Death in place
Category C: Third Place (2026) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Mary Glykokalamos
“Come on!” my father honks at the still stationary silver Volvo coupe sitting at the traffic lights that turned green all of two seconds ago. It’s a deep honk too, a little too long, a little too aggressive.
“Bloody Volvo driver,” I say as we start to move again, trying to distract my father and somehow lighten the mood, if that’s even possible. He doesn’t reply. The hospital isn’t far away but the trip drags with the uncertainty of a thousand choose your own adventure endings.
I try the ‘box’ breathing method we’ve been taught in health education class at school, hoping it might slow down my racing heart and make the butterflies in my stomach stop fluttering and bumping violently into each other. Breathe in for four seconds. Hold breath for four seconds. Breathe out for four seconds. Hold breath for four seconds. Again. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four. Again.
It doesn’t help.
My mouth is so dry, it’s hard to swallow. Outside we drive passed kids playing after-school soccer on an oval. I’m terrible at soccer but I’d give anything to be one of those kids right now. Sliding in the grass, sun on my face.
I turn to my father as he enters the hospital car park. He looks so serious and weathered; his eyes seem darker, his hair greyer, the lines on his brow deeper. Was he always like this? “Let’s go” he says pulling up the handbrake.
“You’ve parked crooked” I say as I get out of the car, but he’s already 10 paces ahead of me. I rush to catch up to him while making sure not to step on any cracks in the pavement.
At the hospital everything has the colour of sick. My cousins are all there, standing silently outside a room with a closed door, like solemn royal guards. Most of them don’t even meet my gaze. I suppose they don’t know how to tell me what’s happening, how bad things are. I’m the youngest, after all.
I feel my aunt’s hand against my back gently directing me towards the room. “Go,” she says with a slight tilt of her head, her voice dull as an old useless knife. Uncertain, I search my father’s eyes for reassurance but all I see is muddy strain. No one’s said it, but I know that death is on the other side of that door.
Inside, I find my mother and yiayia seated at my pappou’s side. The wailing I heard through the phone only an hour ago when the news came had subsided and morphed into a relentless stream of burning tears. They don’t seem to notice me. My yiayia is holding my pappou’s hand in hers pulling it close to her heart. She rocks in her seat uttering words, prayers, promises, to her husband and to God.
Despite the beeping, whirring machines that surround him, Pappou looks oddly well. His smooth, unblemished skin is coloured only by the tiny broken capillaries in his cheeks. He’s intact, limbs where they should be, no missing parts. Surely he’s just taking a nap and will soon wake. But people don’t just wake up from comas, this isn’t Hollywood. I channel Nancy Drew and continue scanning, hunting for a clue, something to account for this living horror. And then I see it, the single wound that has rendered my healthy, bright, loving grandfather completely silent – a small patch on his head, now covered in gauze, and who knows what else. The spot where his head hit the concrete road.
The quiet is disturbed by sudden, hysterical sobbing. It’s my mother, his daughter. With every passing moment she’s closer to losing her father. She deserves privacy but I can’t give it to her. I’m stuck, frozen. I try to avert my eyes, block my ears, but I can’t. I see every heartbreaking sight. I hear every gut wrenching plea. With a heart like hers, so completely exposed, I realise there is nothing left to intrude upon.
My body seems to understand something that my brain can’t, at least not yet. At 4pm today I was happy. I was home from school and eating a bowl of cereal. Everyone I cared about was well and my heart was light. Now at 6pm everything is different. In the space of two hours, a stubborn, unmoving darkness has brought a heaviness upon me like a weighted blanket minus the comfort. It suddenly becomes clear that this is really happening to me, to my family. We can’t strike out the line, we can’t act out the scene again. It’s done. It hits me that we won’t be going home to watch Rove Live on telly tonight.
The first morning without Pappou I wake to loud voices at the door (our hard of hearing neighbour Allen had dropped by to offer his condolences) and the Notis Sfakianakis song, O Aετός – The Eagle playing in my head.
Και αν μoυ κάψεις τα φτερά And if you burn my wings
vα μηv ξαvαπετάξω so I can’t fly again
απ' της φωτιάς μoυ τov καπvό from the smoke of my fire
πάλι ψηλά θα φτάσω. I’ll again fly high.
Ο αετός πεθαίvει στov αέρα, The eagle dies in the air
ελεύθερoς και δυvατός. free and strong.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
My cousin Nicki squeezes my hand, a silent gesture I recognise; it’s time to stand. I’ve never seen so many people in church before, not even at Easter. All the seats are taken but people I’ve never before laid eyes on continue to shuffle quietly in, neatly filling gaps like pieces in Tetris.
