January 24 2016


There it was, a stark image of the urn,  a clay container of ashes, "τεφροδοχος",  you confidently declared it to be as you casually offered it to me, three decades and some ago. A jackpot of your pillaging  a burial hill, somewhere in Chalkidiki,  two, three millennia old, arrived in  today's  birdsong of FB posts.

 Memories flooded in, of feeling out the calcified bottom, touching the carbonized dust, the negligible  remains  of a person, perhaps a hundred-fold removed  relative of ours. The thumbprints of the clay thrower's, were forever preserved on its twin handles, yet the identity of that person unknown..

Before I could revisit the picture, giving in to sentimental forensics, it had been withdrawn.The image of the plain-earth beige color of the slip, the crude triangle shape of the vessel's  finishing form, insufficient in honoring a being as  he/she should ever deserve, flashed once more before my eyes. Dust to dust and all that of death, it was as plain an urn as it could be: unpretentious and amazing in having survived intact  yet far from importance and grandness.


I remember I wanted to assign unworthiness to its owner. The indelicate form of the vessel was explained in my young mind that it must have been for some crusty, heavy-limbed peasant, puny in thought and accomplishments, deserving of oblivion, if not for that urn having survived..Yet, all I wanted in my life then was grandness, affirmation, entitlement and Z was affording me that mirage, as much as he was allowing it for himself.  My early trauma was enough punishment, even at a cost of self-deceit and cowering to lesser virtue, I deserved no simple mortal, only the heights of intellect and refinement, which I was convinced he solely possessed.
But that gift also filled me with a painful foreboding of disaster, that I remember now I had wished to exorcise immediately, as if trying to suspend a final act before the curtain drops. The awkward "present", ever so short-lived as it turned out to be, signaled  the betrayal and curse to come.


Hubris, is  an exacting, leveling prize for unmerited heights, and it is coming on full-frontal today.

The father's tender love, softly sharing the pain, the pride, the ameliorating resilience: he is relating the aftermath of a gene deficit lot, Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome. The luminosity of J, the boy who claimed my daughter's heart and  I am forced to reckon, once again, with the loss of my own boy.
This is the velvet rope, corralling the memory of the urn  and today's appraisal.

 I did bury the "Υιος απολλυμενος", thirty eight years ago, under layers of ash, to preserve myself. I killed my son, to give birth to this parenthood, in a way.

It was the forfeiture of my motherhood to a cuckoo's nest claim, with the adoption of N. And in the end, the debit of my entitlement, was this unexpected gift, an alloy of  kindness and love and shambles, the legacy of kintsukuroi.

May the love long live.