On grief: the shoes are gone, the messages remain

We are on the roof of a rather tall building at sunrise. The camera follows a young girl moving towards the edge. She is filming the sunrise on her phone. For a moment we look with her, through the screen, at the closed windows; we watch her ask “Where is everyone?” and then fall, from a distance. Before we can even ask what is happening, the camera turns away, as if it has already seen what it was going to see.

This scene comes within the first fifteen minutes of director Sandra Wollner’s film Everytime. I saw it at Filmekimi 2026, the autumn film week run by İKSV, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, and I suspect this scene will keep turning over in my head for a while yet. Don’t call this a spoiler: the death happens at the start of the film, and the rest is about what comes after. Just as in a line by the poet Şükrü Erbaş:

“The dead do not know death; death is for those left behind.”

Wollner neither magnifies death nor dresses it up; she turns her gaze to those left behind. The girl who falls is called Jessie. She lives in Berlin with her mother, Ella, and her little sister, Melli: a family of three. We never see the father in the present, and the film doesn’t say why. (I hope it isn’t mentioned somewhere and I simply missed it.) We glimpse him in home videos of Jessie as a small child. The next day the three of them are due to leave for Tenerife, the holiday Jessie has wanted so badly. The suitcases are by the door. That night Jessie sneaks out with her boyfriend, Lux. First we see them dancing in a club, then on top of the building. Drugs are involved. Jessie does not come home that night.

The film picks up a year later. A year: inevitably, those lines by Nâzım Hikmet come to mind:

“You’ll live, my dear wife,
my memory will scatter in the wind like black smoke;
you’ll live, red-haired sister of my heart,
it lasts a year at most
for people of the twentieth century,
the pain of death.”

In these lines Nâzım is consoling Piraye, who fears he may be killed. Still, that one year makes me think about our expectations of when grief should end. In Freud’s Trauer und Melancholie (Mourning and Melancholia), published in 1917, grief was likewise a process that could be completed: the psychic energy bound to the dead would gradually be withdrawn, and life would be rebuilt.

Our society has its own calendar of mourning: the seventh, the fortieth and the fifty-second day after a death. In her book Yas: Uzun Bir Veda (Grief: A Long Farewell), Prof. Dr. Şengül Hablemitoğlu, who also works as a grief counsellor, sees this calendar as the sign of a society that expects us to get over grief quickly, and counts it as a lack of sensitivity. In the book, written eighteen years after she lost her husband, she says:

“There is no right or wrong, slow or fast way to grieve.”

The book’s title says as much.

• The familiar phrases offered to someone who has lost a loved one, such as “You can’t die with the dead” and “Life goes on”, are of little use in the days when the pain is still smouldering. But give it one year or five, as you like, and after a while they begin to feel like the age-old words they are.

Back to the film.

A year has passed. The span Nâzım set in his poem is over, and as far as Ella is concerned, so is her grief. The film does not show us the days right after the death. In an interview, Wollner says that bringing Ella’s pain in those first days to the screen would have been a kind of voyeurism.

Ella is so convinced she has left her grief behind that she takes the drug her daughter took the night she died. According to Wollner, she may be trying to understand what Jessie saw in her last moments. Lux keeps her company in the forest. Perhaps under the influence of the drug, she decides to go to Tenerife, and takes her younger daughter Melli and Lux on the holiday Jessie never got to have.

The island is beautiful. At one point they all laugh together, and the laughter turns into crying. Ella cries in broken sentences and begins to realise that the answer she is looking for is not here. What remains are traces that create a sense of digital immortality of a kind.

What I mean is not creating a virtual being from the dead person’s voice and image. The film isn’t interested in that either. It is more the small child who appears in the home videos, the photographs and voice recordings on phones. One of the scenes that weighed on me most is Melli carrying on messaging her sister on WhatsApp, and looking at the screen as if waiting for a reply. The three dots appearing on the screen…

What do people do in real life? In Türkiye, for instance, the shoes of the person who has died are placed outside the door. The shoes at the door tell passers-by that the dead person will not be coming back, and whether it was a woman or a man. After I lost my father, someone in the family put his shoes outside the door. Every time I went in or out, my eyes went to the shoes against the wall of the building, wondering who would take those elegant size 40 shoes. The next morning, when I saw they were gone, losing my father somehow became a little more real. The old ways knew what they were doing.

What else is done? The dead person’s clothes and personal belongings are given away. Sometimes to family members and those close to them, so they will remember as they use them. Sometimes to someone in need, so they will say a prayer for the departed. But perhaps above all, these things given away keep telling us the same thing: the one who has gone is gone, gone.

Back to the film.

Jessie, though, has another world that giving away her belongings will not empty. A game reminiscent of Minecraft (which I have never played either), called, apparently, “Vintage Story”. Wollner says she thought of the game as a monument, even a graveyard. She finds the idea of the little sister reaching her older sister by wandering through the world she built deeply moving. She also has something to say about digital traces.

Their ghosts, she says, are in every cloud.

Nâzım said in his poem that memory would scatter like smoke. In the twenty-first century the memory of the dead does not scatter so easily. It stays on a phone, in a game, in a chat. The idea of an ongoing bond with the dead is also finding more support in grief research. Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman and Steven L. Nickman, in Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief , the 1996 book they edited, challenge the widespread view that healthy grieving requires severing the bond with the dead. In their view, this idea reflected the modern West’s premium on independence and separation more than it reflected observation. The bereaved did not forget their dead: they talked to them, kept their belongings, saw them in their dreams.

Grief that lasts does not, in itself, point to a mental disorder. In the 2022 text revision (DSM-5-TR) of the American Psychiatric Association’s manual for defining and classifying mental disorders, a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder in adults requires that at least twelve months have passed since the loss. In ICD-11, the World Health Organization’s classification of diseases, the period is at least six months. But neither classification looks only at the calendar: the intensity of the symptoms, how markedly they disrupt daily life and the person’s cultural context are also taken into account. Still being in pain after a year does not, on its own, amount to a diagnosis.

Back to the film.

With nothing left to do in the real world, Wollner lets go of realism. I won’t describe the ending, whose images reminded me of Aftersun. No doubt part of the resemblance comes from both films sharing a cinematographer, Gregory Oke. Wollner says of the ending that it is something that could not happen in life but can happen in cinema, literature or music.

Grief researchers today say that the bond with the dead is not broken, it simply changes form. Perhaps they are right. Once, what was left behind was letters, photo albums and a few belongings. Now it is voice recordings, messages, game worlds and countless traces scattered across clouds. Nâzım’s memory scattering in the wind looks a little more stubborn in the twenty-first century.

But among all these digital traces, the lines of Orhan Veli’s poem Kitabe-i Seng-i Mezar (Epitaph) still hurt more:

“They put his rifle in the depot,
They gave his clothes to someone else.
No more breadcrumbs in his bag,
No more trace of his lips on his flask;
Such a wind it was,
He himself is gone,
Not even his name was left behind.”

In Wollner’s film, when a person dies, a little of their voice remains, a little of their image, a little of their digital ghost. In Orhan Veli’s lines, all that remains is a couplet, handwritten at a coffee counter:

“Death is God’s command,
If only there were no parting.”