FOREVER YOUNG

NONFICTION

Samantha Cooke

“H ow am I supposed to explain to our relatives that you were baptized? We’re Muslim!”

This was how my nene greeted me the day after I returned from a weeklong beach vacation with my best friends. I sat at her kitchen table, plucking olives from the big salad bowl she had placed at the center. I raised my eyebrows at my little sister, Ryan, who dropped her napkin on the table and stifled a laugh.

“First of all, Nene, we aren’t Muslim.”

“We are Muslim, Samantha.”

Nene, who was fierce and could be backhandedly mean, was also loving and kind. Where other grandmothers would bake cookies, Nene would make cucumber sandwiches for my friends and me as we swam in her pool. Nene was the most stubborn woman I knew. She didn’t run the AC in her house, so even during harsh Florida summers, we held many a conversation with sweat dripping down our foreheads. She was backward in many of her practices; she donated money to the SPCA every month but always talked about how much she hated Ryan’s cat. She was a product of her environment. She had been raised in Cyprus, a small Mediterranean island, and at sixteen, she had been married off to my dede.

The conversations I had with her usually centered around her life in Cyprus and her belief that our Turkish heritage automatically meant we were Muslim. Now, the way she said it so definitively in her bright kitchen made me wonder if perhaps I was Muslim.

“I don’t eat pork,” Nene continued as she set a plate of my favorite Turkish dish, dolmas, in front of me. She stared at me, and I knew she was waiting for my explanation of the shenanigans she had seen.

“Nene, that video was a joke!”

The video, pure evidence now that Nene thought I was a sinner, had been filmed a few days earlier by my best friend. We had spent

the entire day on the beach, a day that had stretched into the late hours of the night as we sat around our rental beach house, our skin red.

“You can’t be Isabella’s godmother, because you’ve never been baptized,” Jenna had pointed out.

“Let’s baptize you right now so we can make it official,” Peter had added.

“I have a water bottle,” Rafe had volunteered.

The four of us had been best friends for a very long time. From driver’s license acquisitions to a teen pregnancy, we had been through it all. Whenever we were together and Peter or Rafe suggested something ridiculous, I would always flash back to cramming into a two-bedroom apartment to save on rent or getting part-time jobs at McDonald’s just to get free food.

“The godparents of a child also have to be baptized. Since we don’t have any other friends, you have to get baptized so you can be Bella’s godmother.”

Peter had then sat me in a chair in the kitchen, while Rafe stood behind me with a bottle of water, which he dumped on my head. Peter spoke words that didn’t form real sentences, and we all laughed as Jenna filmed the video and uploaded it to Facebook.

“I’m obviously not really baptized,” I told Nene. “You can’t just splash some Aquafina on someone and call it holy water.”

“And Sammi doesn’t believe in God,” Ryan chimed in.

Nene glared at Ryan. “Don’t say that.” Turning back to me, she added, “Well, if the relatives in Cyprus see it, we will never hear the end of it.”

The year was 2011 and Nene was very new to Facebook. She thought everyone could see everything. Maybe she was onto something, as this was right around the time that Facebook started suggesting “people you may know” just because you had both been in a five-mile radius of Chipotle six months earlier. Nene also commented on everything I ever posted with the same comment: NENE LOVES YOU SAMANTHA XXXX.

“Nene, the relatives in Cyprus don’t even know me. Besides, we’re not Muslim, so—”

“Will you stop saying that?”

Nene walked out of the kitchen, and I knew she was mad at me. But Nene also prided herself on forgiveness, so it would pass soon enough.

Growing up, we always ate dinner at Nene and Dede’s house. At the kitchen table, Dede usually talked about whatever ridiculous new story he had seen on Fox News while hate- watching. He’d tell his young granddaughters about women’s rights and how we should be proud we came from a family of “hard-working liberals.” He told us stories of coming to America with his wife and two daughters, and though it had been good to him, the recent years made him wish he had never made the journey.

One notable Sunday in 2003, after Dede finished talking about how he hoped the country’s run with a Republican president would come to an end, my mom placed her fork down and took a deep breath.

“Carl’s in rehab.”

Just the mere mention of my dad’s name pissed off Nene, who began to rant about how “that meathead was yararsiz bir adam,” perfectly blending her English and Turkish to talk about my father’s uselessness. She did not understand exactly what rehab was, but she hoped it meant a firing squad would line up and take turns shooting at him. She even asked if she could be part of that squad.

“Not in front of the children,” Dede said, his warm eyes filling with regret that his youngest daughter had married “such a man.”

The rest of my adolescence was spent at that kitchen table listening to Nene talk about how much she hated my dad. “I’ll believe it when I see it” became her catchphrase when describing my father, a phrase she supported with years of empty promises he had made to my mom. Ryan had asked Nene once if she would ever forgive him, and she laughed, mumbling, “Benim ceset uzerinde.”

Rough translation: over my dead body.

When I was eighteen and graduating high school, my dad had been out of rehab for a few years and was living with his parents in Tallahassee. When it came time to send out my graduation announcements, my mom insisted we send one to him and his parents. She knew her ex-in-laws wrote five-hundred-dollar checks to their grandchildren at high school graduations, and I needed the money

for college. My mom laughed and said it might be cruel to only invite them for the money but she hadn’t had a full day off in ten years and she “didn’t give a fuck if it was rude.”

