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Fotis Kapetopoulos marks 33 years since his father Anastasios died of liver cancer at 62, recalling his memoir line that both pretended the other would be OK, and urging others to reawaken memory of lost fathers.
It has been 33 years since Fotis Kapetopoulos lost his father to liver cancer. Anastasios Kapetopoulos died at 62, two years younger than his son is now.
Migration, Memory and Grief
He had migrated to Australia with his wife Barbara Pyrlis in 1962. A leading Greek-Australian masthead has published Kapetopoulos' reflection on memory, migration and grief. Time creates chasms in memory, he writes, and past lives become increasingly opaque. Recently his son took him for yum cha and gave him a present.
Those moments will become placeholders of memory. His son is named after his father, Anastasios, not for tradition, not for religion, but for memory. Kapetopoulos was 31 when his father died and had just moved to Melbourne from Adelaide. He had vowed never to live in Adelaide longer than he had to.
He had already lived in Athens and Vienna in the 1980s, and his father understood. You need to expand son, and you can't do that here, his father would say. His mother never wanted him to leave Adelaide. Obsessed by his fledgling career in the arts, Kapetopoulos tried not to think of his father's cancer.
In his father's memoir, which he has tried to read since but can only scan before tears drown him, Anastasios wrote: My son the optimist pretends that things will be OK, and to help him I pretend I will not die. Two days before his father died, Kapetopoulos went back to Adelaide on the Overland train. Flights were not cheap and he was not cashed up. I don't think Dad will make it, his sister said when he arrived.
A Father's Final Days
Don't be ridiculous, he replied. My desire for positive news overtook me. She was right. His father's yellowed skin stretched over bones, skeletal, eyes sunken, and he could hardly muster a word.
Kapetopoulos tried not to break down in front of him. By the second day of his visit, his father was rushed to hospital. It was night. He could not breathe.
The cancer had colonised his lungs, his bones, his pancreas, everything. The time had come. The emergency doctor was the brother of a school friend. Yes, Kapetopoulos kept saying.
His sister, six years younger, cared for their father, but he did not want her to see him die, so he took her home. She never forgave him for that. When he came back, he saw his mother bent over his father's lifeless body on the dimly lit hospital bed. My man, my husband, my lover, you have gone, she said, what am I going to do now?
She kept repeating it like a mantra. His father was an elegant man and well-read. He was annoyed that his son was not reading what he called serious literature: Zola, Kazantzakis, or Steinbeck. Since his death, Kapetopoulos has read them.
History, Politics and Family Legacy
He was also irritated by what he termed his son's infatuation with the trendy left, not serious communism. Anastasios had, like much of his generation, witnessed the horror of Nazi Occupation and then the Greek Civil War, the fratricide. He had walked to high school in Patra and borne witness to partisan heads lined neatly in a row on the footpath.
Kapetopoulos repeated his father's story to a colleague in media recently, and she, maybe 20 years younger than him, questioned his veracity. His father's words come out of him when he accuses his 24-year-old son of being too woke, whatever that is. His father, like many socialists, was very bourgeois. He liked Harris Tweed jackets, smoked expensive tobacco, and thought it beneath him to work in factories, yet he called for the proletariat to rise.
Instead he gambled and was good at it. Migration never suited his old man. When Kapetopoulos spends time with his son, he tries to make the grandfather he never met a little more real. Possibly channel him through me, he writes.
Reawakening the Memory of the Dead
I often see him, whole. Now, his peers are losing their fathers and mothers. In our case, migrants once young, with life force, ideas, dreams, fire in their blood. Odysseuses who never found Ithaca again.
Our dead inhabit a wilderness of memory. So, for all who have lost fathers, reawaken memory. Even if it is splintered, inaccurate and vague. Forgetting is the greatest of all deaths.
theage
smh:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Anastasios Kapetopoulos Greek Australian Memoir Grief And Memory Migration To Australia
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