Until I Say Good-Bye (14 page)

Click!
The locks popped open.

I rolled out “like a sausage,” as Steph laughs when describing it now.

When we arrived home after the appointment, Steph locked me in the car again. And lost her mind again, just like the first time.

During another recent mishap, I was the one who lost my cool.

I had broken my left thumb—snapped accidentally as someone turned me over, unaware my bum thumb was extended. I was in bed resting when my sixty-pound dog Gracie stepped on said thumb. I wept.

Steph was trying to comfort me. I was so upset I couldn't tell her how I wanted my hand moved to relieve the pressure. Steph stood over me, flummoxed, weeping too.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they touch. And a lot of people now touch me, as they dress me and clean me and move me around.

I am constantly saying to others, “Careful. Slowly. Don't forget my thumb . . .  ,” or my legs, or whatever body part is flopping behind.

I am constantly telling Steph the opposite: scratch more fiercely, press firmer, pull harder. Her touch is too gentle.

She'll brush out my tangled hair delicately, like she's performing surgery. “Just yank the brush through!”

“Oh, I don't want to hurt you! You sure?”

“Darling, I would not suggest it if it hurt.”

She strokes my head every time she moves hair out of my face.

She says, “I would do anything for you,” and I believe her.

I believe in her.

My children adore her. “Hello, sugar plums!” she greets them each time she sees them.

When Marina accidentally dyed a blond spot in the front of her hair, she asked Stephanie to fix it.

Wesley will sit on Steph's lap longer than any other human being's, including me. “Can I spend the night at your house?” he often asks her.

Aside from John, Stephanie is the one person on the planet I have absolute faith in to raise my children. I know she will love them like her own.

What providence that God gave me such a sister.

What peace of mind.

For me, sweet Steph, you are the greatest gift of all.

Everyone Should Keep a List of the Little Things They Love

(found on my iPhone, dated March 2012)

Smokin' hot 4-inch heels

The sexy feeling I get while wearing them

When Gracie licks my face

When no one is screaming at home

Starbucks chai tea latte skinny

Freesia: the smell, the colors

Lavender sunsets

Any sunset

The grace of an orchid

A chilled fine white wine

A friend to share it with

The silly feeling it leaves

Sitting by the dryer vent emitting fresh soapy air

Chinese potstickers, steamed not fried, with that soy-based sauce with little green onions

A beautifully iced cake that tastes as good as it looks

A handwritten letter from a friend

A steaming bath in a clawfoot tub

When my dog lies so close to me on the bed I can feel her heart beating

When my children do the same

A cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Cream and sugar please.

The song “Clair de Lune,” because it reminds me of my sister

A pedicure when the lady rubs my feet and calves

When you can see rainbows in the sprinkler mist

When someone scratches my head for me

The Gift

April

Panos

I
n the late fall of 2009, while a series of doctors fumbled to figure out what was wrong with me, my mental detours started in force. My attempts to find some flippin' reason for my body's problems other than ALS.

My birth mother Ellen didn't help, as there was nothing wrong on her side.

That left my birth father.

In her second letter, Ellen had named him: Dr. Panos Kelalis. And in the next sentence, she told me she had heard through the grapevine that he was dead.

Dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

Dead.

I had never even considered the possibility.

Poof! Gone in one sentence was the chance to know him.

The chance to ask him why we are how we are.

The chance to say, “I am a part of you. And you a part of me.”

I was angry, and I questioned Ellen's character. She had kept my birth father and me apart, unknown to each other. Had she only contacted me because he was dead? Because then she could dodge dealing with him and his family?

My thoughts were unkind. I had lost my birth father. And it hurt.

Don't focus on the loss, I told myself. Focus on the opportunity. The chance to explore the man he'd been.

Dr. Panos Kelalis. Dr. Panos Keh-LA-lease. For weeks, I turned the name over in my mind.

A doctor, as my mother always told me growing up. But I never quite believed her. Tee exaggerated many things. I mean, one semester of French, and
voilà!
Steph and I were fluent.

But my birth father really was a doctor.

And, by Jove, he really was Greek.

That had been the scourge of my childhood: my lack of ethnicity. My nondescript looks such a torment for my raven-haired Greek beauty mother.

No amount of Greek lessons, or performances of Greek traditional dances in little Greek outfits, would help. No amount of studying the Greek language with a bristly woman named Ms. Karadaras, who would pinch my ears if I didn't concentrate, would satisfy Theodora “Tee” Damianos. I just didn't look the part.

I was explaining this dynamic to a friend recently. It was something I had accepted years ago, but suddenly Stephanie, sitting beside me, started crying.

“It was never true,” she said of our mother's criticisms. “It was never true. You were always so pretty.”

