Eva Kyriazis Antholis
Mom was born in the Arcadia region of Greece. Her father was killed by Nazi collaborators during WWII, and she immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s. She became a U.S. citizen in 1956 and lived in Washington, DC, where she soon settled into her mission to teach young people the Greek language.
Mom’s love for family, friends and faith gave shape to her life and sustained her through great tragedy – her father’s death, her divorce, and the memory loss that dominated her final years.
Mom and her sisters were five fingers on one hand, loyal and connected their entire lives. Nieces’ and nephews’ photos covered her apartment, and their latest accomplishments filled her conversations. Mom’s friends – Greek and American -- became family. She loved their children, especially their daughters, and taught most of them Greek. Mom’s sons’ friends became hers.
Mom rarely disliked people, but she was willing to take down anyone who crossed her family or her friends. She could curse like a sailor – in Greek and in English – and invented words of her own that would fly like darts from her lips.
Mom loved the Greek language. She loved its simple architecture: roots and prefixes and suffixes that formed the words that have come to define our civilization. Anthropology was human plus logic. Ecology was household plus logic. Economia was household plus rules. Philosophy was friend plus wisdom.
Mom loved politics. She loved Democrats of all kinds, though it was purely coincidental that Democrat comes from a Greek word and Republican from a Latin. Mom loved her conservative friends, though she would sometimes whisper that “they are Republican” as if they had come down with an unfortunate, perhaps temporary, disease.
Mom loved her students. She raised a generation of young Greek-Americans – and virtual Greek-Americans – in New Jersey and Washington. She poured her soul into their instruction -- devising games, writing plays, and rehearsing dances. When the Olympics went back to Athens in 2004, she took special pride in having taught Greek to some of the Americans working there, and felt personally responsible for the games’ success.
Mom both loved and feared American culture. There were certainly parts she did not like. She did not like cars much, and hated driving on the highway.
While she loved shopping, she hated paying full price. And she did not care for non-Greek restaurants.
Still, Mom was no xenophobe (another Greek word). She loved American heroes of all kinds, but she held them to high standards. Were they as smart as Aristotle or Plato? As clever and persistent as Ulysses? As brave and strong as Hercules? Or more recently, as rich as Onassis? As good an athlete as Greg Louganis? As beautiful as Jennifer Aniston or as smooth and smart as George Stephanopoulos?
Mom loved baseball. Her first team was the Mets (short for Metropolitans … yes, Greek again). In 1986, when the Mets won the World Series, Mom would call her sons each night of the playoffs. If she got an answering machine, she would leave a long, detailed message describing the game. After the miraculous, come-from-behind win over the Red Sox, her message exhausted the tape.
Mom came to love the Yankees, too, worrying through each win, and suffering each loss. She would line icons up on the top of the television set, and sit with all her fingers crossed. When the Yankees fell behind against the Red Sox in the decisive seventh game of the playoffs one year, she exiled a son into the other room, judging him to have been bad luck.
Famously, Mom loved cooking – another way to love her friends and family. Food flew out of her refrigerator and stove, infinitely dividing. Dinner guests went from being delighted, to being full, to being overwhelmed.
First appetizers would appear, starting with tiropetes. Mom’s fingers worked with filo dough and butter the way a concert pianist worked with white and black keys.
Main courses were things to behold. Mom could braise a lamb, roast a chicken, or bake a salmon in her sleep. And then, after three courses, Mom would roll out her two masterpieces: moussaka and spanakopita. Nothing made her happier than pouring béchamel sauce over perfectly cooked eggplant and ground beef.
And just when you thought you would explode, the desserts would appear. Her grandkids loved her koulourakia and kourabiedes. Others liked her karithopeta. But her own personal favorite was baklava. Mom would order baklava in restaurants just to see whether it was better than hers. It never was.
Of course, Mom loved her sons. Their accomplishments were her accomplishments. She was a regular – and LOUD – presence at every sporting event, graduation, movie premier, or White House reception she could get to.
Mom loved her daughters-in-law. Though she had always been on the lookout for nice Greek girls for her sons to marry, when they fell in love she seized upon her non-Greek daughters-in-law as the daughters she never had. She saw herself in their joy for life, for laughter, for politics, for drama, for friends, for family, for food and for cooking.
And most of all, she loved them for the grandchildren that they brought her. She loved her namesake Evanthia, who shares her wit, determination, and passion for language and ideas. Jack is the fusion of her son and herself – the sweet combination of introversion and extroversion, intelligence and style. She loved Annika, her fiercest protector who alone was able to convince Mom to leave the loneliness of her apartment and move closer to family. And she loved Kyri, the clone of her own childhood photographs, and the one Mom would hug like a stuffed animal in her final days.
Finally, in good times and bad, she always looked to the protective power of God. She read the bible in Greek and in English for comfort and companionship. She prayed constantly. And while Mom would pray for miracles, prayer was more than asking for tangible results. Prayer was that place where she found meaning, and calmed herself. When she was upset or at wits end, she would repeat that God is Great, make the sign of the cross, and assert that God would set all things straight. It was that faith – along with her family and friends – that sustained Mom through her hardest days.
Mom addressed her own memory loss with that sense of faith, optimism and pride. To the end, she was extremely proud, rarely acknowledging that she was confused, and feigning that she knew where she was or what was going on when she clearly did not. But in quiet moments, she confided that she was aware of what was happening, but understood that it was a natural part of God’s world. “Gherámata,” she would say. Old Age. And while her condition often left her scared and lonely, it never stopped her from finding joy in – and bringing joy to – those around her. To a person, her caregivers found in her a brilliant smile, a ceaseless desire to share a hug and kiss, and a love that knew no bounds.
Note: Eva’s sons are Kary Antholis, an Oscar-winning filmmaker and President of Miniseries at HBO and William Antholis, Managing Director at the Brookings Institute
