Gods can’t die // yaroslava
“I can’t,” I said, hoping that my unformed argument as to why not wasn’t noticeable in my voice.
I didn’t allow myself to slump into the chair. Back straight, legs stiff, hands clasped together in my lap, over my winter coat—suicidal people have terrible posture, I convinced myself. Good posture equals mentally healthy, equals non-risk, equals no hospitalization.
The two psychiatrists in front of me were not convinced.
“Gods can’t die,” Patrick, my youngest brother, said four years later, answering my question about mortality in Greek mythology. He was, I could tell, already doubting the necessity of my call.
“Okay, but what if they would burn to ash or lose all their limbs?” I asked him.
“I don’t think they would die. That’s why they were alive when Kronos spit them out.” His voice was full of fifteen-year-old certainty and tinged with annoyance at the irrelevant questions about myths.
“Maybe they would die if you were to split them into the tiniest fraction of themselves, like atoms or something,” Patrick continued after a second. “But I guess they would just reshape back.”
The gods were endlessly resilient, then, and so not a pressing topic. The important question was, of course: “How is Laura?” This was the topic I had deliberately avoided since the beginning of our call, knowing it would derail the mythological questions I wanted to ask about and knowing that the conversation would lead there eventually anyway.
“She has already met Hector,” he told me. He had introduced them when they bumped into Laura while she was waiting for her train post-class. “She thought he was super cute,” he assured me.
Homer might have thought Hector dead, but Patrick knew that the real Hector, prince of Troy and mirror image of Greek heroism, was alive and well in his black miniature poodle. True, the dog is in all aspects far removed from the Greek ideal of semi-divinity and infinite courage. He makes up for these arguably small shortcomings through love, softness, and being generally super cute.
“But yeah, gods can’t die,” Patrick continued. “The myths would be very different if they could.”
“Why not?” the psychologist asked me that night in the cramped, poison green and orange office.
There is no Greek myth that describes how Hades got Cerberus. One day the monster was just there, with two, three, or fifty heads, towering over, guarding, and tethering the god to the underworld.
“I don’t have anyone to take care of my dogs.”
It wasn’t a lie. I had two miniature poodles back in my studio apartment.
I first saw Cerberus in a children’s book of mythology. The cover was blue with a flying Pegasus; it was a collection of short, sanitized, reductive myths. Cerberus was mentioned in just one line:
“Finally, Hercules had to fetch Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the Underworld.”
I thought about Nemo and Francis, named after the submarine captain and the Jazz-age writer.
They wouldn’t understand why I hadn’t come home.
“I can’t leave them alone,” I said.
“Right,” the psychiatrist said, looking at her colleague. I wasn’t sure how convincing my answer was, how serious my situation was. They were making this so much more difficult than it had to be. I had come to the center for a simple prescription recommended by my therapist, Clara Goodwin, whom I had started seeing not too long ago.
I hesitated to call her at first. Then I was walking down Waverly Place on my way home after another late-night rehearsal for one of the many projects we did that first year as drama students. It was dark and cold, and I stood on the corner of the Tisch building, whispering into the phone about how, surrounded by high-rises and skyscrapers and NYU banners about belonging, living—once more—didn’t seem as necessary.
I saw her that Thursday.
“How often do you think about suicide?” Clara asked.
I didn’t know how to answer the question. It wasn’t something I was consciously tracking, but I figured I could offer a rough estimate.
“I’m not sure,” I began, “I think it really depends on the day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sometimes it’s just an average, normal amount, while other days it’s more prominent,” I tried.
“The normal amount is zero.”
Now, sitting in the psychiatry room of the NYU health center, I could see this unraveling into hospital gowns, anti-slip socks, and calls home.
It’s difficult to write, to talk about depression in a way that doesn’t make people want to hospitalize you or that reads like a call for help at best, a cry for attention at worst. It’s often described as drowning.
“It’s like a wave,” I explained, already knowing it was a disservice to the Aegean waves I remembered.
Patrick and I floated in the sea, the cold water reaching our ears. It was 2014 and summer. We bobbed up with the soft, lazy waves which seemed to mimic our casual presence.
These are the same waves that housed nymphs and water gods and sirens. This is the same sea that carried thousands of heroes and soldiers and demigods to the city of Troy. The same sea that carried few back.
“I think Troy is somewhere that way,” I said, pointing away from the beach. Patrick, who decided the spot we were in was too shallow for his very advanced, seven-year-old swimming abilities, had just turned to deeper water.
“Do you know the story of the Trojan War?” I asked him.
He turned back to me, treading water.
Looking back at pictures of our many summers just outside Larnaca, one of the island’s bigger cities, I recognize places and days but can’t remember details. I attribute it to my then-simultaneous preoccupation with and indifference toward staying alive.
What I do remember are the sea and the sunset and the myths.
Cyprus makes you understand how myths are born. In the orange of sunset and sunrise, you can almost see the outlines of worship: Helios in hot beach sand, Aeolus in the breeze, easing on the waves, waves, in turn, hinting at Poseidon and sea nymphs.
