What sets death apart from most biological processes, however, is the cultural stigma we've attached to it through time. Today, in most [Western] societies, death is regarded as a tragic event, with strong feelings of sadness, grief, depression, and hollowness attached to it. As someone who was raised in one such culture, I too have been programmed to process death this way; not necessarily when I come to think about as a generic concept, but rather when it relates directly to someone near and dear to me.
Last week, my grandpa passed on.
I received the news while at work, and thus, I had a lot of distractions to keep my mind busy for the rest of the day. It was not until I came home and took out my grandpa's sweater from my closet that the realization of what really happened truly hit me. I found myself curled up on my couch, hugging and crying into his sweater, with a napkin that he used, which I had not thrown away, in its right pocket.
Since they're back home in Turkey, I could not be with him or my family at the time of or following his passing. As a result, it's been a little challenging to grasp the reality of the situation. Since I am not there to sense the absence of his physical presence, the only evidence I had of his passing were the words of my mom up until the moment I held his sweater in my hands. If not for such physical evidences, for all I know, my grandpa could still be waiting for me back home, ready to greet me at the airport as he did just a few months ago.
Marcel Proust once wrote: "We think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears." I must agree with him on the effectiveness of objects to act as reminders and physical manifestations of our memories of loved ones. Perhaps this is the case because objects are the only visible and tangible connections we have with those who are no longer visible or tangible to us. And that is most probably why all the emotions that were somehow bottled up earlier in the day at work were immediately triggered the moment I held his sweater in my arms. It felt like I was holding a part of him in my arms, and the thought that I would not be able to do that again (at least until I also pass on) struck me very hard. I thought I felt the sensation of missing someone after a few months of being away from my family, but I had never experienced missing someone like I missed my grandpa that moment. It felt like someone had dug a bottomless hole in my chest and created a vortex inside it, which sucked in everything colorful living inside of me. I felt so empty and so full of darkness inside. It was the kind of darkness that I imagine a black hole creates or emits or whatever it does as it sucks everything around it inside and sends it somewhere never to be found.
It took me a few days to get back to my normal self. However, I was never quite able to extensively talk about his passing, or what he means to me, or why I love him so much to anyone after his passing because no one in my family is quite ready to talk in such depth. That's when I knew I had to write about it.
One tradition that I really like, but that isn't practiced in Turkey is the eulogy. Even though my grandpa's funeral has already taken place and even though I was unable to attend it (physically at least), I think the best way for me to get a little bit off my chest will be to write an eulogy for him, so that he can feel, read, or hear it wherever he is.
So here it goes.
"My grandpa always called me his 'lawyer'. I guess it's fitting that I'm the one delivering this speech :) Ever since I was little, I would stick up for him whenever my grandma, mom, or aunt and him argued over anything. He was the only guy in a family full of girls and I could imagine how isolating that could be if the girls formed a team and ganged up on him. He's always had a special place in my heart and since he was not the type of person to bother getting into a verbal quarrel with anyone, I would get into them for him.
I didn't do it just for the sake of doing it, but rather because I felt that he was never one to use his words frugally, even when he was in the right, which sometimes meant that he would be bombarded with verbal vomit by my darling aunt or grandma, who don't mind using their words pretty generously.
He wouldn't talk much or bother to respond to anyone who was complaining about something to him. If you didn't really know him well, you could interpret his silence as indifference. It wasn't. Rather, it was because he believed that it was never worth getting into an argument with anyone over frugal matters. He spent most of his childhood in boarding school, followed by military school, which gave him so much discipline and taught him so much about life that he knew what sorts of real problems people could be faced with in life. Therefore, he didn't find it worthwhile to fret over matters that he didn't believe belonged in that category.
During my twenty three years of knowing him (or eighteen, if we don't count the first five years of my existence in this world), I have never heard him speak ill of a single soul. If he had a problem with you, you would be the first to know about it. Needless to say, this probably didn't make him the most popular person in the world, but it certainly made him one of the most highly respected. I can bet you anything that there's not a single soul who can tell me that they didn't really know how my grandpa felt about them, or if he was genuine in his interactions with them. He was who he was, said what he felt, and let you deal with the rest.
If I ask each of you in this room today to describe my grandpa to me, I am positive that each of you will describe the same man. That's one of the reasons why I love and respect him as much as I do, and most important of all, truly understand who he is. If there's one quality I value more than anything in people, it is genuineness and authenticity. I love people who are true to themselves, who are themselves no matter what context or setting they're in, or by whom they're surrounded. My grandpa is the epitome of authenticity. In that sense, I like to think that we're very similar to each other. I care so much more about speaking my mind than about being liked by others. Perhaps that's why we understood and appreciated each other more than any other two people in our family has possibly ever been able to do so.
As I mentioned before, and as I'm sure most of you already know from your interactions with him, he didn't like to talk that much in large group settings. If you wanted to chat with him, the best way to do it was over a game of backgammon. But that meant that you always had to be prepared to not only lose to him, but also to get criticized in the meantime for all the mistakes you made during the game. He was my favorite person to play backgammon with because he was the best at it. Sometimes he would end up playing against himself as he corrected all my moves, but that was just one of the beauties of playing with him. He taught me how to play when I was in middle school, during one of my summer vacations, all of which were spent at my grandparents' summer house in Karamursel with my mom until a few years ago. Since I am an only child and had no friends in town during the summer, one of my favorite things to do would be to tag along to my grandpa during the day and hang out with him and his friends (most of whom are here today) to watch their backgammon marathons that would last hours. As I'm sure some of you remember, he would let me roll the dice for him when it was his turn to play, and call me his lucky charm whenever he won (which was majority of the time). If one of you guys teased him for cheating by having me roll the dice, he would give me a kiss on the cheek and tell me to never leave his side.
