Every family has their secrets, and ours was that Yia Yia was a bit crazy. One could point to her sudden and animated outbursts of anger in awkward places. Her decades of pill popping that made her loopy and fall over. There was her seemingly random religious proclamations. Her lifelong gambling obsession. Her propensity to nick items from stores without paying for them, and sometimes getting caught.

It became the inside joke of our family. Whenever a new incident happened and the word of it spread amongst our family, there was an ashamed amusement over it. A laugh and sort of exasperated “That’s Yia Yia.” It could reach boiling points sometimes. Like when we would receive calls from the police because she was acting irate in a store or cursing at family members because they disagreed with her assertion of events.

In my high school history class, I had to do an assignment which I have gathered that just about American schoolkid must do at one time or another: you interview a relative about their life. The idea is to glean what it was like to be alive during historical events we all live through. I decided to interview Yia Yia.

I had always known she grew up in Greece. I had known she lived there through the Second World War. I knew she came to America by way of meeting and marrying my grandfather, an American GI in Europe.

This assignment brought new aspects of her life to light. She recalled being in a field and watching German and Bulgarian soldiers march into her town. She recalled seeing her neighbor executed in the street by Bulgarian soldiers. She told me about watching her mother eat sawdust and breadcrumbs mixed with vinegar during the Greek famine, and Jewish neighbors disappearing. She recalled hurrying home one night during the war, as she was out past the curfew, and being stopped by Bulgarian soldiers at a checkpoint. She relayed how they threatened her life, and she was only saved because a passing German officer put a stop to what these Bulgarians were doing, believe it or not. It took me decades to realize and wonder if there was more to that specific story, that she didn’t say. In the context of a war in which literally millions of women were violently raped by soldiers of armies traversing and occupying their towns.

Not all of her stories were of her being a victim, however. Some were defiant, maybe even heroic. She told me about how she beat up the wife of the commanding Bulgarian General in charge of the occupation of her town and had to hide for days as soldiers searched for her. She told me about being rounded up with other women in her town, being put onto trucks and driven into the mountains. She survived to tell me the story by jumping out of the truck while it was driving and hiding in the mountains for a period of time.

Yia Yia was born in 1923. Greece was invaded in 1941. She endured these catastrophic events as she was coming into womanhood. More forgotten to those outside of Greece, however, was that Greece also had a brutal civil war that began when the Axis occupation ended and didn’t end until 1949. It is often considered the first proxy war of the Cold War. Yia Yia really had her youth robbed by the brutality of war.

My own experience with war came when I was 20. I was sent to Afghanistan as an infantryman and saw war through that lense. I had to fight for my life on numerous occasions. I had close brushes with death. I watched an 18-year-old friend take his last breath with his head in my lap, as we sat in a field. I put two other friends into their body bags, as well. I saw civilians caught in the middle of it all. Many stories too intimate, still too fresh to tell, even to those I am closest to. Of course, I have also lost many friends to suicide, since.

If surviving war was one journey, “coming home” Is another. “Coming home” is really the journey of recovery from it. It is a process, not an event. For many, it can be a journey that never ends. A decade plus removed from my service overseas, I’ve been better able to put much in perspective. I’ve started to realize the similarities between Yia Yia and me. Replace pills with various other substances, especially marijuana. Searching for spirituality in different places. The violent and random outbursts of anger that terrified family members.

This is how we “carry it.” The trauma, the guilt, the frustration. It isn’t pretty or neat or easy to explain. How can one even begin to explain it all? Especially to those who have no concept of what it is like to live through something like war.

Yia Yia passed away in 2015. I didn’t realize most of what I just said until after she passed away. I am not sure how I could have used this knowledge while she was alive. I do think I could have been more patient with her. Maybe I could have listened to her more about her life, about what she saw? I think these, because it’s what I often wish for, for those around me. I feel a camaraderie with Yia Yia now. An understanding. In a way it now feels, how we spoke about her, is how we speak about me. How she acted was inexplicable to many in our family. But I get it, Yia Yia.