The sky feels closer on Cyprus. Maybe it’s because there’s nothing to hide behind, no large trees, skyscrapers, dense development— it’s just you and the sky. It’s logical that from this sky, from this confrontation with your smallness, came the gods.
After we returned from the beach and our conversation about Troy and its prince, we rested. Patrick played upstairs with the army of small stuffed dinosaurs he packed with him every time we traveled. My other brother Robert was deep in books, Mom in the kitchen, Dad outside.
Sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom, I had a view of the pool, behind which lay the British army land, and then the sea in the distance.
The bedroom grew darker. I didn’t bother to get up and turn on the lights. My body felt heavy, glued to the linoleum floor and sticky with heat and tan. If I could, I would melt into the floor, melt away with the residual sunlight.
Gods can’t die, but humans can. I’m not sure I was conscious of the former, but with the soft sounds of family existence floating in from the living room and kitchen, the latter was occupying my brain.
As the sun set, the filtered pool waves, reflecting the purples and reds of the sky, made a mockery of the sea. I thought of what it would feel like to drown in that pool.
I didn’t do anything with that thought. Instead, I pulled out my phone and googled the specifics of the Titanomachy so my retelling for Patrick during tomorrow’s beach day would be accurate.
I traced the kitchen counter of my New York apartment, sticky with orange juice and vodka, with my fingers. Its edge was chipped and covered in half-moon-shaped defects from where party guests tried to open beer bottles on the brittle lacquer. The music from the other room was turned up once more.
I threw a lot of parties in my one-bedroom apartment my first year of NYU. This was 2018. These parties, filled mostly with strangers and friends-of-friends, made sure that depression wasn’t inherently sad. Instead, it was vodka orange in red cups and loud songs blended into louder conversations followed by noise complaints.
I could slip away, and nothing would change. Everything, everyone would continue. Everyone except Francis, who during these nights would sit under my bed waiting for people to settle on the floor or, even better, for them to leave, and Nemo, who would panic anytime someone would laugh too hard. He’d follow me to the door as I planned to slip away to the staircase.
“I wouldn’t take them,” I assured Clara during our phone session the next morning. “My family is too far away to take Francis and Nemo, and I don’t want to leave them alone.” Clara had to travel to San Diego. I was open to pausing our sessions for two weeks; she insisted we’d call instead.
She made me open my closet and throw away the pills I had been researching after the party had rippled out the night before.
They were prescribed to me after my wisdom tooth removal. I hadn’t taken them after the procedure since the label warned of its highly addictive nature and unwelcome side effects that seemed worse than the pain they were supposed to ward off.
I hadn’t thought of them till after midnight when my apartment was empty. Not until morbid curiosity and aspirations had made me Google their lethal potential. Humans can die, but not with these pills, I found. According to the search engine, an overdose was only good for paralysis and non-lethal organ failure; undesirable and burdensome outcomes, I had decided for myself and now shared with Clara. She made me throw them out.
“I wouldn’t take them,” I repeated before we hung up.
Francis and Nemo followed me to the trash chute in the hallway. The pills rattled going down. Then, it was silent except for the clinking of Francis’ nails as he darted and spun down the hall. I made a mental note to empty the trash can in my apartment.
At the peak of Cypriot summer, the sun rises around 4:30 in the morning. My phone alarm was set for 4:15. It was quiet except for the sound of Nemo’s nails on the linoleum floor as we went downstairs.
As I put on Nemo’s collar in our driveway, his fur still flattened from sleep, the sky had already changed; the deep navy of night shifted into what would be the azure of summer skies.
We reached the public beach in just five minutes. It lay empty and quiet.
You could see where sea had crept onto land; a line of drying seaweed and occasional plastic signified the temporary expansion. Now, in the morning, the sea showed no signs of these nightly ventures, and the waves which had gently rocked Patrick and me the day before had smoothed out to a still, wet mirror.
I placed a towel on the sand, colored by the iodine and cold from the night, just as the sky turned orange.
“Gods can’t die,” Patrick would tell me eight years later, when I called him from New York. I’m not sure I was aware of the immortality of gods in 2014. As Helios continued his trek upwards till all the early-morning reds and purples and oranges had moved from the sky to the trees, and flowers, and earth-toned houses of Cyprus, that wasn’t important. Neither was the mortality of man.
Nemo shook the sleep from his eyes and sand from his fur and paws, worrying about how close the water was. He shifted his weight back, pressing into my leg. We stayed on the beach for thirty minutes, watching a god that wouldn’t die pull along a star that eventually would.
Yaroslava is an Amsterdam-based writer with a background in journalism and theater. Her cultural and journalistic work, including essays, interviews, and cultural reporting, has appeared in Cultured Magazine, Unpublished Magazine, and the now-defunct Shame Magazine. She is also the creator of The Aphrodite Project, a fictional podcast exploring mythology, modern love, and the performance of femininity.