THEY SAY that time heals everything. For some that may be true. For others, however, those are just empty words. As hollow as the gaping wound that refuses to close and will never close as long as those left behind are alive to remember.
“It just won’t go away. I have tried to change but I don’t know how. It’s affecting my children, who have become inadvertent victims because of it, but try as I might, I can’t make it go away,” said Eleni Pirilli, her eyes welling with tears.
Eleni is the sister of Christos, who along with his wife Antonia and their three children Eveli, 12, Xenios, 10, and Marcos, six, perished on August 14, 2005 on board the fateful Helios flight that crashed over Grammatikos in Greece en route from Larnaca to Athens.
Three years on and the pain and sense of loss is still as fresh as it was that summer.
“I keep their house the way they kept it when they left. I go in and clean and dust and polish. People have told me that the furniture will ruin but I don’t care. It’s all I’ve got left. I only have memories and photographs now. Nothing else,” she said.
“At first I kept it tidy thinking my sister-in-law would come back and thank me for looking after it for her. Only now has it started to sink in that they are gone forever and the pain of that realisation makes it so much worse,” the 47-year-old said.
Emilios Manoli, Antonia’s brother, said moving on was much harder when the case surrounding the crash remained open and there were still so many unanswered questions.
“No one has been blamed. No one has been arrested and taken in for questioning. They arrest you for less in this country and yet 121 lives were lost and they are covering up those responsible because they are bigwigs and have money. We are an island of A Class and B Class citizens. The A Class are the rich and powerful, the B Class are the simple people. I am in the B Class and so those A Class responsible for what happened will not be brought to justice,” he said.
As he talks about who is to blame for the crash, his face hardens and his eyes blacken. Grief etches his face, but so does anger and frustration.
“Do you know what it’s like to have no one answer your questions? To say that you’re grief stricken and emotional, which is why you’re talking the way you are? I am rational and know my mind and I want answers. I want to know why the Attorney-general, the Communication Minister and the owner of Helios had a private meeting within a few days of the crash. What were they talking about? What were they planning to cover up?”
The father-of-one said he wanted justice for those who perished.
“Nothing can bring them back but I want the moral satisfaction that those who killed my family are punished,” he said.
A year after the crash his family suffered another loss. That of his elder brother, Andreas.
Andreas’ widow, Katerina, said the cause of death was put down to grief.
“He had a real soft spot for his sister. She was eight years younger than him and he couldn’t come to terms with what had happened. Just before he was wheeled into surgery for an infection in his heart he was asking for her,” she said. He never came out of surgery alive.
According to Emilios, his 44-year-old brother had also been riddled with guilt about their baby sister’s death.
“My sister had a bad feeling before she boarded the plan. She rang Andreas and told him she didn’t feel comfortable about the plane and he told her to go and have a good time. When the plane went down he kept asking himself why he’d encouraged her to go,” Emilios said.
FIFTY-six-year-old Vassilis Koutsofta lost his only son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Today he and his wife, Chrysso, are raising their five-year-old grandson who was left behind with his maternal grandmother only because he was considered too young to join his parents and sister on their week’s holiday in Prague.
He wants to know why no one has resigned over the incident.
“How can they live with themselves? How can they carry on getting up and going to work and acting as if nothing has happened,” he said.
Chrysso has been coined the Paralimni cemetery gatekeeper as she spends most of her waking hours tending to her son’s grave.
“I go there at 6am, again at 10am, again at 1.30pm and then in the evening,” she said.
“I feel close to him there. I talk to him. When I’m here I feel his absence.”
Chrysso waves a listless hand around the garage and said: “This is where he worked. My daughter-in-law worked in the front office. Now someone else works in his place. Someone else gets the money he did. We treat him like our son. But our son is gone. My son is never coming back.”
The business, a licensed Toyota car garage, is still tragically called Vassilis Koutsofta and Son Ltd.
“To us he’s still our son. He hasn’t been wiped out,” she said.
The 56-year-old, whose eldest daughter is expecting, said life went on but inside something had died.
“We laugh, we dance, we eat, we drink. But what you see on the outside is not what is going on inside. No one knows that,” she said.
The times she visits the graveyard are the times she used to have breakfast, a midmorning snack and lunch with her son. She has put up photographs of the trio on her dining room table so that she can look at them when she eats.
