As I  write this I am actively eavesdropping! We live in the bottom floor of a large house that has been built as two apartments and in the garden there is a small grandad flat. Until two weeks ago our little community consisted of us three, the couple upstairs (Ömür and Sezer) and their two year old girl and Mıstık (Mustafa) dede who lived in the garden. On my return from Cyprus last week Sezgin told me that Mıstık, who had been taken to hospital ten days ago, had passed away in hospital. Now the garden area, which is just to the left of the room İ use to write, has been turned into an outdoor lounge with about fifteen rickety wooden chairs and a couple of tables that have seen better days. For the last three days a steady stream of visitors has been in and out of the yard to sit and pay their condolences to Ömür (Mıstık’s son). 

I am interested to see how this old man will be mourned. There are the formalities and traditions to be observed, of which the recieving of visitors is an important part. Whenever his name is mentioned now it is either preceded or followed by the word ‘rahmetlik’ which indicates that he has deceased and strictly speaking is only used for the Muslim dead. No-one is wearing black and as of yet I haven’t observed any visitors crying. This maybe due to the fact that he was an old man who had already had a brush with prostate cancer the year before and who was in visible pain towrads the end of his life or it maybe because he was a bad tempered old cross patch who rarely smiled or had a good word to say about anybody? Somehow İ doubt that anyone will be mentioning these negatives facets of his character as speaking ill of the dead seems largely reserved for the famous and infamous. 

The tide of people washing in and out of the garden gate has been pretty much continuous all morning and much of the talk of Mıstık dede has been of how he predicted his own demise. He had warned friends and relatives that if he went into hospital he would never come out. İn his hospital dreams he kept seeing a bride walking towards him and this is being interpreted in the garden chat as an angel sent to fetch him. More likely it was the lewd mind of Mıstık at work imagining tasty virgins ripe for ravishing as he was never too old or ill to swipe a lavicious look all over which ever female guests we had at the house.  

Since he has been gone the garden has been liberated for the use of the rest of us. Previously he had staked the entire space out as his own and used to sit hunched like a vulture on the thin wooden bench glaring down his beaky nose at anyone who passed. He rarely spoke to us and responded to general salutations with a nod at the most. He saved his speech for pronouncing on subjects that were none of his business. Every trip away İ took he seized the opportunity to tell Sezgin İ had absconded and wouldn’t return. He would tell me that Sezgin was never going to amount to anything and the estate agency would fail. He asked our nanny if she was so poor that she had to work for us and told her that good women stayed at home and looked after their own family thus managing to cuss both of us simultaneously. I have never heard the lady who lives upstairs raise her voice to her husband or shout at her child but İ have seen her, tears streaming down her face, screaming in despair at him and telling him that the reason people never visited her was because of his foul mouth and behaviour.  

Now he has stopped lingering in the region of the terminally ill and passed on to the land of the dead he will be remembered differently. The times he said something that was rude but funny will be recalled more often than the occasions when he was just rude. The brief smiles he hauled up from the depths of his inner grouch when playing with his grandaughter will stick in the memory. The airconditioning unit he bought this summer and had installed in the flat upstairs will become his last momento to his family. Out of the window will go the squabbles, irritations, spitting and nasty behaviour. He will be resurrected in a new and more forgivable and tolerable persona. 

Why do we do this? why not accept the truth of his life and be prepared to speak ill of the dead? İn some cases one might hold one’s tongue in order not to upset grieving close family but there is no-one weeping for this old terror. Instead my daughter and I are glad of the use of his old front porch for hanging her bouncer, his daughter-in-law has already cleaned out his cottage and it is being used to help cater for the needs of guests. The mourners sit and chat and talk about olive harvests, laugh about relatives and coo over each others childrens and very rarely mention Mıstık at all. İ guess it is the kindness in people’s hearts that stops them getting together and saying what they really thought of him and how 99% of people who knew him may well be glad he’s gone. As Winston Churchill said of his own future death – Mıstık might have been ready to meet his Maker but whether his Maker is ready for the great ordeal of meeting him is another matter.