I am Vera.

Born to Suna and Cüneyt, an Istanbullu, someone whose very arrival into this world was made possible by a moment’s hesitation reversed… but more than anything, I am the one who grew up beside Aunt C., shaped by her, taught to see the world through her gaze.

On paper, I was not her daughter.

But what makes a mother? The one who gives you life, or the one who holds you within it, who raises you, who makes space for you without erasing herself? No one ever explained that to me. I learned it simply by watching Aunt C. So I am not merely her daughter in spirit; I am a continuation of her life, distilled through time.

Aunt C. never gave me long speeches or careful advice. But through what she lived, what she withheld, and through nothing more than the way she looked into my eyes without saying a word, she showed me how easily a woman’s life can be handed over to others’ decisions, how early it can be confined, how quietly it can be divided. Because some women do not live by choosing their lives, but by carrying what is given to them, and learning to call it “fate.”

Her health began to fade, slowly. It was a kind of quiet retreat - day by day, little by little. The kind you don’t notice at first and you dismiss until one day you look back and realize everything has changed. One day she spoke a little less, another she tired a little sooner, another she fell into silence for longer. I thought it would pass. I thought we had time. As always, I postponed what I felt to a “later.”

There was no later.

The day we lost her, I wasn’t even in the same country.

Even saying that still leaves a hollow inside me that hasn’t settled. When the news came, the words were simple and ordinary… and yet within that simplicity lay one of the deepest fractures of my life.

Cevriye was gone.

And for the first time in my life, I was able to say to myself that I had lost someone who loved me unconditionally. Even saying it out loud took time. That was when I truly learned what it means to grieve.

But it didn’t happen the way I imagined.

I couldn’t cry.

I still don’t fully know why. Perhaps somewhere inside, I could not accept her absence so quickly. Sometimes, when faced with the greatest pain, we freeze - we cannot react, as if feeling it would make it too real.

But later, I realized that grief does not live inside a single moment.

It seeps into others. Sneakily.

After losing Cevriye, in the smallest changes, in the faintest losses, whenever an unexplainable ache rose inside me, whenever I felt something shift out of place… I was, in truth, crying for her: for her absence, for the fact that she was no longer anywhere. And perhaps most of all, for the unconditional love I lost with her.

When some people leave our lives, they do not take only themselves. They take with them a feeling we will never again experience in the same way. And now, whenever I turn back to the past, I remember her life not only through what she lived, but through what she could not. Because a woman’s story is often written less by what she does than by what she is not allowed to do.

But I do not want to leave her story there.

Because Cevriye was not only a woman confined within a life. She was someone who pointed toward another possibility from within it and someone who left a trace strong enough to alter another person’s path.

I am where she left off. I am the continuation of her silences. I am the possibility of what she could not live.

And maybe, that is why… even though Cevriye is gone, I swore I would never allow her to be forgotten, never allow her to be erased from this world.

As long as I live, she will go on living.

And as long as you read, she will become breath for another woman.

By Vera Herself, in memory of C.E.
2026
This story continues.

Subscribe now

Share

• I was born the third daughter in a family of seven, in a small town where everyone knew each other and where a girl’s life was written long before she could understand what it meant to live. My father had wanted a son. He would not stop until he had one. And perhaps that was the first lesson I learned without anyone teaching it to me: that …

Read more

💧

There Are Rivers in the Sky
by

As I write this book review, my desk faces the terrace, neglected since last summer. It is late, and it is dark, but my light is on, and in the re…

Read more