In life and in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. This is the story of two women,at the reckoning end of life, leaving their homes for the Greek island of Kythera. We took ourselves off, without armies or kingdoms, modern-day heroines to no one.
It seems miraculous now, believing ourselves freightless, divested of troubles. We knew we were privileged in that we could leave home at all, since most souls in this world are tethered by the quotidian restraints of existence. We counted ourselves blessed in being able to choose a different route to the one prescribed, a path more usually trod by men, and by that I meanthe path of desire. If men cover the universe with drawings they have lived, as Gaston Bachelard wrote, we wished to trace ourown map, to follow nothing but the wind of our desires.
Given our ages—sixty-two and eighty-five—we were perhaps brave and foolish in equal measure. Possibly we were drawn to Greece, the land of immortal gods, because we found it impossible to imagine our own extinction. I know it’s hard to believe— possibly even pathologically hubristic—but neither of us thought for a second that my mother could fall ill and die in Greece, even though we went through the arduous process of securing comprehensive medical insurance for her.
We discovered that no company in the world was willing to insure her for a year and possibly longer except one based in Monument, Colorado, specialising in expensive insurance for expatriates. My mother and I, together with my middle brother, Steven, contributed equally to the hefty sum, which ensured an emergency medical evacuation flight back to Australia should she need it. We went as far as discussing what would happen to her mortal remains should she succumb to the effects of type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking (yes, Mum was still happily fa**ing away), or any of the other bodily catastrophes that cause eighty-five-year-old women to fall off their perches.
Mum was adamant she did not want us to fly her body back to Australia for a funeral; a committed Anglican who believed her faith would return her to God, she was happy to be cremated in Greece. I didn’t know until I investigated further that the Greek Orthodox Church—which exists as a sort of atmosphere permeating the lives of all Greeks—opposes cremation, believing in the resurrection of the physical body, and that it would be a million times easier to fly a body back to Australia than to find a crematorium on Kythera, or indeed anywhere in Greece.
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