As Vassiliki Xidias approaches her 80th birthday on February 25, she is planning a celebration at a swanky hotel with her six children. But with Vassiliki, a party is rarely the whole story. While most grandmothers are content with tea, she celebrated her 70th by jumping out of a plane.
“Have you ever been skydiving?” she asks. “The hardest part is waiting for others to jump before you. Once you are falling, it is the best feeling. You hold your nose and just come down. It is beautiful. I wish it didn’t stop.”
The skydive was a gift from her children, inspired by her son-in-law’s experience who had tried sky-diving and loved it. While some might joke that a son-in-law encouraging a parachute jump is a plot to get rid of a pethera (mother-in-law), Vassiliki saw only pure adrenaline.
“If anything happens to me, the kids are grown up,” she reasons.
“My husband only found out after it happened, and could not believe it,” she adds. “He is more traditional than I.”
Her “tomboy” spirit was forged in the village of Soulinari, Kalamata, which she left at age nine to arrive in Australia in 1955. The transition was stark.
“In those days, they put older kids who didn’t know English in kindergarten,” she remembers.
Vassiliki never saw the inside of a high school; instead, her youth was spent caring for five younger siblings and working the bustling stalls of the Victoria Markets. By 17, she was a bride. By her early 20s, she was a mother of six, including a set of twins.
Vassiliki mastered the “hustle” decades before it was a trend. She worked as a seamstress by day and studied fashion design by night, later running a milk bar. “Always have two jobs,” she says with a glint in her eye. “If you don’t like one, there’s always the other.”
In her 50s, she pivoted again, returning to school to become a nurse. She only retired at 66 because, as she puts it, “I noticed many people in the nursing home were younger than I was.”
Her time in aged care taught her more than medicine. “Older people know a lot,” she whispers. “They taught me many things, even about shares. I learned more from life experience than any textbook.”
These days, she gives back by advocating for others and helping her peers and seniors navigate aged care and home packages.
Vassiliki still “walks like she’s running,” power-walking rather than driving. A survivor of Stage 1 breast cancer, she approaches life with the same stoicism she used to care for her own mother, who lived to 101.
“My mother was my hero,” she says. “She had a hard life, and lost her parents when she was eight. But I am so happy she died peacefully in her own home.”
This June, Vassiliki and her husband – the quiet complement to her high-energy spirit – will celebrate 63 years of marriage. They share six children, 19 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, but she isn’t slowing down. She still drives, socially active at her local Greek club with admin tasks, and hopes to visit Althorp to see the resting place of Princess Diana.
As she looks toward 80, Vassiliki remains open to skydiving again or even bungee jumping in New Zealand.
To Vassiliki, age is just another height, and she’s never been afraid of the view. “You only have one life, so you may as well make the most of it,” she says.