“I didn't say pretty,” I said in my slurred voice, trying to speak slowly and clearly. “I said I didn't think I was Greek.”

Now I had my father's name. Panos Kelalis. As Greek as it gets.

I Googled away.

Dr. Kelalis was a surgeon.

Oh!

He worked for the prestigious Mayo Clinic, first in Minnesota, then Florida.

Oh!

He authored a seminal textbook for doctors in his field.

Oh!

His obituary in the Jacksonville, Florida, newspaper described him as an internationally renowned pioneer in pediatric urology.

In an instant, I felt so much smarter.

Gawd, I hope this is true, I thought.

As a journalist, I knew you could create a deceased person in your mind. Study his life. Define who he was. Create a feeling inside. Panos was dead, but not gone. I could re-create him in the things he left behind.

I requested a photo from the newspaper where his obituary appeared. It came, as all things seemed to, in a plain manila envelope. The next day, on my lunch break in a park, I opened it.

I stared at the gray-haired man in front of me.

These moments, when I first saw the faces of my birth parents, were not moments of blubbering. No crying out “Mama!” or “Papa!”, a primal urge released. Rather, it was a studied calm. A stealthy search for my face in theirs.

I started with Panos's eyes. Our deep-set eyes, the ones that make me look like a raccoon if I put dark eyeshadow on.

I stared at the thick, skewer-straight eyebrows. Our eyebrows. Every time I had mine waxed, I said to the Vietnamese lady, “As much arch as possible, please,” and she said, “I try! I try!” I would have one big straight caterpillar across my forehead if not for her.

I noticed our round cheeks, the ones my mother so criticized.

I smiled at our nose, with the slight bulb at the end. Not so bad if you look straight at it. But from a low angle, a fat mushroom. In 2010, there was a ginormous picture of me in the newspaper meeting my new dog Gracie. My head was tipped up as Gracie licked my face, and my God, my nose looked huge.

In his picture, thank goodness, Panos stared at me straight on.

I thought: What a handsome fellow.

Then caught myself.

Most of my adult life, I have looked at men in terms of whether I was attracted to them. I had long entered the phase where I loved gray hair.

I thought: Doh! You're not supposed to think he's handsome. That's your birth father.

Ahem. Okay. Distinguished, then. Panos looked so distinguished.

Near all my life, I had looked at the faces of the six Maass kids, my best friend Nancy's face most of all. I had marveled at the similarities. Memorized how they looked alike: who had their father's eyes, their mother's cheekbones, who got the dip in the chin.

Near all my life, I had looked upon my finely featured mother, and my handsome father, and couldn't find my face.

But in Panos's face, I saw myself.

Myself—in such an impressive man. A man, in that moment, I wanted to know everything about. I wanted him to come alive in that photo and speak to me, the daughter he never knew.

I started to reconstruct Panos as best I could. His obituary noted he had been married to a woman named Barbara. There was no mention of children.

Oh boy! I thought. What if all this happened after he was married?

I pictured some beautiful doctor's wife with a perfect life. Then me barging in and sullying a lifetime of memories with him.

No, please no.

I searched for a marriage certificate in Minnesota, since he worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester when I was conceived.

Nothing.

I checked the public records of Jacksonville, Florida, where he last lived, and found court records.

The state of Florida leads the United States in open-records laws. Lawsuits, arrest reports, divorces, even wills, are public domain.

My domain. As a court reporter, I had used these records for years.

I found Panos's probate records. I saw there was ongoing litigation over his estate. There was a certificate of death, but no cause of death listed.

And there was a will, a spare document with three trustees: Robert Abdalian, Soulla Economides, and Stelios Iannou.

How the hell do you even pronounce that? I thought. And how do I locate them?

Only one name had a quick-click Google answer. There was a Stelios Iannou Foundation in Cyprus. Panos had left most of his estate to disabled children. Awesome. And not just disabled children, but the disabled children of Cyprus.

My birth father was a Greek Cypriot.

I brought the globe to my desk and spun it around. There was Cyprus, a small island in the Mediterranean, south of Turkey and west of Syria and Lebanon.

Cyprus, I thought. How unexpected.

How cool.

I wondered if I might have some mysterious illness that only affected Greek Cypriots. Jewish folks suffer Tay-Sachs, black folks sickle-cell anemia. Perhaps on Cyprus—population about 1.4 million—they suffered something too.

I wrote a lawyer in Jacksonville, one of a few listed on Panos's court documents. No response. So I called.

“Were you Panos's lawyer?” I asked.

“No, I am the lawyer for one of the lawyers,” he said.

Oh Lord, I thought.

