Easter is meant to be a time for reflection, but this year I feel I didn't have the right focus during Holy Week. My focus was on myself and my grief, although you'd think I'd be used to the pain of the divided heart by now.
Towards the end of March I said goodbye to my eldest son, to my aged father, and to the city of my birth, Melbourne, which I had been visiting for more than three months. Then I flew the long hours to Athens, arriving in a morning blur of fatigue mixed with joy, for in Athens I was reunited with my youngest son, and shortly afterwards telephoned my middle son, who lives near Chania, Crete.
Alexander and I returned to the Peloponnesian village for Easter, to the house in which we have both lived on and off for nearly 30 years. But part of me was still in Melbourne, watching the change of colours, hearing the trams rattling and clicking their way along leafy tunnels, walking familiar streets, seeing the striped sails of yachts against the blue of the bay. Talking to my son and father and to my friends. Especially that: part of me was indeed still talking to them all, and in Australian English.
So, on driving up the village street to the house, I felt once more that my ageing heart, held together with Velcro and Band-aids, was about to start some serious bleeding through the worn seams.
When such melancholy descends the only thing to do is walk. And so I did, eventually fetching up near a chapel on a hill, for the village is ringed by chapels, six of them, in a kind of protective belt. Outside the one I found on Good Friday a gum tree and a Judas tree stand side by side. I sat and contemplated these for quite some time: my life, or my two lives in a neat symbol. Such was my thought.
And then I took in the scene around me. I had viewed it many times before, of course, but when your life forms a pattern of departure and return the familiar is constantly made new. The glories of autumnal Melbourne were gone, but here were the beauties of the Greek spring. Here again were the reminders of life's pattern of loss and gain, another nudge, if you like, to an understanding of