Some of us are blessed with angel guides here on earth. I met mine, Thalia Georgiou, 22 years ago. At the tender and ancient age of 15, Thalia peered over a precipice and saw her possible demise.  A tumor snaked around Thalia’s carotid artery, threatening to cut off the blood supply to her brain or empty her life’s blood should a surgeon’s hand err.  After receiving a death sentence in her home country of Greece, she arrived in New York City to prove her doctors wrong. She came for chemo to shrink the tumor, surgery to remove it, and radiation to prevent its return. She came to survive the odds.

Flashback — 1998 —

I get to know Thalia’s mother before I make inroads with the teen. Her mother attends a parent respite group that I co-lead with a social worker. Thalia prefers the jewelry making classes in the adult recreation program to the children’s recreation area where I work. But one day, she rolls her IV pole into the sun-drenched playroom and asks me for some time — in private.

As I close the door to my tiny office, Thalia reaches into her knapsack and hands me a clear, plastic bag.  “Open it,” she encourages me. I obey her and find a long braid of hair encased within. “Touch it. Smell it. Feel it,” she says.  “Look at how it’s red on the top and brown underneath. I dyed it once. See all the beautiful split ends. When I had hair, I hated split ends. But they are so beautiful now. Sometimes I tell my mom, ‘Get my hair. I want to sleep with it.’ And I curl up with my hair on my pillow.” As I follow her instructions and bring the braid to my cheek, she watches me expectantly, a faux panther tattoo adorning one side of her naked scalp.

Thalia puts the hair carefully away. In its place, she brings out several photo album pages. Holding them on her lap, she slides her chair close to me and points. “This is my neighborhood taken from my best friend’s house. You can see my house from here. This is the roof. See the little park at the end of the street, and the trees? It’s such a pretty street.” She shows me photos of boys, describing them as both friends and boyfriends. Thalia confides in me that one of them looks like a boy here at the hospital. “You know I was thinking. I’m away from home and very sick. He’s here, very sick. Why not?”

There are pictures of her best friend, a lovely girl who “took some of my boyfriends, but that’s okay.” In one shot, she and Thalia are at the airport on the day that she left for New York City.  The friend is clearly distraught and tearful. I say, “I can almost imagine what it must be like seeing you off, not knowing if and when she’ll ever see you agin., feeling helpless to do anything for you.”

“Yeah, and how do you think I feel?!” she retorts. “A million miles away from home, alone, facing death.”

A small gash appears in my heart.  “Are you facing death?” I ask.

“Well, when I came here they said that without treatment, I’d be dead in four months. Then they said that with treatment … well, they said that even if my tumor responds to treatment that I only have 30% chance anyway.”

“Do your friends know this?”  I am wondering how she is coping, who she is leaning on.

“Well, I told them all that I was dying right away.” Thalia smiles gleefully. “And you should have seen all the attention I got!”

I note that amongst all of the pictures, I see none of her father. She explains that she has drawings of him. She hands me a sketch pad. “I’ll show you my dirty picture first.” She turns the pages to a pastel drawing of a graceful, naked woman. A pencil drawing of a woman in lingerie, a handcuff dangling from her finger. And two drawings of her father,  profiles of him relaxing with music, with one shoe off,  and another at the beach. sporting long, curly hair and a hairy pot-belly.

 

There is a self-portrait entitled Mirror Image, August 1997. A slightly wary version of Thalia in pencil, braid intact, tilts her head to the left,  her eyes trained to the right at her own image in the mirror. I don’t notice any trace of the long scar from her initial surgery that presently runs along the left side of her neck, and so I ask, “Were you ill yet when you drew this?”

It’s as if she knows what I am asking. “My head was turned — see — no scar.”

We pour over many more drawings, each with a story to tell. The museum walk continues when Thalia holds out a large, heavy ring. It is silver with a jade stone. “This was given to me by a friend of my mother’s a long time ago. When I think of this ring, I think about my whole life, the mistakes I’ve made, the things I’ve learned from them. You know, when I came to the hospital, I really changed. I am not the same person I was before. And three days after I got here, the ring broke. It was so strong that a train could run over it. But look, I can’t wear it anymore.”

The last thing she digs out of her bag is a handful of three Greek audio cassettes. I ask her if she wants me to borrow them and listen to them at home. “Not exactly,” she answers and pulls a cassette player out with a flourish. She cues up a song for me and plugs me in. She translates for me as the music sears my eardrums.

“It’s like this. When there is a knot in your throat, and the ceiling is spinning, you feel your tummy is going to be ripped open. This is love, and it is death and resurrection combined, and it goes on and on and on.”

That hour spent with Thalia so many years ago serves as a permanent beacon in my work and life. Her humor, honesty, wisdom, and bravery continue to inspire me. She reached out to me on FaceBook when she turned thirty, and we remembered and laughed together, musing about the horror of that year, and the hope.  She returned to Greece after treatment and now makes a living designing and creating jewelry, clothes and wedding dresses.  She developed the building blocks of these skills while in the hospital. She was the kid who used her radiation face mask as a display model for homemade earrings and necklaces. She could turn torture into beauty – and she still does.

Thalia was married this past week to her soulmate at a castle in Italy. Here she is in the wedding dress that she created, in the life that she resurrected.

 

 

 

 

 

You can visit her Etsy shop and purchase her amazingly original designs at https://www.etsy.com/shop/THAGartDESIGN/items and follow her on FaceBook at https://m.facebook.com/ThagArtDesign/ and https://m.facebook.com/bloomingmusejewellery and her Instagram accounts are Thag.Art.Design and blooming_muse_jewellery. She models all of her works of art. Note the ring in the lower right-hand photo………