I told the lawyer I was a daughter Panos never knew of and wanted to contact the trustees or relatives to ask for medical history.

The lawyer was like “Suuuurrrrre!” and totally blew me off.

Dead end.

Then my extraordinary pal Nancy struck again.

You see, Nancy never forgets a friend. And is such a generous and helpful soul, she naturally assumes this in others. Which is to say, Nancy not only thought of a man we had both known twenty years ago, but thought nothing of asking for his help.

“Call George!” Nancy said.

George Sycallides. A fellow graduate student in the journalism program at the University of Florida. An international student from—I had forgotten!—Cyprus.

I found George, dusted off the little Greek I knew, and spoke to him on the phone.

“
Yassou! Ti kanis?
Man, George, have I got a story for you!”

George listened intently. “Really? Really?” he said over and over.

I asked for a favor: Could he contact the two trustees I believed were in Cyprus, Soulla Economidou and Stelios Iannou?

“Of course, Susan. Of course,” he said

I was hoping he would simply locate Soulla and Stelios and see if they spoke English. Then I would contact them.

George called back within days. Stelios was dead, George said, but Soulla was alive. She was Panos's cousin. “I told her everything!” George said merrily.

Yes, George was telling Soulla about a nurse at the Mayo Clinic who had a baby girl . . . when Soulla broke in: “Panos has a daughter?”

“She would be thrilled to meet you!” George said.

Good old George. Talk about kicking open a door!

I sent an e-mail to Soulla, emphasizing my mysterious illness and that I sought only medical information. George gave me an address, and I sent pictures of my family. Close-ups, where Soulla could see features clearly.

Soulla opened one photo and was stunned.

Not a photo of me, but of my little cocoa-bean son with hazel eyes. The one who tans up like me, unlike my blue-eyed kids who burn like their dad.

My son Aubrey looked exactly like my birth father.

Three weeks later, on February 19, 2010, I received an e-mail from Soulla, via her daughter Alina in London.

“When George called me,” she wrote, “after a while I felt like it was Christmas and I had a present I never expected. You are so welcome. I have two daughters (Alina and Mania) and two granddaughters (Phaedra and Anastasia) and Avraam (my son-in-law). I have many photos of Panos. In one especially (he was about 6 years old) he looks exactly like you! The ears are absolutely identical! Can't wait to see you.”

Alina assured me that “everything mum writes in her brief note to you is heartfelt from all of us here :-).”

Would it have happened without George? I don't know.

But I can never thank him enough for his role.

I
n April 2010, I arrived in Cyprus. It was less than two months since I corresponded with Soulla. Less than five months since, through a court order, I had my adoption papers unsealed on health grounds and found out that Panos Kelalis was officially listed as my father. Less than eight months since I noticed the withering in my left hand.

No time to waste.

I wanted to know.

If this book is about the journeys I took because of my ALS, then this was the first. A journey into my birth father's past and forward into his relatives' present.

I previously described seeing a picture of Ellen for the first time as staring into the sun. My personal sun. A recognition so bright it blinded me.

Cyprus would too.

I had never considered finding my birth father. Never. Now a turn of fate, and here I was on an airplane, zipping across Europe on the edge of an Icelandic volcanic explosion. Traveling to meet a dozen people I didn't know. To introduce myself, the illegitimate daughter of a dead man they had long admired. Writing my own life and rewriting his.

I couldn't get my head around it, much less my heart. I needed someone with me to pinch me, to witness the unreal and tell me it was true. That person, as always, was Nancy.

A public relations pro, Nancy would have made a fine journalist. She remembers things so precisely. Every detail. Every foible. Each time she tells a story, it's loaded with minutiae most people forget.

You know those cars outfitted with 360-degree cameras that drive around mapping streets for Google?

It's like Nancy does that in her head.

Nancy journaled while we were in Cyprus. The puff of air freshener at the doctor's office, the off-color joke of a cousin—she noted it all.

She kept me grounded and focused on the details: the purple flowers that never wilted, dead or alive. The seasoning on the souvlaki. The tang of salt in the dry Mediterranean air.

I was overwhelmed when meeting Panos's family. Nancy carried the conversations for me, spoke when I was too moved to speak, brought presents that I had not thought to bring.

She helped me see the beauty of Cyprus. Warm. Fresh and sunny like the Mediterranean of our dreams, with terraced buildings and rocky outcroppings. A dry tropical oasis, unlike the lush mugginess of Florida.

But cultivated. Orange trees. Palms. Bougainvillea. The handiwork of a dozen cultures over a thousand years that had made this island home.

A crossroads. “A lifeboat for the Middle East,” as Soulla's son-in-law Avraam described it to me. An old place. A place to dig and dig and always find something new.