“The table was made bigger because it didn’t fit us all and now all I have are the photographs,” she said.
Eleni Pirilli said her parents had also been destroyed by their loss.
“It’s awful for me, but they have buried their child. Of all nine grandchildren my niece was the only girl and she adored my father and he her. She used to ask him if he’d buy her a Mercedes and he said he would. Then she’d joke that she’d come and pick him up from the Old Age Home and take him for a ride. Now she’s gone before him,” Eleni said.
Chrysso wants the people who killed her son to suffer the way she has. She wants them to feel her pain. She wants them to know what it feels like to have your heart wrenched out overnight. She wants them to know what it feels like not to know what her son and his family went through in their final hours. She wants them to question whether their loved ones were conscious when the plane went down. She wants them to know the anguish of wondering whether their child suffered and there was nothing they could do to help it. She wants them to know what it felt like to wade through a room full of charred bodies hoping to find her boy’s remains.
“I hope no one ever experiences what we experience daily, but I hope they [those responsible] do. Only then can they understand what we go through. Only then can they understand our loss and grief,” she said.
Emilios said he will never forget what he saw in Grammatiko that summer.
“It was inhumane. They could have identified the remains through DNA but they made us go over. The figures were deformed. No one was recognisable. Why they put us through that I’ll never know,” he said.
His wife Vassoula said her husband still refused to talk about that day.
“I’ve asked him to tell me but he won’t. He said it was worse than Vietnam,” she said.
“Overnight we went from a happy family, to one that has lost six members… Lives were devastated. Our children went into shock, we went into shock. Everything changed. Not a day goes by when you don’t think about them,” she said.
Vassilis and Chrysso were in Cephalonia when they got the news a plane had gone down.
“In that second I knew. I knew it was the plane my son was on,” Chrysso said.
She said she had been trying to reach her son and his wife on their mobiles all morning and that they were switched off.
“We were with other people and they told me that he was having a good time and wasn’t going to be bothered getting in touch with his mother. I told them my son would have to be dead before he ignored me. He knew how I worried and that I’d want to know he’d arrived safely.”
When she uttered those words she couldn’t have known the bitter truth they held.
Eleni said she still woke up at night, her cheeks damp with tears.
“That first year, if it hadn’t been for my husband and children, I’d have wanted to die. It’s all a blur. My memory has been left affected by it,” she said.
The women seem more comfortable to share their pain and can weep openly. The two men are less able to discuss it, their emotions kept tightly in check. But whatever the reaction, their grief, still so raw, is palpable. As you sit and listen to them you know that they are right when they say no one can know their grief, as you struggle to find the right words. Anything. Something. To make it better. Even briefly.
“People have been kind and they can try to understand but they can’t know our pain,” Emilios explained.
“We are tired. We talk about it again and again and again and nothing has been done to bring those responsible to justice,” Eleni added.
“It is tiring for other people to keep listening to our pain. There is only so much they can take so we stick together. We talk to each other. We support each other,” she said.
“In Emilios’ face I see my husband,” said Katerina.
“Vassoula is now like my sister-in-law and Emilios my brother,” said Eleni.
“In my grandson I see my son. He has his father’s sense of humour and affectionate nature,” said Chrysso.
Unlike some other families who are torn apart when struck down by grief, these families have pulled together. They support and love each other.
Eleni said: “As my mother said to my father. Your grief is my grief. Together we will share it and experience it as we go through this life until the day we die.”
The same can be said for these families who were left devastated in the blink of an eye and no amount of financial compensation can ever bring back what they lost. Nor does it seem appropriate to even try.
Chrysso said: “It’s so strange how life can change in just a split second. One minute everything is good and bright and the next it’s gone. In a split second nothing is ever the same again… If only I could turn back the clock. It’s like a light has gone out… I wonder if that day, when things started to go wrong, whether my son tried to help. He was a mechanic. He’d have known something was wrong. Couldn’t he do something?”
The questions that torment her are the questions that torment many of the Helios victims’ relatives. They are questions that need and should be answered. Whether they are or not remains to be seen. No matter what the outcome, however, the fact remains these families have forever been changed and no amount of wishing can change the past, no matter how hard you try.
