Into the Wilderness…

14/05/2026

There is a particular irony in the kindness we reserve for the dead.

Take my mother’s family, for example. They save their best tenderness for those who are no longer around to receive it, with the weeping, the gathering, the annual prayers and the grand tombstones. When my grandmother, Aatha, was still alive, bedridden for years as dementia slowly took her away from the land of the living, she was largely left to the quiet, exhausted devotion of my aunt. The one child, out of the eight, who stayed. Many of them only really appeared to mourn Aatha with great feeling, when she was gone.

This piece was first published on Borderless Journal. Click here to read the full story.