Today would have been my mother’s 100th birthday. She was the second of two daughters, born only fourteen months after her sister Catherine. She passed away at the age of 82 after a brutal, harrowing month in hospital, in July 2005. The last words she said to me were “I love you. You’re my prize.”

I wasn’t always her prize, but I was cast in the same mold she was. She was independent-minded, scrappy, opinionated, and not at all shy about sharing her opinions. She was one of the stubbornest people I have ever known (as was my father). She was Greek, and he was Croatian, so they were both of Balkan heritage. You know why they call those mountains the Balkans? Because the people who live there balk at EVERYTHING.

Mom’s tough, can-do character was formed by her childhood experiences; her father abandoned their family during the Great Depression. My mother’s mother, my Yaya, had to find some way to survive. At one point, with an empty cupboard and icebox and two hungry girls to feed, she went to the Catholic church around the corner to ask the pastor for help. She spoke very broken English, but Father McCaffrey of Holy Cross understood her problem, and helped her. He gave her food, he helped keep a roof over their heads, and he accepted Mom and Cathy into Holy Cross School. His kindness saved their lives, and to this day, every one of us, me and my siblings, supports our local food pantries to pass along the blessings we received.

Yaya found a job in the garment district, at first as a simple seamstress, but honed her skills enough to be doing elaborate beadwork by the time her working life ended.  She worked very hard to support her girls; she made sure they got a good education, encouraged them in their jobs after high school, and was very, very strict about their dating. Neither one of the girls wanted to date Greek boys (probably because of their father’s faithlessness), but eventually, Cathy met the man she would marry and spend her life with; she introduced Mom to his first cousin and the rest is history. That is why all the kids in my generation, Cathy’s and Matt’s and Mom’s and Dad’s, all bore the last name Karabaic.

Mom was extremely close to her mother. My earliest childhood memories include their daily 8AM phone conversations in Greek. “Kalimera, tikanis?”

Yaya had her first heart attack when she was sixty years old. She lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building in Astoria (“Never let anyone live over your head”, she said) right next to the elevated train line. One day, she couldn’t make it up the stairs, and ended up in Boulevard Hospital. Mom sneaked me and my sister Janet up the back stairs of the hospital to visit Yaya (you had to be 8 years old to visit “legally”, and I wasn’t yet 6.) I don’t think Yaya ever went back to work after the heart attack.

We always visited Yaya on Sunday afternoons, after church and Sunday dinner. There were five of us, with only nine years between me and the youngest, my brother, so we were quite the rambunctious lot. I remember Mom helping Yaya with various things while my sisters and I would put on “shows” in the living room. Sometimes Dad would take us all down to the playground or out for a walk (probably to give both Yaya and Mom a break from our noise and chaos).

Yaya’s health and memory faded significantly over time; by the time I was in high school, it was touch and go as to whether she could still live alone. For a time, I lived in her apartment with her, because it was so close to school (4 subway stops!). I shopped for us and learned how to cook. But that was not a sustainable solution, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was that Yaya was alone all day while I was in school.

Then for a time, Yaya came to stay in our five-room apartment. There were already seven of us living there (five of us between the ages of nine and eighteen), and only one bathroom. Yaya slept on a convertible love seat in the living room. Since that was also where one of the two televisions was, that turned out not to be a sustainable solution either, because of the child (and adult) traffic back and forth through the apartment.

Yaya went to live in Cathy and Matt’s home in New Jersey, very briefly. That wasn’t sustainable because Matt worked fulltime in the city (he was chief electrician of the Empire State Building), Cathy worked full time at Scholastic in Englewood Cliffs, and Matt Jr. and Stephanie were both in school all day.

In the spring semester of my first year at Parsons School of Design, I volunteered to give Yaya my bed at home in exchange for her bed in her apartment. What made this a good temporary solution was all the time I was spending in studio at school on weekends, and working on my assignments well into the wee hours in my little basement studio at home. Yaya’s apartment was about a half hour from school via one subway line. My folks moved my drawing board into Yaya’s living room, and Yaya moved into my bed. This worked out well for me but didn’t really resolve the problem at home. Yaya needed more care and more attention. Mom had been working part-time in the evenings at Gertz in Flushing since I was in 6th grade (she persuaded my father of the value of this by invoking the 25% employee discount). Dad would get home from his job at Queens Midtown Tunnel in time to drive Mom to work in Flushing. I had had the responsibility of warming up (or sometimes making) dinner, making sure everyone ate, and cleanup, but now I was in Astoria. What had been a Rube Goldberg machine of relatively good efficiency was breaking down; it was stressful for everyone, but especially for Mom. There was really no good solution for her.