I hoped they would just send the check, but I got a phone call the week before graduation. They would be there.

When Nene and Dede heard that they would have to see not only my dad but also his parents (with whom they had never gotten along), Nene sat down calmly at her usual place at the table and folded her hands around her teacup.

“Nenem,” she said to me, “Muslims believe in forgiveness.”

I thought of all the times in the last few years Nene had talked about never being able to forgive my father for what he had done to us. Yet she went on to explain a Turkish tradition of forgiveness. The one initiating the tradition was to invite everyone who had ever wronged them over to their home for dinner and bask in their company, letting forgiveness for everyone’s wrongs wash over them.

Though we have done extensive research, my cousins, sisters, and I have yet to learn what that tradition is or whether it even exists. It speaks volumes to us that Nene might have created it for herself.

Nene had talked about her death since I was a child. Early on, she began to gather her five granddaughters around her and tell us her time was coming. She started writing our names on little pieces of white paper and attaching them to different items in her house so we would know who got what when she was dead. She told us she wanted us to play “Forever Young” by Rod Stewart at her funeral and to make sure her sister-in-law knew she had never liked her. This continued for twenty years (and counting).

I was lucky; despite Nene’s rants about how she was dying and couldn’t wait to be dead, my mom was always very healthy. The same, however, could not be said for my mom’s older sister, my deyze, whose health had been declining for many years.

Deyze sent us the best birthday and Christmas gifts, hands down. When I was six, she got me hooked on collecting porcelain dolls. My favorite, a doll dressed like a faerie on a swing, hung above my bed for years. On every occasion, she’d send beautifully dressed dolls with painted faces. She would bring one wrapped carefully in her carry-on each time she visited Florida from Kentucky.

Eventually, the frequency of her visits began to slow, the time between them growing to months and then years, until she was forced to stop coming altogether. I always knew Deyze was sick. First it was breast cancer, then an autoimmune disease Nene also had. Nene and Deyze were competing in “The Death Olympics,” my mom would joke. They would each call my mom and complain about the other— shame the other, even—for thinking they were the sickest.

The week before Christmas 2014, my cousins, Shannon and Amber, called my mom. Deyze wasn’t doing well—for real this time.

My mom had no extra money saved, no emergency fund to fall back on, but she took a leave of absence from her waitressing job and got on a plane to Kentucky. At the time, I was living with her—the cheaper alternative to the student housing I couldn’t afford. My mom called our landlord, let him know we needed to break the lease, and Ryan and I packed our things. With nowhere else to go, we showed up on Nene and Dede’s doorstep.

We moved into their two guest rooms. I slept on a waterbed, convinced I was the only millennial who could ever say that sentence, and though I was thankful for a place to sleep, I felt suffocated by Nene and Dede’s grief. I began counting down the days until my mom would return, not realizing I was simultaneously counting down the days until Deyze died.

Nene grieved, but also maintained faith that Deyze would pull through. We tried, unsuccessfully, to convince her to get on a plane to go to Kentucky. Shannon and Amber would call frequently and let Nene know that Deyze was dying.

“Well, she’s a fighter,” Nene would say.

And Deyze was a fighter. She was a brilliant, sarcastic woman who had raised two brilliant, sarcastic daughters by herself because she, too, had married a man who was useless. However, even the best fighters hang up their gloves eventually, and on February 6, just six days before her sixty-first birthday, Deyze died with my mom, Shannon, and Amber by her side.

Later that day, Ryan and I were on the road to see Glen Hansard in concert when our older sister Rachel called us, in tears, to tell us the news. We turned the car around on I-4 and drove to Nene and Dede’s house. We walked in just as they hung up the phone with my mom. Nene cried and wailed, falling to the kitchen floor. She

pulled tufts of her black hair from her head and screamed that God wasn’t real.

When discussing funeral arrangements days later, Shannon told Nene that Deyze had wanted to be cremated and for Shannon and Amber to travel to Cyprus to spread her ashes. When Nene hung up, she told me the plans.

“At least Deyze will get to go to Cyprus! Maybe we can plan that for you and Dede as well.” Horror filled me as I realized what I’d just suggested, and I quickly added, “In, like, twenty years!” I couldn’t even begin to think about what my life would be like without Nene and Dede.

Nene said nothing as she stood from the kitchen table and walked to the back door, staring at a picture of my mom and Deyze as little girls. When she turned around and looked at me, her eyes were narrowed.

“But, Nenem, Muslims don’t believe in cremation.”

FEATURING

Valeria Amirkhanyan Elena Anderson Erin Aube Lameese Badr Rachel Coyne Samantha Crooke Chanice Cruz Amanda Dettmann Owen Elphick Lori Eslick Angelica Esquivel Carl Gagnon Elliott Gish Joanna Grisham Gigi Guizado

Samina Hadi-Tabassum Zebulon Huset Dóra Kazó-Horváth Joshua Kulseth Hallie MacLeod Sean Madden Megan Rilkoff Matt Rogers Joanne Skerrett Marsha Solomon Devin Thomas O’Shea Sandra Vucicevic Melissa Wabnitz Pumayugra Ronald Walker Erin Wilson Igor Zusev