Death!
I can almost see him.
My shadow.
The one who never really leaves.
I first met death when I was still a child, though even then childhood already felt like something I had been cheated out of.
My grandmother was sitting on the roof of our house, staring up at the sky.
Her eyes were open, but she was no longer looking at anything we could see. There was a strange stillness on her face, a stillness I had never seen there before. The years had folded her skin into a hundred small lines, yet somehow she looked peaceful, almost weightless.
I sat beside her and held her hands.
They felt dry and hard, like old wood.
Then my father saw us.
He came toward her slowly, trembling. He sat down beside her and began to cry without making a sound. I had never seen him like that before. I did not understand why he kept calling her name with so much pain when she was right there beside him.
Then he lifted her into his arms.
He carried her down the long staircase, step by step, took her into her room, laid her on her bed, and held her head against his chest.
That evening, my uncles arrived from every direction. Together, they carried her away and buried her.
I heard my mother’s half-sister say that the earth would eat her. She said the worms would come for her from every side. My mother cried and told her to stop, but my father only looked at her with eyes so red they seemed full of blood.
I never saw that woman again.
That night, I could not stop thinking about my grandmother lying alone in the dark, inside the green wooden coffin they had brought from the mosque nearby.
Only the night before, she had been sleeping in the room next to mine.
I used to hear her all night long, calling the names of girls she had known when she was young. I heard her cry. I heard my father trying to calm her. I heard her scold him, then scold my mother. And then, suddenly, his rough voice would soften. He would speak to her gently, telling her stories from his school days as if they had happened only that morning.
Her voice stayed with me after she was gone.
That long, tired voice calling for Aisha, her childhood friend.
I could not sleep. I kept trying to understand that I would not wake up the next morning and find her in her usual chair by the balcony, looking at the sky, passing the beads of her long rosary through her fingers.
My father said she had gone to heaven.
But I had seen them put her in the ground.
For years, I could not make sense of that.
In my mind, death became a ladder: something that began under the earth and climbed all the way to the sky.
Only later did I understand that we do this because we cannot bear the plainness of death. We lift our dead upward because leaving them below feels too cruel.
That was the first thing death taught me.
It does not always arrive with violence. It does not need a reason. My grandmother’s body had not looked broken. Her clothes were clean. Her face was calm. Only her mind had left us long before the rest of her did.
That was my first meeting with death.
It was full of wonder.
And it made me older in a single day.
Since then, I have run from him whenever I could.
I run when I see him in the face of a relative, in the bent back of an old man, in the tired eyes of a woman who seems ready to leave. I try to shut something inside my head, to block the memories before they begin, to silence the questions before they grow teeth.
But death always finds me in dreams.
He comes in the same scene every time, wide and merciless, as if I am watching the whole world from too far away. And I wake up shaken, hollowed out, ready to cry without knowing why.
And today…
I meet him again.
My shadow.
The one who never really leaves.
I first met death when I was still a child, though even then childhood already felt like something I had been cheated out of.
My grandmother was sitting on the roof of our house, staring up at the sky.
Her eyes were open, but she was no longer looking at anything we could see. There was a strange stillness on her face, a stillness I had never seen there before. The years had folded her skin into a hundred small lines, yet somehow she looked peaceful, almost weightless.
I sat beside her and held her hands.
They felt dry and hard, like old wood.
Then my father saw us.
He came toward her slowly, trembling. He sat down beside her and began to cry without making a sound. I had never seen him like that before. I did not understand why he kept calling her name with so much pain when she was right there beside him.
Then he lifted her into his arms.
He carried her down the long staircase, step by step, took her into her room, laid her on her bed, and held her head against his chest.
That evening, my uncles arrived from every direction. Together, they carried her away and buried her.
I heard my mother’s half-sister say that the earth would eat her. She said the worms would come for her from every side. My mother cried and told her to stop, but my father only looked at her with eyes so red they seemed full of blood.
I never saw that woman again.
That night, I could not stop thinking about my grandmother lying alone in the dark, inside the green wooden coffin they had brought from the mosque nearby.
Only the night before, she had been sleeping in the room next to mine.
I used to hear her all night long, calling the names of girls she had known when she was young. I heard her cry. I heard my father trying to calm her. I heard her scold him, then scold my mother. And then, suddenly, his rough voice would soften. He would speak to her gently, telling her stories from his school days as if they had happened only that morning.
Her voice stayed with me after she was gone.
That long, tired voice calling for Aisha, her childhood friend.
I could not sleep. I kept trying to understand that I would not wake up the next morning and find her in her usual chair by the balcony, looking at the sky, passing the beads of her long rosary through her fingers.
My father said she had gone to heaven.
But I had seen them put her in the ground.
For years, I could not make sense of that.
In my mind, death became a ladder: something that began under the earth and climbed all the way to the sky.
Only later did I understand that we do this because we cannot bear the plainness of death. We lift our dead upward because leaving them below feels too cruel.
That was the first thing death taught me.
It does not always arrive with violence. It does not need a reason. My grandmother’s body had not looked broken. Her clothes were clean. Her face was calm. Only her mind had left us long before the rest of her did.
That was my first meeting with death.
It was full of wonder.
And it made me older in a single day.
Since then, I have run from him whenever I could.
I run when I see him in the face of a relative, in the bent back of an old man, in the tired eyes of a woman who seems ready to leave. I try to shut something inside my head, to block the memories before they begin, to silence the questions before they grow teeth.
But death always finds me in dreams.
He comes in the same scene every time, wide and merciless, as if I am watching the whole world from too far away. And I wake up shaken, hollowed out, ready to cry without knowing why.
And today…
I meet him again.
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