Music by My Bedside. Kürsat Basar

He had asked about me and reproached my mother, saying, “Didn’t I tell you we shouldn’t have sent her so far away?”

      After that, he had not uttered a single word.

      My mother told this to everyone who came to visit.

      “Oh, God,” I thought, “Why? Why did you withhold those few things from me and my father? Why didn’t you let him stay conscious for a few more hours? Why didn’t you let him know that his dear daughter came and that she is there by his side?”

      I was confused. I was scared. I was helpless.

      I was unhappy as I had never been before.

      You find yourself suddenly in ruins. You had been in a happy home all together, laughing with joy, and a tremor of a few seconds smashes to pieces that secure life you thought would last forever. The ground slides from under your feet as if moved by an earthquake.

      We placed the bright flowers I had brought into a vase on the night table next to his bed. I looked at those flowers and imagined that I would lie in a similar bed one day, while people waited for me to open my eyes. I had no idea when that time would come.

      No one knew.

      As my father lay in his bed without the slightest movement, we knew nothing. We didn’t even know if he knew what had happened to him, where he was, if he felt pain, or heard us. Nothing.

      Maybe he was having a dream and was in utter confusion, unable to decide which direction to take. Perhaps he was just standing there in his dream, without knowing which of the roads in front of him he should choose. Or, maybe he was roaming around comfortably in his dream, as if he had found his real home in a garden that looked surprisingly familiar to him.

      In the end, he left us late one night.

      He left before I could say anything to him, before I could look in his eyes for the last time, and before he let us beg him to come back.

      If there’s a moment in life that truly determines our lives, mine was when I kept vigil over him, half asleep and half awake.

      During those hours, the uselessness of the life I was trying to establish dawned upon me.

      I realized that nothing in this world is safe and secure. We are cast about by the whirlpool of life that is stronger than each of us, and one day, unexpectedly, we are flung out. In my mind, I gave up.

      I gave up everything.

      We are on a spinning merry-go-round. We either spend those few short moments lost in bliss, or we choose to spend them in vain, asking ourselves why we keep spinning.

      I chose the first option.

      Without even being aware of my choice.

      I had held my father’s hand and told him I’d never leave him again, yet he had left me and gone far away. I learned that we could not keep someone with us for a lifetime just by holding onto his hand tightly.

      I wish the reason for my trip to Turkey had been to see my mother and brother and share so many wonderful stories and memories.

      We had not seen each other for such a long time, and I had many things to tell them.

      Another country, the people I had met, my school, my marriage, programs on television, the drive-in cinema, giant shopping malls.

      We were not able to talk about any of this. At such a period in our lives, the details of a distant life on the other side of the ocean, the new home I had decorated myself with modern furniture, the neighborhood where all the grass was cut to the same height, the squirrels, the convertible, and the photos of the trips we had taken were suddenly unimportant.

      The presents I had specially selected for my father (sports shoes one could not find in Turkey, and carefully selected books), gloves and hats for my mother, boots for horseback riding and the latest music records for my brother.

      I had imagined how happy they would be when I gave them their presents. I had missed them so much that I had constructed and played a beautiful picture of happiness as we met again in my mind over and over. I imagined how we would all sit in our living room with all the lights on, surrounded with enough food to feed an army, talking about the good old days. I would tell them about all the delicious dishes I was able to cook and would ask for new recipes.

      Yet, when we returned home, and my mother, my brother and I were finally alone late at night after all the relatives, acquaintances, and neighbors had left, after having listened to all the talk about my father and what a special man he was, and after there were no more tears left to cry, we could not find much to speak about, even if we had wished to.

      My brother gathered and organized our father’s documents and all the odds and ends in his drawer. My father had glued photographs of my brother and me taken at almost every age into a notebook, putting dates and short notes next to them to remind himself of those days.

      After a rainy funeral, days full of pain and confusion, and nights passed praying and chanting for the deceased, I left my mother and brother again without even being able to embrace them in joy and happiness.

      I was shattered, as if something inside me had cracked. Subdued, as if I had grown up suddenly.

      A few weeks later, when the first rays of the sun appeared, heralding the end of the freezing, gloomy winter that had imprisoned us at home, we went on a trip to the Midwest.

      I guess our friends had organized this trip since they thought I needed a change and that I was no longer a laughing, joking childish young women but a taciturn, distant person who stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, gazed vacantly, and whose eyes filled with tears at any moment.

      As the whole group, we crowded into our cars and followed each other.

      We drove on newly constructed, broad, well-organized highways.

      We saw new houses spread everywhere. We gazed at modern districts of small identical homes with gardens.

      New type of restaurants to gobble food . . . drive-in cinemas everywhere, one after the other . . . motels advertised with flashing signs . . . oil wells . . . bicycles, new-generation family cars loaded with tents, golf clubs . . . solitude in a vast land extending as far as the eye could see.

      Finally, when we arrived at a small town, we found it decorated with flags. As we walked along the road with houses lining both sides, we remarked that the flags gave the town a holiday spirit.

      A flag was placed by the door of each small house within a garden. The greenery and the immaculate nature of this small town almost invited one to spend a whole life there.

      We felt as if we had entered a town in one of those American films that opened with beautiful music, making it clear from the beginning that the story would have a happy ending. We waited for “Mr. Smith” to pop out from somewhere with a broad smile on his face and solve all our problems.

      Then, all of a sudden, we realized that photographs were hanging in each window—pictures of young soldiers.

      They were not celebrating a holiday here.

      In this town, a son from almost every home had failed to return.

      At once, that joyful, bright spring day turned into a gloomy winter evening. That dream-like town, which made one happy to be alive, disappeared.

      What we had mistaken for holiday spirit was, in fact, commemoration of unforgettable pain.

      I had thought they had won the war somewhere, far away. I had forgotten that no one can win a war.

      Those kids who looked like heroes in their framed photographs embellished with Purple Hearts, those smiling kids, had suddenly died one day in a foreign country. They had not said good-bye to their parents, to their childhood, to their girlfriends or fiancées,