It's now the evening of January 2, 2015. Many hours ago, we received the anticipated call from the Hellenic Nursing Home. Ma (the name she hated) had gone to sleep for the last time here on earth. The phone has finally stopped ringing and the house is very quiet. This is the time for reflection. Anyway, she never liked music playing when we were mourning or during Holy week. That was one of the many admonitions making me think how life with her was more like life with an Old Testament Prophet than with the saint whom people sometimes turn the newly departed into. She wanted perfection and always warned us when we were sliding away from it or falling short of it. At the same time, she knew what to admire: the advancement, the beauty and home making skills of her nieces, the industriousness of her nephews, and the unrealized potential of everyone within her immediate household. Those of us sitting at her funeral, praying for her in their own houses, or having known her, will recount instances when they got appraised in pointed words that would have brought a smile of approval to the lips of Jeremiah. She kept her birthplace, a tiny village on the island of Chios, with her to the very last. Picking figs with her grandmother, with whom she lived for companionship and refuge from an over-crowded parsonage, bathing in the sea, going off to school, playing at one of the many Homer's rocks that populate the Aegean islands, living the liturgical calendar with her father, an Orthodox priest, the foods, the sweets, the dances, the fires of war that destroyed Smyrna, these never left her memory. Yet, more than any other place, Somersworth, New Hampshire was special to her. There, she knew the rewards of friendships on the factory floor, sang in the choir of its church, kept house for her father, its priest, learned to drive a car, and played hostess to her New York niece and nephew. There, she was married. In their own way, Greek mothers of her generation were icons of Panagia (the All-Holy Mother of Christ): they brought God into the house as she brought Him into the world; they administered the fasts, read the Salutations on the Fridays of Lent, and were judge, jury and executioner over adherence to the Ten Commandments. We awoke and went to bed each night with Christ's Mother, "Kali mera Panagitsa mou, kane me megalo kai kalo paedi, amin". I don't know if she wrote that prayer, but I do know we were before the icons in the morning and before bed "Kali nikta, Panagitsa mou" to it after the Lord's Prayer. There was a popular song a few years ago by John Mellencamp, "I fought authority, authority always wins" and she could have written it. All teachers whether in Greek or American school were right all the time. All priests and doctors, for doctors especially though grudgingly, were to be respected and obeyed. She knew first hand, the fishbowl in which priests' families live, and would scorch anyone who gossiped about them. Learning was, as the old rhyme had it "the things of God" ("Little moon shining, Shine for me that I may walk, So that I may go to school, So that I may learn my letters, Letters that instruct me, In the ways of God."). She believed it and made us believe it. The greatest sin was the two-sided hamartia of being disrespectful and having earned disrespect by "missing the mark." At the end, God softened her. That iron will became acceptance of her new life in nursing home care. That straight from the shoulder, got you right between the eyes, became a sweetness. There were more welcoming smiles than ever. Instead of the words that could set us on fire to work harder, live cleaner, pray with greater fervor, we learned to treasure the few phrases she commanded, "Here come my children" which covered grandsons, nieces and nephews, wives, and dearest friends. Instead of corrective phrases, we heard, "everything is nice." And in her last hours, when she was squeezing my hand and waking up every now and then, looking around as though to say, you're here, alright, I'm going back to sleep now, she let us leave before she left us. We've been joking about how heaven will be cleaner and its population more disciplined for her arrival, but we know that few people have ever lived life as though it were preparation for the real life to come. This was what guided her every step, what she wished us to emulate, and what we can never forget.