My parents have always sheltered me from death so now that it’s here and I’m smack in the middle of it, I’m unsure of myself. I pull at my pantyhose. I’m wearing a matching burgundy skirt and jacket that Nicki helped me buy from Target yesterday. It’s not meant for someone my age and makes me look like a child playing dress up, but it was the best outfit we could find that met my mother’s specific instructions.
“I don’t want you wearing black,” she’d said.
Instead, I was told I could choose from navy, burgundy, or charcoal. After today, I never want to wear these clothes again. I’ll donate them, or better yet, burn them. Years from now, there won’t be a single burgundy coloured item in my closet.
Goosebumps line my body as the priest repeatedly chants the words Αἰωνία ἡ μνήμη - Eternal be his memory. “Eternal be his memory,” the words linger in the thick-with-incense air. Pappou has now permanently shifted from a living, breathing human into a memory, an apparition. What will happen to him when I’m gone too? I worry that there won’t be anyone left to keep him alive.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
At the cemetery the priest repeats prayers for my pappou’s soul as the coffin that now houses his body descends slowly into the depths of the earth. It’s over. A man from the funeral parlour with too many teeth holds out a bucket of sand to the mourners. He offers some well-rehearsed words of solace as he looks each person in the eye with a sharpness that tells me he has grown too accustomed to death. One by one we all toss some earth into the grave, as if to keep Pappou warm, to envelop him and comfort him, something to nestle his beautiful broken head against for eternity.
Afterwards, we go back to my yiayia and pappou’s house, as tradition dictates. I hold the front door open and watch as Yiayia is shepherded toward the house by my mother on one side and my aunt on the other; their combined love barely enough to hold her weeping body upright. My eyes sting and I taste salt as the tears cascading swiftly down my cheeks pool around the corners of my mouth. I squint to see the three of them bob along as one black, blurry, distraught form inching closer to the house.
A seemingly endless number of people begin to file into the small family living room where I spent hours as a child listening to my yiayia and pappou talk about life in the village ‘back home.’ One by one, they pick up a shot glass of brandy, drinking to pappou’s memory. Some I recognise, others are strangers. Pappou’s circle was obviously larger than I’d known. I stay close to my father and watch as a gangly man offers him half-baked condolences and a limp hand shake. Maybe someone should tell him to liven up, that the role of the deceased has already been taken.
The house quickly becomes a flurry of movement and anxious activity. The women, my mother and aunts, take orders from guests for Greek coffees, σκέτο, μέτριο, γλυκό; no sugar, a little sugar, sweet. They serve dry biscuits called ‘paximadia’on brightly coloured souvenir trays that Yiayia and Pappou had brought back from their travels around Australia. The sun-drenched palm tree print from Surfers Paradise is so painfully at odds with the current mood that I feel physically ill at the sight of it.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Death is such a strange thing. One minute you’re breathing, feeling, and thinking, and then the next minute, you aren’t. And the strangest part of it is that we’re born into existence knowing that this will one day be our fate. No ifs, no buts, no exceptions; just one toiling, spiralling, forward somersaulting, manic propulsion toward a single trajectory. All paths lead to death.
On Tuesday my pappou was struck by a car and knocked to the ground. On Thursday he was gone. Like black paint mixed in with white, those three days were a disturbing, dizzying, thickening grey mess.
Before, death had been something that happened far away from my small and familiar pocket of warmth and safety. People died all the time, I knew that. They died in hospital beds, in their homes, at their workplaces. Some were old, while others were too young. Some knew death was coming; they’d sensed its looming presence grow, heard its steady approach gathering pace, felt it strengthen and set invasive, sprawling roots, noticed the almost imperceptible tightening of its grip around them as they expectantly waited for the final, overwhelming squeeze. Some people longed for it, begged even. Others weren’t ready, taken by complete surprise.
Before, I knew none of these people. None were my beloved pappou. Before, everyone and everything was forever. Life was a Mary Poppins song. Now, I knew that death was never far away. Now, I agonised over two questions. First, was my pappou ready? And second, would I be ready when my time came?
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
When I was a little girl, I didn’t understand why Greeks would dance the Zeibekiko, a dance steeped in painful history and heavy with the deepest, darkest burdens of life, at weddings. Why it was that men would improvise their way around the music, embracing with feeling the wounds of the world, on these most joyous occasions. Now that Pappou is gone, I think I might be starting to understand. Alongside the confusion in my mind, is a partially formed idea, an answer slowly assembling. I’m not going to rush it. I’m going to be patient and allow the mysteries of life to reveal themselves to me slowly, when the time is right. Until then, I’m going to dance the Zeibekiko to Pappou’s favourite song, O Aετός – The Eagle.