Memorial Eulogy for Thanasis Maskaleris

by Dionysos Maskaleris

 

My father died November 23rd 2017 Thanksgiving evening.

 

The memorial was Saturday January 20th at the Fellowship Hall at the Orinda Community Church in Orinda where I work as a caretaker and where nearby up the stairs by the nature open space is the cottage where I live.

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At the memorial there was live modern Greek classical music and live traditional Greek music.

 

250 people came to the memorial.

150 Greeks. 

Some speakers:

Former SF mayor Art Agnos. 

Former SF poet laureate Jack Hirschman.

The SF Greek Consulate General (he read a proclamation from the president of Greece - my father was previously awarded the Medal of the Phoenix Greece’s highest civilian honor equivalent to the US Medal of Honor).

Karen West my friend (Who I stay with in Lagunitas and is the presenter of famous authors at readings at Book Passage bookstore in Corta Madera). 

 

Notes in reflection about the memorial:

When I was eight years old my father left me outdoors alone in the dark many times for many hours where I didn’t know how to get home or where to find any protection - though he raged at me and was cruel to me in many ways when I was a child - I did not leave my father alone in the dark - later when I had really grown I invited us - still rarely he invited me - we often went together to outdoor places of divine daylight and... I held my father’s hand before he died as no one deserves to be left alone in the darkness while we are dying - as no one deserves to be left alone in the darkness while we are trying to live through the separation from love.

 

The shadow of my father’s cruelty and greatness was on me at the memorial and for all my life but my own darkness and Light was also at the memorial and everywhere the Light of the Energy of the Universe is growing in all our lives.

Dion

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Eulogy for my father that I gave at the memorial:

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“A flower falls, even though we love it;

and a weed grows, even though we do not love it." -Dogen

 

“A stumble may prevent a fall." -Thomas Fuller

 

"In this world there are only two tragedies;

one is not getting what one wants, 

the other is getting it."  -Oscar Wilde

 

"There are only two ways to live your life.

One is though nothing is a miracle. 

The other is though everything is."  -Albert Einstein

 

“The only abnormality is the inability to love." -Anais Nin

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"To love mankind is easy; to love man is hard." -Jewish saying

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 "And sometimes love is just listening and being present to an energy that just is." -dion

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“Know thy self.” -Inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi .

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“I look for the joining of the inner and outer Light of atoms, stars and human souls.” -dion 

 

So here we are: mourning and celebrating Thanasis Maskaleris’ death and life - his life as Greek peasant and immigrant - as professor and poet - as lover of the landscapes of women and nature and human cultures. 

 

As I asked at my son Josiah’s death a few years ago and then again at his widow Erica’s death a year later - for both I asked in Aramaic: Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani? In English: Why have you forsaken me? As Jesus said and now I ask: why do you betray me and how can we forgive each other?  

 

Whether you believe in heaven or in reincarnation or that our molecules just do an eternal dance with the Energy of the Universe - the Darkness and Light of death and life are divine mysteries.

What is the cause of death? Life. What is the cause of life? Death.

Once I asked my father if he had a religion and he said he was a pantheist - he saw God in everything.

What strange beings we are. We don't want to die but we are the only species who create religions so we don't have to die and we kill sadistically sometimes in God's name. Perhaps the animals are more evolved then we are as they only kill for sustenance. The frogs and the crickets perhaps the most evolved animals as they are great meditators and have been singing for millions of years before mammals. Perhaps more evolved beings are plants and the highest life forms are rocks as their atoms dance for eternity. 

This puts our deaths and lives in perspective. 

Perhaps truly death and life is in everything.

It's a matter of life and death. 

As I child I remember us - my father my mother and I - we close together reclining on the earth in the Greek countryside of great scents of mountain herbs and in the visions of the eternal Arcadian Light.

And I also remember him my father as battle scared Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great’s father raging at me and I hiding in my mother’s bosom. My father and I perhaps were both - he and I - male herd animals as he was with his father and so as he left me alone as a child as he turned away from me to form many other relationships with others I turned inward as perhaps I was destined to live without geographic or heart connection with family much of my life.

I Dion named Dionysos on my birth certificate drove myself mad from my father's banishment of me and from my forced and innate loneliness. 

My father was a many faceted man. Like a Greek god he still is to me with many powers and weaknesses.  

He at times was more like Zeus or Apollo and I more like Dionysos and those energies sometimes don’t understand each other. I was born with clubfeet. I wonder what my father thought as he first set eyes on me for not well the myth goes that one was born with clubfeet who was to sleep with his mother and kill his father. I never tried living this myth literally (don’t try this at home) but I remember a few times as an adult my own wrath and venom in spitting out my truth about him to his face that equaled and perhaps exceeded any anger he ever had for me and at those times he pleaded for me to stop talking - that I was killing him. There are many deaths - like killing me softly with your song. Freud and Carl Jung had their interpretations of Thanatos and other Greek myths. My father did not like the negative Freudian interpretation of the Narcissus myth but rather affirmed the myth as a healthy introspection of reflecting upon, discovering and loving ourselves. Though the Narcissus in us can deny our own vanity making this psychological diagnosis the hardest negative human trait to overcome. My father saw that the Narcissism in the Freudian sense in world political and economic leaders and in all of us with our addiction to technology and economic greed that is destroying the human species and our Great Mother - Gaia Earth. 

My father told me his father was mean to him sometimes forcing him to only do the farm work and forbidding him to do his school studies but his mother often secretly did my father’s farm choirs so he could secretly do his school work.

