Old age induces a sense of doom. In complex ways, one’s extended expectation of death is woven into varied catastrophe happening around the world. I clearly remember the expression on my father’s face, somewhere in between agony and desperation, when hearing of timeless deaths of young people on the news, near or far away. Meanwhile, for fifteen years he grieved the death of his son, my brother, in very subtle rituals, in silence. As I am, he was not a believer in a higher being that held the fate of all life in his hands. His was a somewhat secular and introspective revolt to the injustice that while he was alive young people have perished, as in wars. At the same time, I suppose he did not hold the conviction that the conditions leading to the injustice could be changed by political means. I would not call him a pacifist, for that stance also requires a conscious political deliberation. He was simply a decent man, well read in his youth in classics, very modest, and with sincere empathy for fellow beings. I suppose these substituted for the extra material wealth that he could possibly accumulate over the years working as an attorney, they chased away the unnecessary hustle and competition that would make his and others’ lives tense.
The estimates are that close to seven hundred refugees died off the coast of Morea in June 2023, men, women and children. One mourns these tragic deaths, tries to understand the people’s plight, and is repulsed by the chain of circumstances and catastrophe in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria that lead the victims to this journey and abhors the lack of response at sea to prevent it. Like wisdom, old age is a factor to process the totality of unhappy destiny all over the world, from war, famine and destruction to climate catastrophe. A sense of destitution is caused by apparent diminishing of one’s agency in the face of events, especially in isolation. It seems the introspection should be vented either through organized political struggle and comradeship, or by an attempt at poetry (or madness.) In both cases, in good health (or not) one’s demise is indefinitely postponed and defied. And this, as opposed to an expectation of a posthumous legacy or a favorable quarter in afterlife, is the true antidote to fate: neither immortality nor an early doom, but just on time.
On June 28th we took the train from Thessaloniki to Athens, exactly four months after the disaster on the same line, in opposite direction. The faces on the train were solemn. The hills, the sky, fields, trees, plants, towns and houses were very similar to the ones in my country. But on the East of the Aegean sea, my sensation of injustice is beyond compare…
July 2023