Mariam the Paralytic

Eldress Mariam the Paralytic of Limassol, known in the world as "Aunt Maroula", was a woman who was bedridden and ill for many years, became a nun before her death, and fell asleep in the Lord on 18 August 2004. She is honoured by the faithful as a symbol of patience and consolation, without synodal canonization.

Left in bed in the prime of life, she bore for over thirty years a body given over to suffering. Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol, who had known her long, says that she was paralyzed and bedridden from the age of eighteen and had eighteen to twenty operations; another narrator speaks of thirty years in bed and fourteen operations, among them illnesses of the breast, stomach, liver and eyes. She lived in a house near the Metropolis so ruined that one day the floor gave way and she fell through with her bed. She was married to Christakis; after nineteen years of marriage he died suddenly, and she was left with no one in the world: her brother was in Australia, old himself. She could not even go to her husband's funeral.

Yet her room was always full of people. They came daily to be comforted by her and found her face radiant. When asked how she was, she answered: "Glory to You, O God." She said that she could understand every pain because she suffered with every pain, and she regarded all who came as her children. On the day her husband died, she tells, the devil whispered to her to take the pills on her bedside table and end her life. She cried out from the depths of her soul: "God, save me." Then the Lord appeared to her on a cross taller than the door, His face shining like the sun, and said three words to her: "Faith, patience, hope." The room filled with an indescribable fragrance. Further strength came, she said, from a miracle she attributed to Elder Paisios, who healed a breast cancer she had before an operation.

Toward the end she received the monastic schema and the name Mariam. Metropolitan Athanasios said that it was impossible to enter her room and find her alone; often there was a kind of procession around her bed. A month before she fell asleep she told a visitor that her end was near and that she had asked God for two things: light and reason to the end. The request was granted. She died on Wednesday, 18 August 2004, in great pain, after a cancer was added to her illnesses.