Seventeenth of February

dies a mother, dies my mother, dies mother...

Seventeenth of February and I have a peculiar relationship. I wish I had written records of it in the last two decades and even beyond. Because since 2004 on the February Seventeen dies my mother. And this day tends to manage many mischiefs.

This morning I woke, said good morning to my mother and lit the candles one by one. It’s raining outside, the house is very dark. I may not go to the cemetery. I’ll see as the day brews.

In the last few days, I wrote this piece for February Seventeen. Because sometimes some things just don’t allow you to move around them. You have to go through them spilling a little ink and blood. They know, you know, sooner or later you must write. My mother stories are such stories for my fantasy writer…

I often wish I don’t have to write true stories (that centres humans and deals with intense patriarchal structures) and I resist telling them. Mostly because they are tricky. Reality is complex with many points of views and messy webs of relationships to honour in a simplistic linear storyline. And my society, like many other settled ones whose relationships with imagination are harmed, loves consuming real life stories, especially tragic ones to a degree that can be so harmful and toxic. Moreover, I want to be read not because of what I lived and survived but because what I have alchemised and created out of it… or at least both. Well, stories and I shall find our flow, our polyphony, our lichen-like organism as time goes by, and as we learn to collaborate, relate, metabolise, harmonise and mature one another, I suppose.

A gemini mother and an Aquarius daughter at an amusement park circa 1980s

Last year was my mother’s twentieth death anniversary.

I wanted to write something but there were too many mothers and children being killed actively by the war machines of patriarchy and I could not find the power within me. Also I had no gift for her, for us… life had no gift for me. But this year, finally, is different I have at least a gift. And I can say:

Mom,

I wrote us a story

I poured my grief and my love in

Alongside with enchantment and mystery¹

It’s called La Graine, The Seed

This spring it will germinate

In bookstores all around France

And perhaps this, mother,

May resurrect your daughter

My mother died on the seventeenth of February twenty one years ago. That winter, when we were at the hospital, it snowed in Istanbul. One day towards the very end of our journey, I was worn out and I couldn’t leave home and go to the hospital, the next day my mother did not have her consciousness anymore.

I remember entering the hospital room when blood was spilling from the little opening between her lips. My mother always loved red. Wearing red nail polish was her little rebellion against her patriarchal, religious geopolitical place in the world. As the life drained out of her, she was leaving a red trace out of her exhausted and heavily medicated body… Her mother, my grandmother, was sitting by her daughter’s side with a piece of handkerchief in hand to catch the red spill. When I asked to replace her, grandma said that it was her duty. They both tried to keep me away from the duties of women in their own silent ways…

My mother was very ill. She had been ill for over four years and she had not been well for many years before that. Yet I cannot say if it is cancer or the latest bombardment of the western medicine that killed my mother in the name of saving… Or was it patriarchy, patriarchal society and its web of codependent, harmful, parasitic, immature relationships?

There are many colonial and patriarchal weapons pointed against women; superiority, inferiority, shame, fear, envy, codependency, forgetfulness, repression, patience, self-sacrifice, domestic duty, free labour etc. to keep us trapped and serving. My mother also lived at a gunpoint, that much I know from her life, ours, mine and others.

Her death was a collective effort like many witherings. To simplify a long complex death march; we took, we took, we took until she had nothing to give and she died. We, humans have the great capacity to get greedy and suck the life out of beautiful things. We did not care enough for her until she was very sick. We did not give her as much as we took, left her with what harmed her, acted like everything was alright until we could not deny it. Just like we treat our planet. Patriarchal powers, family, country and business as usual. Just another sacrifice until it hunts us one by one.

When death came… slowly marching for over a decade, if not two.

I was sad, I was mad, I was angry, I was disappointed and also I was grateful that her suffering had come to an end and that she was finally free.

