Suliko

Suliko
January 15, 2006

I was in America when the news came by email: grandma Suliko had passed away in her sleep. The families were gathering to pay their respects, and suddenly that all too frequent feeling that I was far away from where I needed to be came to me. It seems so many people have died when I have been far away.

Memories:
I remember the sour face Suliko made whenever the summer-crazed great-grandchildren careened past her cooking table, her affectionate disapproval in all the wrinkles of her face. After their screams and giggles were already far into the next room, she would say, ‘tskh, tskh, slow down! Give a grandmother some peace!’ She would look at me and toss her hands in the air in exasperation, a rueful smile creeping across her face.

On the fortieth day after death, it is traditional for the families and friends of the deceased to gather to formally bid her soul rest. I’m back in Georgia now, so I had the opportunity to go along with the close family members to the cemetery for the beginning of the ceremony. It was bitterly cold, a harsh wind swirling flurries around the small gates and metal fences surrounding family plots in the big city cemetery. The place is enormous, and crowded with these family plots.

Nino and I wove our way through on a familiar path, we had been here the day after Easter last year to pay our family respects to Suliko’s husband. That day, it had also been cold. Suliko and I had sat on the low wall looking at the grave, and as her eyes became tearful, I asked her about her husband. She would only say, ‘he was a good man, a very good man.’

When the kids ran around us crazily on the small muddy paths between fences, Suliko made her typical chastisement almost out of habit. I said, ‘isn’t it a blessing that the children are here to remind us that life continues?’ This is a typical thought in Georgia as I’ve learned from the supra tradition. But I could see from Suliko’s face, old with memories and experiences, that she was already living in the past, not the future. Her friends were dead, her closest family members, her generation. The future will be the future, but I had the distinct impression then that Suliko wouldn’t mind joining her husband.

We approached the same plot, and there I saw the second mound where before there had only been one. Suliko was with her husband. But so strange, because when I left for America just four months ago, she was in perfect health, and now she was beneath that pile of dirt? I couldn’t really picture it.

Many people showed up, friends from all over, and we lined up and poured our proffered glass of wine on the grave. Some said prayers, we ate bread and cheese until it was all out. And we helped Luarsab’s mother come out of the grave area where she had been sobbing the entire time, and back to the car.

Finally there was a large supra with sixty people or so, with a prescribed order of toasts for the deceased’s departing soul and family members. But I did not feel personally moved by this supra and was disappointed it wasn’t a smaller occasion with more personalized toasts.