Once my father and I were driving from his village Stadion in Arcadia to Gypsy beach near Astros - 60 miles from the village to this beach on the Aegean sea that he loved. Along the road grew the most beautiful thistles of geodesic shapes like Dr Seuss drawings or M. C. Escher prints they were. I asked what they were called in Greek and he named them and then he said his father had whipped him with these thistles. At that moment tears came to my eyes and a layer of my own pain fell away and then at that moment how could I not feel compassion for my father - he not just a powerful man but he hurting all his life - he also a little boy like me. 

When my father and I were in Greece we loved to walk together in the hot summer evenings at a municipal park by the village Episkopi a village near his village. In this park where the nightingales sing, a five hundred year old village church stands and all around it is a trench of ancient Greek archeological excavations where also like in much of the Peloponnese parts of the park have closed off areas with low metal fences where within these areas are also ancient archeological excavations including fallen columns, one can hear the murmuring and sighing memories of the eternal Greeks. 

For many years my father and I lived geographically and emotionally parted. But we found each other again in our later years. Though we continued to not do well living under the same roof or in traveling together for long durations or spending more then a few hours at a time together we found and had three great things - three great values in common. So though we had differences we also had what many children and parents are not blessed to share - we had three loves. We taught each other and we innately shared these loves.  

One love we shared was a very progressive politics and a social outlook of solidarity with the common people. Don’t mourn organize! In Greek: Z! In English: he lives! For the oppressed and for all of us - power to the people! - economic democracy - not a power over but a power of - true Demotica. At the Women’s March this morning I saw a sign that my father would have liked: women control the means of reproduction. My father was interested in the reproductive areas of women.

A second love we shared was a love of the Arts - we would go to art museums together and we discussed the love of literature, writers and writing. As an immigrant to the USA at age 17 with English as a second language he knew English better then 99% of native English speakers and he knew the etymology of every single English word from the Latin with a slight look of disdain and he knew the etymology of every single English word from the Greek with his little secret smile of support and love for those English words with Greek roots.

And the third love we shared was the love of nature of our Great Mother - Gaia Earth. In his last days as I pushed him in a wheelchair around his beloved lake Temescal that he had walked around for thirty years - this lake was his church and the last time I took him there he gazed across the lake and he said with joy: look at all the shades of green - look at all the shades of green. 

All you who knew my father or knew of my father - know that my father’s ashes will be scattered there at Lake Temascal this spring and next year his ashes will be scattered in many places in Greece: at Samothrace island of waterfalls and sea goats and at Delos island of thousands of statues (both islands are the other oracles besides Delphi) and at Samaria Gorge in Crete where the Nazis could never conquer and at Mt Olympus where the blue butterfly landed on my arm spreading her goddess wings back and forth making love to me for half an hour and east of my father’s village a mountain village of many different fruit liquors and at Mystras the last Byzantine capital that hung on to the last area of kingdom in southern Greece for a hundred years after the fall of Constantinople and Gypsy beach near Astros where my father swam and at the farmlands and the mountains all around the great Arcadian plateau of my father’s village where when I am there I bicycle every morning at dawn and again at Episkopi where the nightingales sing. 

Know my father - a great man of education and poetry - a man who had at times a free nyad spirit and at times structured Spartan and Platonic ways and know my father who was vulnerable who felt pain - when I took him to one of his doctors a few months ago the doctor said it was time for my father to write a bucket list - a list of things to do before you die - as we left he was in great physical pain as his cancer was metastasizing to his bones and he said he didn't deserve this pain and then he asked me did he deserve this pain? My first thought out of my anger at his misplaced anger towards me and his utter abandonment of me as a child was he does deserve this pain and then I said to him no one deserves any pain and I thought no one deserves to die alone this is my father he brought me into the world and we have more in common then not and his strengths and weaknesses have much to teach me and though I do not always like him or the people I love he is and we all are always deserving of healing from our pain and we are all deserving of love.

My father was a proud independent man who did not want to admit weakness and who drove himself to the emergency room as I myself bicycled to the emergency room for my injuries on occasion. In the last months it was hard for my father to ask for or accept my help. Finally he accepted it when I said you are an Arcadian stronger then independent Spartans - Arcadians are the strongest because we get help from each other - our family members and our fellow Arcadians.

My father often was a man of few words and I on the other hand sometimes vexed him with my Dionysian frenzy of stream of consciousness of words. Sometimes my father told me a story of when Kolokotronis an Arcadian chieftain leader in the war of independence against the Turks saw that his men were in need of food. Because Kolokotronis was illiterate at the time he asked his lieutenant to write a letter asking from the abbot at the monastery up the mountain for food for their small army of liberation. Kolokotronis saw the lieutenant was still writing the letter for five minutes and hadn't gotten past the salutations so Kolokotronis tore up the letter and said to his Lieutenant:  just write two words - Abbot! Cheese! So sometimes when I wouldn't stop talking my father would say to me: Abbot! Cheese!

And I say to we who are gathered here: death is precious because it makes life valuable for death shortens our lives and if we choose so we can see and be motivated by death to make every minute of life a precious breath of love we can share. Often it is easier to love strangers and even enemies then it is to love those closest to us. As the song goes love the one you’re with. You don’t have to like anyone all the time but we are evolving into beings of Light. 

Love is like starlight, if it really was love once the physical body dies the love lives ever on like after a star dies the Light of the star comes to me and enters me - like lovers the stars are - like starlight your Light always enters me and makes love to my Light.  

So today I stand here a man in love. I love my father. Thank you my father for bringing me life. Thank you for showing me ways that are unloving and for showing me ways of how to love. 

Though I held my father’s hand when he died - we never in our lives said to each other the three most sacred words in any language when they are combined with true actions. These three words have never been said to me by anyone. I say the three sacred words to my father now, my father: I love you. -Dion

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{All Dionysos Maskaleris writings copyright or copyright pending}

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