Disclaimer: This is neither a work of fiction nor a precise recounting of true events. It’s a mess; a cacophonous medley of fragmented recollections. I have not consulted anyone else’s point of view, nor do I pretend to speak for anyone but myself. This is how I, and I alone, remember things.
Warning: This story is macabre and unfiltered, please read at your own discretion.
Footnotes: There are a couple of things I mention in this text that you might find surprising or confusing. I have included footnotes to explain them, but please wait until the end to read those.
Twenty years too early
It’s 2002. The crystal sand beneath my feet is warm, waves are gently lapping the shore. I’m eating a big ice cream cone and squinting at the low sun that’s only partially covered by your head over two feet above mine. My free hand is holding yours, your other hand is holding my sister’s, she’s the one closest to the water and her feet splash it as she walks.
You can see I’m licking the creamy vanilla lump too hard, I’ve had the chocolate bits atop it and now I’m trying to get it to fall off its pedestal. It’s too big for me, it’s too much, I only want the ice cream that’s in the nice biscuity wafer cone, and then the chocolate end. Yum. You tell me you know what I’m doing, I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again. So you let my hand go and gesture I hand it over.
I protest at first, stomp my feet, pretend I haven’t been caught red-handed. Then I give up, I give it to you, you devour the protruding ice cream in two bites, and give me back what I most desire. I’m the happiest girl alive, I skip as I let you wrap your hand around mine again, and chomp down my favourite thing: a shop-bought, mass-produced wafer cone filled with unremarkable frozen dairy, ending with a generous chunk of low-quality milk chocolate.
It’s 2002. We’re on a beach in Eretria, on the southern coast of Evia, the second-largest island of the Aegean Sea. It’s our beach. It holds so many memories, that if memories carried weight, they would have sunk it beneath sea level. And it’s only 2002, the weight’s about to increase, double and swell, until I can no longer walk along the frothy waves without tears sheening my cheeks.
We’re approaching the end of our route, where the inlet ends, and all one can see is the horizon. We’ve never walked past that bend, I never knew what was on the other side and to this day I do not care to find out. This is where our beach ends. You pause before we turn, your grip tightens around our tiny hands. I’m chewing with my mouth open because it’s so much more enjoyable. The chocolate chunk at the bottom of my cone has melted and as I eat it, it outlines my lips with silky brown.
I do not know what prompted you to say what you said next. An adult’s mind is an abyss to a child. Perhaps you had recently lost a friend I never knew about. Perhaps another summer past alerted you to your mortality. Or perhaps you had recently heard something on TV that brought these thoughts to your mind. But you said, for the first time but far from the last, you said, ‘Ótan petháno na me kápsete.’
My sister is older, so she processes your words quicker, ‘What are you talking about, dad?’ she says grossed out.
You have just asked us to burn you when you die. Burn you.
‘Why would we do such an awful thing?’ my sister asks.
I finally process what I’ve heard and naively say, ‘You’ll never die, dad.’
You laugh, then you explain. How they did this in ancient times, and they still do it all over the world. You do not want worms to feast upon your lifeless form. You want it to be reduced to ashes.
‘And what are we going to do with the ashes?’ my sister asks.
You shrug. The sea’s right next to us so you propose the option of scattering them over the ocean. Or maybe we could just let the blowing wind carry them across the world as we release them from a mountaintop. You don’t care. All you want is to not decompose. To not have to be dug up three years post-mortem, only to be reburied and exhumed again a year later when, hopefully, only bones will have remained and we can put them in the boot of a car and drive to the Peloponnese to add them to the extended family crypt amongst those of countless strangers.1
It’s 2022. Last Sunday of March. I’m in the back of an airport taxi that’s weaving through the narrow streets of Central London. I woke up in a Bristol Airbnb and have no sharp memory of how I got here. Something resembling dumpster diving in a yellow cluttered storage unit, trying to find my husband’s wedding suit. Massive suitcases being pushed up a hill using strength I did not know I had. A fresh vegetable crate offered to a student in the flat above the one we were staying at, so that it’s put to good use rather than rot in a bin.
Then a train that won’t leave – why won’t it leave!
An endless queue of black cabs at the Paddington taxi rank.
