Sarah Kafatou - Pomegranate Years: A Journal of Aging, Art, Love, and Loss on a Greek Island

Pomegranate Years, an intimate account of three years lived on the island of Crete, documents a turbulent, stressful time of economic and political crisis in Greece. It is also deeply concerned with illness and death, as the authors husband Fotis Kafatos, a distinguished scientist, is increasingly affected by Alzheimers disease.

Fotis remains a full human being, authentic and resilient despite his impairments. Sarah, in her journal, reflects on his situation as well as on current events, the vicissitudes of daily life, and the practice of art. Long walks in the mountains reveal hidden aspects of the island, and her understanding, and belonging, are enriched through historical awareness and conversations with friends.

As an account of a solitude, a couple, a family, and a culture, Pomegranate Years is concerned with the question of how to live well at any age, but especially as one grows older and a beloved life draws almost imperceptibly nearer to its end.

When news that the exceptional scientist Fotis Kafatos had been diagnosed with Alzheimers disease reached his many friends and colleagues, the only consolation was the devoted presence of his talented wife Sarah. In this diary, she recounts how she maintained his dignity and her own, as he set forth, an Odysseus destined not to return to his Penelope. It is a moving story, honestly told.Harold Varmus, author of The Art and Politics of Science, Nobel Prize-winning scientist, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute

Six weeks before the celebrated scientist Fotis Kafatos died of Alzheimers disease, his wife Sarah noted that the pomegranates in her Cretan garden are ripe, and Persephone will be eating her handful of seeds. Whoever eats even a single pomegranate seed will overcome distress. Accordingly, Sarah Kafatous journal focuses less on loss than on coping. Recorded so well here, these three pomegranate years reveal their Persephone emulating Miltons Eve who, hand in hand with Adam when expelled from Eden, wiped away her tears.Peter Bien, Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, and past President of the Modern Greek Studies Association

I started this journal when my husband, Fotis Kafatos, became unable to continue his life in science and we began living year-round in the village of Fortetsa, at the edge of the city of Heraklion on the island of Crete. In it I recorded my impressions of daily life, the world around us, and Fotis in his illness. Much happiness, and some sadness, was intrinsic to what I wrote.

My original family was American, of English, French, and German descent, and I grew up in cities on the east and west coasts of the United States. Fotis was Greek, from Crete. When I was nineteen and he was twenty-two we met by chance at a social event. We talked, we met again, and soon we both felt that we should spend the rest of our lives together. At that time I felt very strongly about a few things and was very naive about much else. I loved reading and writing and knew they would be central to my life, and after meeting Fotis I knew I wanted to stay with him. I assumed that everything else, being of less importance, would fall into place.

I graduated from college in 1965 and went on to graduate school in English and American literature, but never completed my PhD. Fotis received his doctorate in the same year, was hired as an instructor and rapidly promoted, and in 1969 became a tenured professor at Harvard. At twenty-nine, he was the youngest full professor in the history of the university up to that time. This was the more remarkable because, before winning a Fulbright scholarship to attend college in the US, he had lived his entire life in Crete.

Fotis wanted to return to Greece and contribute to science there. When he was offered the Chairmanship of Biology at the University of Athens he took that on in addition to his role at Harvard. We divided our time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Athens until 1982, when he left the University of Athens to help create a new university and research center in Crete. In 1994 he left both Harvard and the University of Crete to become Director General of the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg, Germany. Twelve years later we moved from Heidelberg to London, where he was appointed to a Professorship at Imperial College. Shortly after that, he became the founding President of the European Research Council, the preeminent source of academic research funding in Europe. Several years passed before we noticed that, in small ways, he was becoming less able to orient himself in space and time.

During the early years of our life in Athens, Greece was under military dictatorship. Fotis affiliated himself with the democratic student resistance movement and helped it in small ways, but I needed to find some other way to express my opposition to the regime. I began writing a book, in Greek, about politics and economic development in Latin America. This was my roundabout way of responding to the situation of Greece as a relatively poor and troubled country on the outskirts of Europe.

After publishing my book, I did a variety of things that I hadnt anticipated doing. I volunteered in a homeless shelter, led a monthly academic seminar on modern Greece, joined the editorial board of a political journal, took piano lessons, and made a very gradual breakthrough in my longstanding, long frustrated, effort to write poems. I also began for the first time to draw and paint. My mother had been a fine professional artist, and, though Id believed since childhood that I could never do anything of the kind, I happily discovered that I could. I studied painting for two stimulating years, then left art school to earn a Master of Fine Arts in poetry.

While we were living in Germany I played chamber music, painted and exhibited my work, taught poetry for a time, tried my hand at literary translation, published essays on European literature, and began writing a novel that would take me ten years to complete. After we moved to England, I continued with my essays, poems, and translations, finished the novel, and made my first foray into composing music. I also earned a diploma in life coaching, though I didnt go on to create a practice. All of that, not to mention my life with our family and friends, has been marvelously challenging, rewarding, and fun. None of it would have been possible without the loving support of my husband Fotis, to whom my life and this journal are dedicated.