Gülpembe: Some People Stay After They Are Gone

Some people make a house feel warmer just by being there. The table is the same, the tea is the same, and the rooms are the same, but everything feels different when that person is around. Then one day they are gone, and you understand that a home is not made only of walls and furniture.

Gülpembe always makes me think about this kind of absence.

When I was a child, I believed that older people would always be there. Grandmothers stay in the kitchen, grandfathers sit in the same chair, family gatherings have the same faces every year.

Then life changes.

One chair becomes empty.

At first, everyone notices it. Later, people try not to look at it. New dinners are prepared, children grow up, walls are painted, and life continues. Yet that chair never completely disappears. It remains somewhere inside us. Maybe this is what missing someone means: keeping a place for a person who is no longer there.

Not everyone leaves the same mark. Some people are like spring. They bring warmth, stories, familiar smells, food, laughter, and a feeling of safety. Losing such a person can feel like losing an entire season. Spring comes again, of course. Trees bloom and birds return. But some springs belong only to the past.

I rarely understood the value of ordinary moments while living them. A Sunday breakfast. The sound of plates in the kitchen. An older relative telling the same story again. Sometimes I even became bored. Years later, I wish I could hear that same story one more time. Memory does not work like a camera. It seems to save what the heart considers important: not important dates and long conversations, but how someone stirred their tea, or the special word they used when they called me.

When I was younger, I thought death was simple. A person was here, and then they were not. Later I understood that people leave in a much more complicated way. Their habits remain. Their words remain. A son suddenly uses the same expression as his father. A granddaughter prepares the table exactly as her grandmother did. Someone who left many years ago can still be present in a family. Perhaps this is one of the greatest things we can leave behind: not a name on a building, but a small part of ourselves living inside other people.

One day, without noticing, I moved to the other side of the table. I was no longer the child. A child looked at me, and I heard myself saying something an older person once said to me. At that moment, the past and the future met in the same room.

I cannot hear Gülpembe only as a song about loss. There is also gratitude inside it.

If I miss someone deeply, it means that person once existed in my life. There was a voice, a hand, a table, a season.

Now it is gone.

But it happened.

As the years pass, sadness slowly makes room for another feeling. I still think, “I wish they had not gone,” but another sentence appears beside it: “I am glad they were here.” That sentence does not remove the pain, but it changes it.

Some people leave the house.

But they never completely leave us.