Staring into a wall as I indulge in a fish and chips in a crammed flat in Fitzrovia.
Frantically messaging cat sitters. Meeting one outside a Starbucks to hand over a set of keys.
And of course, how it all started:
‘Zí?!’
‘Óhi.’
My husband always says how it takes so much longer to say anything in Greek. Yet to ask if someone is alive only takes one syllable. To answer ‘no’ takes two.
It’s 2022. Last Sunday of March. I’m in the back of an airport taxi that’s weaving through the narrow streets of Central London. I’m sandwiched between my husband and my sister, talking to mum on the phone. She has already spoken to the funeral director and now needs us to make the final decisions.
‘Can’t you wait until we’re there?’ I moan. ‘We’ll be in Greece before dawn.’
‘Well, [your dad’s wife] mentioned cremation… If that is something you want—’
‘Of course, we want cremation!’ I reply indignantly.
‘Oh, okay, because I don’t remember your father saying that…’
I laugh. I don’t know why, but I do. ‘Oh, I remember,’ I tell her.
‘Your sister?’
I look at my sister. ‘Oh, she remembers,’ I say, and my voice is laden with sarcasm because amidst the chaos and uncertainty your sudden death has set off, cremation is the single thing I do not doubt.
‘Are you sure?’ mum asks.
‘He has been telling us he wants us to burn him – repeatedly! – since I was eight. I’m not a mind reader, all I can go by is what he’s said!’
Mum says Wednesday at nine a.m. is the only available slot next week. That’s three days away. And that’s when it dawns on me that cremation has been legalised in Greece2, there is an operating crematorium and we do not need to send your body to Bulgaria and receive your ashes back via airmail – or however it used to be done, I guess we would have come with you to Bulgaria? I don’t fucking know. I’ve not thought about it. I’ve not planned or considered or worried about it, because it’s twenty years too fucking early. And for the entire train journey from Bristol to London all I could think about was that my daughter which I have neither conceived nor plan to any time soon will never get to meet you, and how unfair this is, and what a responsibility I have to tell her all about you and do you justice and how I haven’t eaten anything and crave a big fat fish and chips.
You loved fried stuff. Fried chicken was your favourite. But I’m a pescatarian.
Despite not having thought of the logistics up to this point, the fact there is a crematorium in Greece engulfs me in shimmering relief. It’s a ray of light in the hell that I’m living. And how fitting, the first and only Greek crematorium is strikingly close to Eretria.
‘So should I book this slot?’ mum asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. I ask my sister. She says we need to plan a funeral first and thus the debate begins of whether a funeral takes place before or after cremation. Before is the clear answer, but that gives hardly any time to put together a service.
It’s 2017. We’re in your house in Psihiko, sat on the cobalt blue three-piece suite. I occupy the hardback armchair facing the TV, where yiayia used to sit, where no one sits anymore. ‘Tha me kápsete ótan petháno, étsi?’you ask.
By now I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard this, it’s like I have no memory of burying you ever even being an option. ‘Yes dad, I know, I remember, I don’t need to hear it every second of my life.’
‘Edáxi.’ Okay. ‘Tha prépi na me páte Voulgaría.’ You’ll have to take me to Bulgaria.
‘Oh, for the love of god, by the time you die, there’ll be a crematorium in Greece for sure.’
Well, I got one thing right.
We book the slot and plan your funeral for Tuesday. We’ll arrive in Greece in the early hours of Monday. This is too soon; I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
It’s been three years since I got over my debilitating fear of flying, but fragments of it still lurk underneath. I like to take the window seat so I can look outside and make sure everything is okay. Today, I sit on the aisle seat and could not care less whether this plane explodes, crashes, or burns. My mind is too far gone, too shuttered to worry about improbable scenarios when actuality is at its worst. I watch Fight Club on my phone. Possibly, for the hundredth time. I start to wonder whether it is my favourite film.
As the men of Project Mayhem chant Robert Paulsen’s name over his lifeless, gunshot body, I’m reminded of this line from Palahniuk’s novel: ‘One second you’re walking and talking, and the next second, you’re an object.’ The smoke pluming out of Helena Bonham Carter’s mouth makes me want to reach for a cigarette.
