1 / 9
1 / 9

An Early Funeral

A 2+1 house in a quiet neighbourhood of Uskudar, close to a grove.  The furniture is not as old as antiques, but it is not angular, shiny modern furniture. There is a smell of wood as soon as you enter the house. Nothing we see in the name of wood is not laminated chipboard that looks like wood on the outside, because it is made of real wood.

It is not a perfect house touched by an interior designer where no one can find a trace of life. On the contrary, there is a trace of a memory and experience in every corner. It is a bit messy, for example, the bed is not made, the bathrobe is thrown on the bed, the clothes from the previous days are on the chair, the used Kleenexes from the bag exchange, the business cards that were never returned and looked at again are scattered on the dining table.

The walls are adorned with posters of old exhibitions, decorative paintings, obviously made by an amateur hand but decorative in terms of their colours, replica paintings of famous painters, small objects brought from many parts of the world.

A small, slightly hunchbacked woman sits in her sixties, wearing a green blouse and a khaki-coloured skirt underneath, a ‘youth-style’ green blouse that her peers would not wear. She has carefully styled her short black and white hair, a lipstick left over from the morning on her lips. She rests her elbow on her knee and her hand on her forehead.

She has just come from the funeral of her childhood friend. He reaches for the phone. He looks at what his Facebook friends have written about his lost friend. How each of them praised the deceased? He gets angry, switches off, then picks up the phone again. There would be many people who would be surprised by his fancy appearance and his foul mouth:

“Son of a bitch! You should have said that when you were alive!

A fear gripped him, “What if I leave just like that? “What if I leave without saying goodbye to anyone. Who knows what they’ll say behind my back? Should I give myself a funeral before I die… It’s unthinkable. But how…¨       

His son senses something strange in her mood as she sits up and down, cries and gets angry. It is clear that she is upset, but he suspects there is more to it.

“I’m going to have a big birthday party this year.

“What are you saying mum, what a birthday, what a celebration… Look at what you are thinking on the day of Aunt Zeynep’s funeral. Her birthday is still two months away.

Stay out of it. Prepare an invitation for me, I’ll tell you what to write and who to send it to”.

“He knew that whatever her mother put her mind to, she would eventually do it or have it done. So, he had already learnt that there was no point in unnecessarily prolonging the conversation.

He was able to say “OK, OK, OK, I understand, who knows what you have in mind! ….”.

…..

(2 months later)

About twenty people, mostly women, were sitting at the long table in front of the wall where giant flowers were drawn on the concrete floor. Everyone was talking to each other in a buzz, looking at the coloured papers and pens in front of them and trying to understand what was going on.

“What’s the matter, are you going to die, why the hell did you gather us at gunpoint!”¨  

When he stood up and managed to attract everyone’s attention by hitting the glass with the knife several times:

“OK, OK, here goes. Today is my birthday, as you know. I’m turning 59. Don’t argue about whether it’s 59 or 60, like every year. (Laughs) You know that full age is bad luck for me, so I always have big celebrations early.¨

Don’t we know! There’s no way to forget your 30th birthday when you came back drunk after everyone had dispersed!

¨Ya really.. I couldn’t forget that birthday, how many years have passed.. Anyway. First of all, I would like to thank you very much for accompanying me until this age and for what you have contributed to me. I’m glad I have you!

¨As you know, we recently lost my childhood friend Zeynep suddenly. This touched me very much because neither she nor her relatives had the chance to say goodbye to her. And if she had heard the beautiful words spoken to her while she was alive, maybe life would have flowed in a completely different way for her. I wonder why we don’t tell our loved ones how we feel about them and what they have added to our lives when they are alive.

¨You are so right…¨ Suddenly there was a murmur of heads and words of agreement.

¨So now you take the pens and paper in front of you and write what you are going to post on Facebook after I die.