An extremely touching memorial

A post from Adventurese of an Orthodox Mom:

In 1998, at the age of 101 my great-grandmother Calliope passed away. She was a very, very special woman. She lost her husband at a very young age and immediately moved in with my grandparents and spent the remainder of her days tending to her children, grandchildren and eventually great-grandchildren and serving the Church with all of her heart.

This photograph is from New Years Day in 1983. Luckily for me, we remained this close until her death. Now she remains in my prayers.

I'll never forget when I was about a sophomore or junior in high school she fell and broke her hip. She told us the devil kept teasing her and he told her that he blew out her vigil lamp (candili). So she climbed out of bed and walked down the dark hallway, one she'd walked a million times before, and when she reached to turn on the light she fell and broke her hip. My grandparents called the ambulance, but she wouldn't leave until someone re-lit the candili, which had indeed gone out.

Now, I'll be honest. At that point in my life my concerns rarely stretched beyond what I was going to wear the next day. I loved my family dearly and my mother made sure we attended Divine Liturgy every Sunday and all of that but I have to confess to knowing the bare minimum of our Faith. So, these 'conversations' with the devil were nothing more than old yiayia tales or superstitions to me.

Whenever I spent the night there she would make sure we said our prayers in front of the iconostasi and when we laid down to sleep she would come tuck us in and make the sign of the cross over our pillows. It was all comforting and gave me, as a young girl, a feeling of security. I can remember awaking the next morning only to be reminded to wash my face and say morning prayers before coming into the kitchen. By the time I was finished she was usually sitting in her little armchair by the front window, reading. She tried very hard to get me to read the Bible in Greek with her and to learn different prayers. I did manage to write one or two of them down, thanks to my constant journal keeping, but sadly enough most of them have been forgotten.

Yesterday I was going through one of my journals where I keep different prayers, psalms, quotes, etc that I especially like when I found a piece of paper with a prayer printed on it that a friend had given me. It felt so familiar to me. Initially I thought it was simply because I'd read it before but that just didn't settle it. As I flipped through my other journals where I have prayers and different things written, including the two prayers from my great-grandmother, I found it. I read them both line by line to make sure. And sure enough it was one of the prayers she tried, unsuccessfully until now, to teach me. I can remember her coming into my grandmother's living room where I layed on the floor watching Nickelodeon and making me reapeat line after line of this prayer.

She kept telling me in Greek, "Don't forget Sevasti, you're going to need this, your children are going to need this. Don't forget."...

Complete post here.