I don’t remember landing, claiming my luggage, how I got to your house… I think mum drove us there? Logic tells me, yes, but memory fails me here. Maybe I fell asleep.
The next thing I remember is rolling a generous helping of tobacco in a thin pink paper in the middle of your living room, while dawn is only just about breaking outside. I’m silent as a heartbeat in a vacuum. Surrounded by somber downcast faces.
A handful of hours later, the sun is in full bloom, and I stand in a funeral home on a bustling main road with my arms crossed and much less caffeine in my body than I would like. There is no room for all of us to sit. They don’t usually get four people planning one service. What is even less common is four people who all agree.
Because you left early, you left suddenly, but you also left clear instructions.
For the most part.
Your widow speaks, her voice nearly a squeak, like a skittish mouse, she doesn’t want to argue, but she can’t not say this. ‘Um, your father,’ she says. ‘Well, he believed in God…’
The funeral director purses her lips, she’s heard this before, I know she has, I clock it in her put-on apprehensive expression – she wants to manage expectations. ‘It’s not possible to have a religious funeral if there will be a cremation,’ she explains. ‘The church doesn’t allow it. The priests won’t do it.’
My sister is ready to check out, fuck them, I see her think. Your widow looks torn. I want to grunt and sigh and collapse on a plush chair at the next-door coffee shop, but the memory of you tapping your forefinger over my heart and telling me that God isn’t the church, He is inside us, and He exists however we want to believe in Him, is ringing inside my head and won’t let me be.
I stopped believing in God a long time ago, but your funeral isn’t about me.
‘Listen,’ I say. I’m the youngest, but I’m the one standing, and my presence looms. ‘What can we do? Don’t tell me we are the first people to walk in here telling you we have a religious deceased person who wanted to be cremated and be sent off by a priest, both.’
‘Well…’ she says, and my trained ear knows it’s rehearsed. ‘The most they’ll do is a blessing. It won’t be the full funeral rites, just a blessing for his soul. We don’t tell them there will be a cremation, they don’t ask, they take the money, do the blessing, everyone is happy.’
I hurl a look at your widow, eyebrows raised, and shoulders hunched, asking if that’s enough. She nods.
Then I look at my sister for approval. She agrees.
Mum has no opinion, she’s there just to be our driver and help us navigate the mess that is Greek bureaucracy. I think she’s also still in shock. She had never seen a body before, I’m pretty sure she had gone to great lengths to avoid it. I’m not exactly looking forward to seeing you either.
When I do, I turn to my husband and say that’s not you. It’s not you, that’s not— That’s just your body. That’s a thing. That’s not you! He holds me. He lets me cry and scream in his cradle and I’m confused because I don’t feel like you’re here, how can I say goodbye when you’re not here!
This body is not you. You’re gone, and the body must be burned. That’s all you wanted. That’s all you’ve asked for. And we just need to get it done already.
Picking your clothes is easy, the suit and shoes you wore at my wedding a mere seven months ago. As I place the tie and handkerchief inside the bag with your socks and belt, I’m finding it hard to let go, maybe I want to keep them… But no. They’re part of the outfit you picked for yourself when you wanted to look your best and they will be burned with you.
The photo we pick is from the wedding too. The photo shows exactly what’s in the coffin. I find this as macabre as it is funny. Or rather as funny as it is macabre. You’d find it funny anyway. I think. I can’t ask you. You’re dead.
They are about to take you in. This is my last chance to touch you. And so I approach, and tentatively make contact with your frigid head and see a blemish on your neck, below where the make-up ends, and I see you, not an object, not a body. I see you. And you’re here, with us, and you will always be here, because you exist in memory, and actions, and in me and my sister, and every person you have touched and inspired and helped, all your colleagues and friends, and family, and you will never be gone, until we’re all gone and our children are gone, and maybe not even then.
We sit at the café of the crematorium browsing urns. Deciding not to buy one today, to get a custom-made one. And it’s the first day of my period, I have hardly slept and the entire bottle of cognac I consumed yesterday is still swirling and sloshing inside my stomach. Still, I find the strength to stroll through the memorial garden, checking the birth and death dates of others who chose cremation. When I finally find a person who died at a younger age than you, I feel a guilty sense of relief.