I remember how my mother aged so rapidly because of cancer and its treatments in her mid-forties. I remember how things were happening at a speed I could not keep up with. Yet, I sensed this was coming, I was living this thread with her closely ever since my childhood. Just like the times we are in, just like the harm we are causing to our web of life. That is perhaps why I began to get triggered, sickened, weakened, vibrated, reacted and demanded change much earlier than many others around me… The Great Unraveling, Joanna Macy calls the collapse of living structures. My great personal and familial unraveling was happening then. My living structures were collapsing with my mother’s death, and three years after my cousin’s and grandmother’s deaths. Within five years, they were all gone.

My mother’s and my cousin’s deaths were hard ones and they needed a lot of tending… I felt left alone and abandoned. They were my closest people within the family. It was as if they were leaving for another planet, for another star system, and I was not invited.

The deaths of women from three different generations spilled many stories.

I struggled to keep up with them, let alone digest them. Even though I sensed it coming, it took me a long time to learn how to relate with the situation. I could not continue living with the aftertaste of the stories and storytelling, that was left in my mouth. And I left the country. I wanted my life to take different shapes. I wanted to live and tell stories with more possibilities and different endings. As far as I know, I was the first woman in my family who left her people and lived on the other side of the world on her own for years. I was twenty four back then, it had been over two years since my mother had died. One day, I packed my luggage, my cat, my dead mother, myself and flew away… with the stories, with the relationships, and with the troubles, of course.

Some mothers has to die to free their daughters, it seems. Perhaps this is the only way they can help, and catalyse our becomings and theirs…

Things, peoples, happenings, hardships, harms, feelings, sensing, imaginings are a big fat compost now. From that compost stories get generated.

When there is death and destruction, whatever is leftover seeks ways to live, relate and recreate. No matter how little, how insignificant. When you come near destruction, as an organism you seek to generate different connections, synapses, collaborations, symbiosis, mutations... You begin risking things that you thought you never could. Here I am reminded of The Great Turning, the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to life-sustaining civilisations, again as Joanna Macy² calls it.

I wonder what we, personally and collectively, would risk becoming as the living systems of a four and half billion year old planet collapses under the claws of egomaniacal human sons and delusional human daughters of patriarchy in power. You must have been feeling the need, or the edge, or the stress of merging our stories, our composts, our gifts and curses, our relationships, our ancestors, our creativities, our troubles, our imaginations with all kinds of beings and risk becoming something, someone more relational, more respectful, more planetary, more cosmological.

My birthday and my mother’s deathday are one week apart from one another. Last Monday was my birthday and I wished to do more for my planet and for the cultural transformation of my species through my creative work.

Today I am listening to my mother’s wishes.

My Dearest Rukuş, I am so grateful to be your daughter. Bowing to you, to your life, to your sacrifices, to your death, to our relationship, to our stories, Mother. I love you. Be free, my dear woman. Be wild.

For a long time, I wished that I could have “protected” you, myself and the ones I love better. In storytelling and in writing I have found the possibility of protecting what matters and transform what sickens our world. I hope I have your blessing, stardust and support. Along the way, I am still learning to hide only when necessary, not to feel too defeated when I get hit hard, not to shoulder all the troubles by myself, not to claim that I failed you, myself and the stories, not to forget that we all make mistakes and cosmic joke of it all, and not to say that I am abandoned… Luckily, my trickster self is by my side, so are my few human and plenty more-than-human people.

Thank you for reading. I am sending love and respect to our dead mothers. Who knows, perhaps they are conspiring out there together to inspire and support us and our quest to protect as much life as possible.

Gizem Gizegen, 2025 Istanbul, ☉ Aquarius ☽ Libra

La Graine is available for pre-orders

A giant thank you to all the people who have ordered it and made our day!

1. My mother’s name Rukiye means enchantment and my name Gizem means mystery…

2. Joanna Macy is an Earth Elder. Somehow she appeared in my mother article with the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning. I highly recommend you her work.