Perhaps memorials and all the sacred and secular rituals of morning across our human history are but failed gestures.The dead live with us. Grief is not a whodunit story, or a puzzle to solve, but an active and vibrant enterprise. It is hard, honest work. It can break your back. It is part of one’s initiation into death — I don’t know why, I have no way of justifying it — it is a hopeful part at that. What is extraordinary is that, given everything that happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light.

Matar, Hisham. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Lands in Between. New York: Random House, 2016.