried granddaughters and cared for during the daytime by her daughter (substituting for a grandchild) would scamper about aunt Despina’s feet on a recently laid parquet floor – a playful pitter patter.)
My cousin recently employed a housemaid to help care for her mother, replaced the bath with a step-in shower and after my aunt suffered her first major fall a few months ago, insisted she be accompanied at all times. Still laughing, my aunt waited until her daughter went shopping, told the housemaid to water the drive and garden and went alone with the aid of her walking stick to the shower. An hour later she was discovered unconscious on the floor and rushed to a private hospital.
A brain scan found that her knock on the head was a contusion with no external signs. My cousin was gratified to learn that her mother’s brain was undamaged and could easily have belonged to that of a woman 40 years younger, with this becoming the main topic of conversation a couple days later when the family gathered around her bed and examined the scan negatives like we understood them.
Auntie seemed shaken but unstirred, could move all of her limbs, hear, see and speak if not feebly due to the aftershock of her fall, yet was not unexpectedly confused and terribly afraid on finding herself in hospital rather than heaven. The word ‘stroke’ was not mentioned and we assumed that within a few days she’d be back on her feet and laughing again.
Then the family ogre waltzed into the ward, a celebrity daughter-in-law, formerly a programme presenter for CyBC until her looks became less than acceptably photogenic (whereupon she was diplomatically transferred to programme production). She proceeded to upset everybody by telling us how her own mother had suffered a painfully protracted and expensive end in a similar establishment – in other words, auntie wasn’t going to get out of this place alive or solvent.
“But no,” the doctor said, “We will force feed her through her nose until she recovers her strength, a few days at the most.”
They did, but auntie didn’t and two weeks later found herself in St Mary’s, the tube still taped to her nose, laughing but not as responsive physically or mentally as she’d been during my first visit to the hospital.
Coincidentally, her younger sister by two years has been confined at home on an inflated mattress for the last three years, cared for and spoon fed lovingly 24/7 by an angel of a Sri Lankan woman.
The ogre (I do like her, really) did say when she was almost thrown out of the ward by her husband – my aunt’s son and a very nice gentleman – that Despina should have been admitted to the Nicosia General, where she would have been given a free diagnosis and prognosis then taken home and spoon-fed like her sister; saving the family the €2,000 private hospital bill and the uncertain future expense of St Mary’s.
“But what if she chokes on her food at home?” my cousin said.
“Then she will have fulfilled her wish,” my favourite ogre replied.
All I could think of was that we were probably in the process of losing the last person capable of naming the entire family from 1878 until the present day, recounting as she did stories of the Spartan lifestyle endured by most islanders prior to independence.
Like the legend about her grandfather killing a lascivious Turkish policeman with a blow from the jawbone of a donkey, suffocating another two who came to arrest him with the smoke from a souvla fire after getting them blind drunk on penny bottles of brandy.
Strovolos at the time was a village of 250 impoverished souls (now exceeds 110,000) situated a good 30-minute walk from Nicosia’s city walls, where my grandmother delivered and sold home made bread every Saturday morning from the back packs of her donkey (probably one related to the jawbone) struggling beyond belief to bring up her five children unaided. Oh, for those good old days!
