A few days after Uncle Dimitri’s engagement party, Yiayia didn’t feel so well. She went to bed early that evening, but in the middle of the night, she had a major stroke, which means that the blood stopped flowing to her brain. We didn’t find that out until later, though. The next morning, Pappou couldn’t wake her. He called Mom right after he called the ambulance. But it was too late.

It was sadder than I even know how to explain.

Yiayia’s funeral was in the last week of September, but time stopped right about then, so it could have been any day in any month in any year. Days and hours didn’t make sense any more. They all rolled into one long slow fog.

The morning of her funeral, my dad made my mom get dressed and put makeup on, even though she didn’t feel like it. She was lying on their bed in the dark and Dad had to go in and physically pull her up.

“Your mother wouldn’t want this. She’d want you to carry on as normal. And, anyway, what? You’re going to look beautiful for every other special occasion and not for your own mother’s? Tsshhh.”

So Mom forced herself to get dressed, and Aunt Soph came over and did her hair, but the air in the bedroom was flat and moldy, like the inside of a forgotten cupboard.

We buried Yiayia that afternoon, and our world changed forever.

A hundred people came to shake Pappou’s hand and kiss his wet cheeks. I’d never seen him cry before. I didn’t even know he could. It made me cry, because although I was sad, seeing him in pain was even harder. And seeing my mom, Aunt Soph, Uncle Dimitri, and everyone else broken and in pieces was the worst thing ever.

It rained and rained and rained that day.

When we all went back to Pappou’s house, Yiayia was missing from everywhere we looked.

Eleni and I lay on the spare bed to get away from all the people downstairs. We put our arms around each other like we were rocking on a boat on a choppy sea, which I guess we were.

“Where do you think Yiayia is now?” I asked Eleni in a whisper. Because how could she be here and full of life one minute and gone the next? Her glasses were on the nightstand. Her slippers were under her bed. Her favorite mug was in the cupboard, and her fingerprints were on everything in the house. How could they still be here and she wasn’t? It just didn’t seem possible.

“The Greek part of heaven,” Eleni said. “Eating koulourakia.”

“And meatballs. And makaronia tou forno. And making everyone else eat it, too,” I added.

“And making sure all the ghost children do their homework so they will have degrees and become doctors,” Eleni said.

I smiled, but a huge boulder sat inside my belly, making it hard to breathe. “Do you think her ghost is still around?”

“If it is,” Eleni said, “food will appear in the kitchen, and we will have to eat it. And she’ll make cupboards bang and glasses fall off the shelves if we don’t do our homework.”

That afternoon, we wrote letters to her in our notebooks, in case she could read them from heaven.

Dearest Yiayia,

We know you’re around because we can feel you so strongly, but it’s not the same, and you need to come back now. Uncle Dimitri is getting married and you’re going to miss it. We know you and God are close friends, so please ask him if he will change his mind and bring you back to us because we miss you so much and everyone is a mess without you.

Love from Alexandra and Eleni xxxx

We waited for hours to see if a reply magically appeared in our notebooks, but it didn’t.

We went downstairs and everyone was staring at the air and the floor in shock, like zombies. We sat there too and joined in the staring, because we couldn’t understand it either.

I didn’t think my heart could ever feel more hurt and broken than it did that day.

But there was worse to come.

I just didn’t know it yet.