Dearly departed how so many miss you. How so many yearn and grieve for you. The places you used to sit in a room seem dimmer now bereft as they are of the light of your smile. The signature sound upon the stairs as you descended each morning is no more. You have ascended never to return and the memories keep flooding back. They embrace with love but also constrict with pain and longing all at once. It is not grief that pains, we are to be life long companions grief and I who will travel far together with the rise and fall, ebb and flow, but rather the burning feeling in my heart of memories that pains. It is not that I remember you. I do not need to invoke remembrance instead remembrance invokes me. Unbidden it surrounds and wheresoever one looks it is there. I live in a state of remembrance. I did not ask for this life of remembrance. It was not something I was searching for and yet it has found and held me in its grip from the moment your hand slipped out of mine. I do not have the power to resist. You are simply “there”. Invisible, intangible, immaterial but unmistakably just “here” with me. I feel you everywhere at all moments of wakefulness. In my dreams of which you know better than I. How to speak now when the centre of the circle of one’s life is no more visible? I wander about the circumference at the outskirts of my life. Where shall we meet and face one another again? I will wait for you at the park bench where we used to take rest. I will enact our conversations silently as an act of remembrance and prayer looking for you in the eyes of the people who pass by. If you recognise me please say hello. Dearly departed how so many miss you. None more dearly than I.

Musa Askari

(A reflection in memory of all the departed Souls in 2020 and in honour of those who remember them. A year of heartache.)