"How did you know the deceased?" asked the imam.
All the men, lined up as neatly as a regiment of soldiers, responded in unison, their voices loud and unwavering:
"Good!"

 

As if they had sealed a pact among themselves- to protect one another's honor at all costs, even after death. Just as victims in crime documentaries are always described as innocent bystanders, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Azra had not set foot in her father's village in over a decade. Born in London but raised on stories of an Aegean town where olive trees clung to the hillsides, it felt both foreign and familiar here. Cows and sheep sometimes wandered freely along the streets, let loose by their owners, while cats roamed like little orphans, slipping silently between alleys and doorways. The half-stone, half-wooden houses and the smell of baking savory flatbread escaping in every corner of the neighborhood - everything was exactly as she had imagined. 

 

Yet her grief was complicated, tangled with years of distance - he kind that slowly corrodes the soul until sorrow seeps through all the pores in her skin. Back in London, they called it depression. Here, it was a kind of madness; "The devil is fooling with your mind," they would say. People simply expected her to stand, pray, mourn, and move on, as if sorrow were a choreography of religion rituals. 

 

All the men leaned forward around the dark hole they had just dug. Azra had never understood why men always claimed the right to stand in the front row - even at the burial of an unfamiliar body, one that would rot beneath the earth in a matter of days. She rose on her toes, straining to see over their shoulders from the very back. A lifeless form, wrapped in a white shroud, was lowered into the pit. The fabric fell in folds like a Bernini sculpture, delicate and deliberate, each crease catching the light like marble.

 

Azra closed her eyes and tried to imagine what it would feel like to have shovelfuls of wet soil thrown over her. A cold shiver ran down her spine as drops of sweat slid along her back. With every heap of dirt tossed into the grave, her knees weakened, as though she might pierce through the ground herself. She swayed lightly with the breeze slipping in waves beneath her clothes, hoping it would carry her forward into the first row: from left to right, leaning in. A sharp pinch on her arm yanked her back into reality. Her aunt tucked her rain-soaked, wavy hair - bulging out from under her scarf - back into place.

 

The cemetery lay just a few meters outside the village, yet taking the bus there felt as ordinary as commuting in London. The old wreck's tires bounced against the asphalt, pebbles rattling against the fogged-up windows. The bus was crammed with people clinging to one another, like pre-packaged meat in plastic. Except this one carried a sharp, sour, intrusive smell. The sticky, sweaty arm of an old, unfamiliar woman pressed against Azra's. She inhaled sharply, subtly carving out a space for herself. Her stomach tightened as if to protest the heat, the smell, the closeness. The rickety bus rattled across the steppe and into the village while tiny crystals in her inner ear collided in chaos.

 

On the way back, the bus came to an abrupt halt.A deer lay collapsed in the middle of the road, legs splayed like broken branches. Its glassy eyes were still. The slow movements of The Living on the bus suddenly quickened, and without a second thought, they stepped off the vehicle. Again, it is the men. Sometimes Azra wondered if certain rituals would unfold differently if women were given the privilege of carrying them out.

They gripped the carcass by its legs and antlers, dragging it to the roadside. The animal left a faint trail of blood in the dust, a shallow groove that the bus would soon erase with its back-and-forth journey to the cemetery.

 

The bus rumbled across the steppe again, finally stopping at her front door: a stone house with a balcony in the center of the village, positioned near the cafés that only men could make use of. Inside, the house was suffocating, filled with a grief she didn't recognize. People sat in every corner, crammed on the ground, on chairs, on windowsills. Plates of helva were distributed by her aunts. Mothers whispered, children squirmed, and an elderly woman held the Quran, her fingers tracing its edges as she prepared to recite verses. 

An old woman in the chair by the entrance looked up at Azra. "Can I have some more helva, kızım? I'll take it to the children at home." Azra's chest tightened. She'd always thought grief was universal, but here it was communal, crowded, noisy- consumed by ritual. 

 

She overlooked the crowd, now certain they weren't here to mourn - at least not the way she did. She slipped into the garden out back, sat on the worn couch, and reached behind the pillow for the pack of cigarettes she had hidden earlier. Lighting one, she stared at the mountains in the distance.

Her cousin appeared in the doorway. Azra didn't bother to hide the cigarette she was smoking with unease.
"Can you come over? We need some help. There are a lot of people inside," her cousin said. Azra kept her gaze steady, trying to look entirely cold.
"Since when do you smoke?"
"Since I realized I'll die anyway, whether I'm healthy or not," she said quickly, as if she had written the line long ago in a script and was reciting it now.  

 

Without looking away, she muttered, "He would have hated this."
Her cousin leaned against the doorframe now. "I'm sure he wouldn't. Your father was a modern, open-minded man who loved to be free of rules - a free spirit. I agree with that. But believe me, at the end of the day, like everyone else, he respected our values. He wanted things to be done properly, by tradition."  

Azra laughed, bitterly. "Wow, he told you all that? Funny, because he never said it to me, while I was his daughter." 
She caught herself talking in the past tense.
"This... all of this isn't him. It's what you want him to be. I want to honor him the way he lived, not the way others think he should have died." 

Her cousin sighed. "You know what? Do whatever you want. But when this day is over, you'll regret not saying goodbye properly." She raised her hands dismissively. "I'm not arguing with you. Not today, not when grandmother is inside." 

 

Her cousin went back inside the house. Azra narrowed her eyes toward the sky. She wasn't sure what she was looking for. Then, she reached for her phone. Her fingers glided to the playlist she and her father had once made for their road trip to Naples - filled with house/techno songs. They had argued about everything, but music was their love language. 

She pressed play. The beats filled the garden, pulsing through walls and windows. The birds she didn't even notice, flew away out of the fig tree. 
Azra began to dance slowly, eyes closed, letting the music carry her body and her grief away. 

 

A group of women stood by the doorway now, their headscarves pulled to their mouths as a gesture of shame. 
"Tövbe estağfirullah... She's lost her mind. May Allah give her wisdom and sense. She's in pain; she doesn't know what she's doing."

 

But Azra knew exactly what she was doing.
This was her goodbye.