In late 1973, Mom and Dad (and I guess Cathy and Matt) decided it was time to move Yaya into a nursing home. Everyone thought that the consistency of care would be better in an environment that was structured for that kind of care.

 I knew it broke my mother’s heart to do this. She faced the impossible task of choosing between prioritizing the care of her beloved mother and her husband and children. Everyone needed her, but there was only so much “her” to go around.

I went with Mom the day she took Yaya and her suitcase to Flushing Manor Nursing Home. I went because I didn’t want her to face it alone.

I don’t remember how we got there—I guess we took a cab, because Dad wouldn’t have been home from work yet. It was sometime in the late fall. I remember Mom taking Yaya to a counter with nurses, and then behind the closed doors of an office, and waiting for what seemed like a very long time for her to come back out into the anteroom where I waited. She didn’t say much when she came back out and neither did I.  Her face said everything that needed to be said. We walked down Northern Boulevard, turned left on to Main Street, and as we approached the subway I asked her, “Do you want to go for a drink?” She was not a drinker at all, but she nodded, and we walked up Main Street to Jahn’s. We sat at a pretty little table right by the window, and I ordered us Seven and Sevens. We sat there, sipping slowly, not talking much at all, and watching the crowds of people coming home from work. We had a second drink, and I got the check, paid it, left a tip, and we walked down to the subway and went home.

Yaya would last almost a year in the nursing home. I never went back to see her, something I truly regret now. I told myself I was busy with school, which I was, but I should have made time. Mom never asked me to go, and never asked me why I didn’t. She went regularly and my recollection is that sometimes my younger siblings or Dad would accompany her.

At about one in the morning one October night, the phone rang. My bed was closest to the kitchen; I answered it quickly so it wouldn’t wake my parents. It was the nursing home. Yaya had had a stroke and passed away. I could see no reason to wake up my mother to tell her this news; it could wait until morning.

When I heard her stirring in the kitchen several hours later, I got out of bed to tell my mother that her mother was dead. There were tears, lots of them, and some yelling that I should have woken her up. I told her she needed the rest more than she needed to know right then, and I stand by that to this day.

There was a wake in Astoria, and a funeral at St. Demetrios, and a burial at Cypress Hills Cemetery next to the husband who had abandoned her so many years earlier. Her name is on the gravestone below his. Yaya was buried wearing her wedding ring, which she had never taken off.

Years later, when Mom was in her last month of life in Union Hospital, our whole family was trying to figure out what her best next steps would be. Should she go to a real rehab hospital, like Kessler in West Orange (which would be hard for Dad to get to without someone to drive him), or should she opt for the local place, just a five minute walk from their home, that her doctor described as a place where you get parked. She wanted to just go home, but for that to work, there would have to be some major alterations to the ground floor. Then she said, no, just put me in a nursing home, I don’t want anyone to have to bother about me. My brother and I, in consultation with the social worker, agreed that the best result would likely come from doing her rehab at Kessler. The social worker promised to give us 24 hours notice before any transfer. That didn’t happen; the transfer to Kessler East Orange was rushed and horribly botched, and led to my mother dying from sepsis three days later.

It was my decision to okay the transfer. In retrospect, I should not have done so, because it was all so rushed, and to a different facility, but my mother and father both trusted their doctor, who said it was the right thing to do. Mom told me, “Whatever you do will be the right thing. I love you, you’re my prize.”

It is a decision I still carry, to this day. Every time I have decide about care for someone I love, I remember how this turned out. I follow my own North Star now, my own instincts, and try to stay as free of the medical-industrial complex as I possibly can.

There is no substitute for love. Love is the North Star.

I love you, Mom, and I am proud to be the daughter and granddaughter of stubborn, scrappy, willful, opinionated women who loved fiercely and always did the best they could. I am trying really hard to follow in your footsteps and do the right things for the people I love the most.

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