SHE NEVER KNEW WHERE SHE WANTED TO BE by Maria Mackas

“I want to go home,” she’d say, whether she was in Georgia, where she lived for more than seventy years, or Cyprus, where she was born. It was the one constant in my mother’s life, the one thing you could count on; she wanted to go home. But where was home? She was never sure.

Long before Alzheimer’s stole her from us, she said she wanted her ashes taken to Cyprus and spread in the Mediterranean. I promised I would make it happen.

So when I found myself stranded on a train in Italy with her ashes in a Tupperware container, it wasn’t really surprising that, inexplicably, the train stopped for an hour and a half, midway between Tarantola-Cortona and Rome, where I was heading to catch a flight to Larnaca, Cyprus. Again, she was caught in between. I missed my flight, spent the night in Rome and bought a ticket for the next flight, which was the next day. I was pissed. And exhausted. 

But after thinking about it, it was so her. She never could decide where the hell to be. Every vacation to the beach, as our family of five packed into the un-airconditioned behemoth of a Mercury for our eight-hour drive, she would announce, “I’m not going,” and march back into our split-level Tucker home (also un-airconditioned – this was the 1960s). My brother and I and grandmother were so accustomed to it, we just sat in the car with the windows rolled down and amused ourselves for the 15 minutes or so it took Papa to cajole her back out. They must have argued or something – who knows. It was hard to keep track of her back-and-forth nature.

And incomprehensible. Until I learned her duality was not uncommon among immigrants. I spent five years studying immigrant literature as I worked toward my doctorate in Literary Studies at Georgia State University. Literature had always been a solace; growing up in an immigrant family, books were where I turned when I was called nigger or hairy or repeatedly asked where I was from. Immersing myself in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott or Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace, where people were good and kind to others, and Jo and Betsy dreamed of being writers, helped me escape. Now literature provided comfort in a bigger, epiphanic way – revealing truth. My dissertation focused on four books with ties to Georgia immigrants; I interviewed seventeen immigrants to Georgia and juxtaposed their stories to those in the two novels and two memoirs. The common themes were uncanny: prejudice, hybridity, the struggle to assimilate, reluctance to denounce native citizenship, to name just a few. The immigrants, from places as varied as Nigeria and Ireland, had experiences that closely mirrored those of immigrants in the literature. And those of my mother. 

Researched and written during the first Trump administration, my dissertation captures the fears and anxieties of first- and second-generation immigrants during those years. And the anxiety brought on by those emboldened to voice what was always right below the surface: racism.

There was also that universal truth that if you looked different or had an accent, you had to prove yourself more worthy. My mother wanted me to be perfect; an “A” wasn’t good enough; “A+” was better. Fuzz on your face was unacceptable, even when you’re ten years old; regular, painful waxing made you look more American. Friends were not to be trusted; you were just a runner-up for Miss Tucker High School because your jealous friend in charge of counting the votes stuffed the ballot box.

My mother was complicated, conflicted, confounding. My father drove her crazy. Yet when I took her to New York for a long weekend I was awakened to her voice from the bathroom where she pulled the phone to longingly talk to my dad: “She’s dragging me everywhere. I miss you, Jimmy.” When she finally achieved her dream of buying a flat in Cyprus (no small feat – my mother was a secretary, my father a waiter) what did she do but sell it after only a few years because she couldn’t stand the smell of the Turkish neighbors’ cooking. You’d think that when my husband and I decided to adopt a baby from Guatemala, my mother would be accepting of a child from another culture. But she warned us not to expect her to love a child “not of her blood.” Then she laid eyes on our little one and everything changed. They became soulmates and she once revealed, “I loved you, but nothing like I love Marra.” Hurtful? Actually, it made my heart sing. I reveled in their bond. It was one of the only times I felt my mother experienced pure joy.

When I told Marra I planned to spread my mother’s ashes in Cyprus, she said she’d meet me there. I was in Italy with my husband, celebrating the completion of my PhD. Marra was living in England with her fiancé. Together, we had spread some of my mother’s ashes in the Gulf of Mexico, on the Florida beach where I had vacationed with my family as a child, and where, years later, we would all vacation together. I had also spread some in the North Georgia creek that bordered our cabin property. More than twenty years earlier, we had spread my father’s ashes there. She loved the mountains, the ocean, Georgia – and Cyprus.

Marra and I waded into the Mediterranean one beautiful April morning and tossed my mother’s ashes into the clear, cool water. It was curious: They lingered on the surface. Then they settled on the bottom in a clearly discernible shape. I blinked and stared at what I saw. Was I creating my own kumbaya moment? I looked at Marra just as she said, “Oh my God. It’s a star.” Star – one of Marra’s first words, uttered softly as she watched The Lion King. “Marra’s Star” was a story I wrote for her right after we brought her home. I had just given Marra star earrings from Italy. We had just talked about getting matching star tattoos.

I’d like to believe my mother was finally at peace and was sending us a message. She was finally happy. She was everywhere all at once.