It was 2002. We were on a beach in Eretria, on the southern coast of Evia, the second largest island of the Aegean Sea. It was our beach, where I imagined this story you always told me to have taken place: random neighbours and yiayia’s friends, picking me up and calling me a cute baby while I screamed and kicked in my lilac polka dot swimsuit, asking to be handed over to you, to ‘Babá mou, Péto mou!’
I told my husband I thought you would have lived another twenty years. That you would reach and surpass yiayia’s age. He very innocently and very quickly asked, ‘Really?’ And I saw it, in his eyes, my delusion. That living to ninety-three was guaranteed. Because it had to be, because I only had twenty-seven years with you, you were supposed to meet your grandkids. I don’t care whether you were seventy-three or fifty-three, I care that I was twenty-seven.
I keep meeting people nearly twice my age who don’t know how to speak to me. They’ve never lost a parent and don’t even want to think about it. I meet others – not many –who have lost a parent too. Whether they were younger or older than me when it happened doesn’t seem to matter. All they say is that they understand. And I can see it. They do. And it feels like I have entered this secret, undesirable club that we are all destined to be a part of. There is no turning back. Life’s just different now.
Two months after your cremation, I check in my luggage, shove my British passport in my khaki jacket’s inner pocket and pull out my Greek one to cross the border without getting stamped. On the other side, I repeat the same process in reverse. In my rucksack, resting on my travel pillow, I have a knotted plastic bag. It is clear and hardwearing, probably from a Greek patisserie. Within it now nests your black suede baseball hat and a blue velvet box encasing the small urn that holds the part of you I get to keep. It looks like a bottle and so airport security asks what it is. They take it out, they touch it, then I tell them and they freeze. They gently put it back, don’t ask for any accompanying documents and just send me on my way. When I have my back at them they mumble ‘condolences’.
Sometimes I look at that velvet box, in my wardrobe in Bristol, the city you never got to visit, and I wonder if any part of your eyes is in there… your blue eyes that I begrudged you for not passing to me. I like to think that small urn holds a mix of you, and roses and thorny stems, and your favourite outfit. But when I feel more pessimistic, I bet it’s just wood ashes from the coffin that I got.
When I’m feeling cynical, I imagine your ashes got mixed up and it’s someone else’s burned dad that I’m speaking to.
Not that it matters. The ashes are not you, merely a symbol, as if I don’t trust myself to remember you without evidence. As if I worry that if I don’t somehow keep you alive, you’ll slip into memory too soon, too early. You’ll become an abstract concept, ‘my dad’, rather than Petros.
I always pictured scattering your ashes over the sea in Eretria, on a windy day so they could travel far and wide. But for now, I’m holding onto them.
It’s no surprise. I’m still paying your phone bill after all. In your name. Four euros and eighty-one cents every month. I memorised that number in 1999 and I am not about to let anyone else have it. It’s mine and mine alone. It’s just not time to let go yet. It’s just too soon.
You asked me to burn you. I did. Two years ago. Twenty years too early.
You asked me to burn you. I said it’s sorted, don’t worry about it, consider it done.
You asked me to burn you, dad. I did, dad. Now what, dad?
Footnote 1: In Greece, due to limited cemetery space, especially in urban areas, it is common for graves to be leased, rather than sold, for an initial period of three years. After this period, remains are exhumed to make room for new burials. Sometimes, if the body has not fully decomposed, it may need to be reburied temporarily before another exhumation occurs later. When the remains have decomposed sufficiently, they may be kept in an ossuary with an annual charge or taken to a rural cemetery, often to be added in a family grave or crypt.
You can read more about this here:
Why Greeks are exhuming their parents | BBC
Rest isn’t eternal for most Greeks | LA Times (This article is from 1999 and, shockingly, still relevant.)
Footnote 2: Cremation in Greece was technically legalised in 2006, however, due to pushback from the Greek Orthodox Church there is still no public crematorium. The first, and at the time of writing only, crematorium in Greece is privately owned and opened in 2019.
You can read more about this here:
Greece’s first and only crematorium opens despite pushback from the church | The World
Cremation Is Now Legal in Greece | Greek Reporter
Greece had long banned cremation — until the country ran out of room for bodies | LA Times
Arghierenia Kyrimi 
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