I loved hanging out with him when he played backgammon, because it allowed me to get to know him not as a grandpa, but as a great friend and a great person who had gone through a lot of challenges and interesting experiences during his life. Seeing how much respect and love his friends had for him, and what a great sense of humor he had when he did what he loved to do, I got to see a side of him that I don't think even my grandma, mom, or aunt got to see. On several occasions, we went fishing together, and he taught me how to prepare the bait, throw the hook, pull it up, and unhook the fish. We'd talk for hours on his small canoe, feed the seagulls that would wait by us on the water for some freshly caught fish, and head back home to enjoy our catches of the morning. Looking back at all those summers we spent together, I am ever so grateful for not having any siblings or any friends my age who would most probably have taken away all the time that I got to spend with him instead.
My dear grandma loved to tease him, saying how hard it was for her to get him to start or hold up a conversation, that she had to "pull words out of his mouth with a tweezer". Somehow, though, I always knew how to get him talking. We did crossword puzzles together, I'd ask him about how it was to go to military school, to serve in Pakistan, to visit all the different places he visited in the US, what cities he liked the most, or what he thought about the current political situation in Turkey. Somehow, I could talk to him for hours. Just this past winter when I was visiting home, he told me about one of his adventures when he rented a car from Germany with one of his friends and drove all the way to Pakistan with it. He told the story with such great detail, almost reliving every moment of it, that I felt like I was part of the journey. When I asked my mom about it, she told me she had never heard that story before. So I guess I might have had a way of opening him up, of getting him to share more than he was accustomed to sharing.
In the last eight years or so, we also developed a new way of communicating: via email. If I'm not mistaken, at the age of seventy four, he decided to take computer lessons. Seventy four. This alone, is enough to bring tears to my eyes when I think about him. It makes me want to keep learning, to keep achieving things all the time. To stay up to date, to never be satisfied or settle for the skills and knowledge I have at any point in my life. Not only did he learn how to use a desktop computer and an iPad (and did so much better a job at it than my dad--sorry dad), but he also got an email account, opened a Facebook account, and joined Skype so we could talk to each other when I moved to the US for college. He asked me questions whenever he got stuck, but eventually, he was a master of both. He forwarded us all these interesting videos, songs, and slideshows of photos, with an occasional slip of an empty email :), which was a great source of communication for us when I moved away from home. I went on his Facebook page a few days after his passing, only to see that he listed Philadelphia as his current city. I couldn't stop myself from crying. I guess that's a pretty good twenty-first century evidence of how much we meant to each other.
He taught me not to be frugal. To turn off the lights when I leave a room, to not let the water running when I brush my teeth, to buy the cheaper version of something if both things serve the same purpose in a fairly similar quality. But it was also him who taught me how to give to those in need. My mom called me the day of his funeral to tell me how shocked she was to hear from people we hadn't heard from in years, as well as people very close to us in our family, who came to Ankara for the funeral, and told stories of how my grandpa helped them out when they were in need of it. None of us knew about it because of course, he hadn't told anyone. He had just helped them out, no questions asked, because they needed it, and then kept his mouth shut about it. And if it's at all possible, I love him even more for all that.
Not one to really like dressing up, he always put on a fresh cologne that I loved so very much, any time he expected a visit from me. I'd hug him and kiss him on the neck and cheeks, telling him how great he smelled, and he's respond; "I put it on for you!"
Maybe it was because he sensed something too, but when I was home this winter and his condition was getting a little serious, he called me his "guardian angel" every single time he saw me, which meant a couple of times a day on several days. Even though he had difficulty walking, he came to greet me at the airport with my mom, and stood waiting for me at arrivals. When he didn't have enough energy to lift his arm because of how low his blood pressure was on the day that I left to come back to the US, he greeted me standing at the door when I went to say goodbye to him and my grandma on my way to the airport.
He wanted me to join him on his trips to the hospital during the two months I was home, which I more than gladly did as his "guardian angel". Perhaps he wanted me there because I was the only one in our family not treating him as a patient, taking things a little lighter. I loved making him laugh. He kept saying; "you can make a dead man laugh". I loved hearing him say that as he laughed at something I just said or a story I just told. I loved being a source of happiness for him, and I loved that he wanted me around all the time. Even after I came back to the US and he moved into the hospital, I loved that he looked forward to our daily Facetime sessions as much as I looked forward to them. I loved being his thing to look forward to each day.
And now, I love that he is finally free to do whatever he wants. No offense to any of you guys, but I know that he's spending most of his time with me, here in New York. He might be making the occasional trip to Turkey when I'm asleep or doing something boring at work, but I'm pretty confident that he's spending most of his time visiting, with me. After all, he is my guardian angel now. Don't be jealous though, whenever you need or want him around, just let me know and I'll ask him to drop by for a few hours.
I'm sure he'll listen to his guardian angel :)"
Gone through the same things a couple of years ago, my deepest condolences. Living away far abroad from home makes it even more tough since you have to overcome the sorrow all alone when you actually should be with close family and friends. Hopefully, writing such a nice eulogy for him made it a bit easier for you to recover.
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