Silent Pulse: The Debt of Grief

I am grieving.

I have always been grieving, though it changes shape.

But right now, it is a tide that carries everything with it.

Grief is not an event in my life. It is a climate. It is the air pressure I have learned to breathe under. I have lost family. Blood and sisters in spirit, cousins whose laughter once braided through childhood afternoons, aunts who carried entire histories in the folds of their dresses. Lovers too, some buried in the earth, some walking around with beating hearts but no longer walking beside me. There are losses that arrive with funerals, and losses that arrive in silence. Both weigh the same. Both demand your attention in ways that are unteachable.

In the span of ten days, I lost three people I was close to. Ten days, small enough to count on my fingers, vast enough to undo a year. The first left quietly. The second followed before I had learned how to survive the first. By the time the third arrived, it came like a storm that had lost patience, sudden, violent, tearing through the sky without warning. It blew through me and through him at once, as if we were both made of fragile paper.

I have cried for the last smell of roses and musk clinging to skin that no longer carries warmth. I have cried beside a body lying still on a bed that looked too ordinary for such finality. Death is indecent in how domestic it is. The curtains remain drawn. The clock continues its quiet obedience. The world does not pause to acknowledge what has been removed from it.

I have cried even more holding their tasbeeh, the only one they had, the only thing I wanted from their inheritance. Not gold, not property, not anything measured by worldly standards. Just those worn beads that memorized the rhythm of their fingers. Each bead a vertebra of prayer, a small planet of whispered mercy. I wrapped it around my wrist as if I could borrow their pulse. As if remembrance could become resuscitation. To remember them is the debt of a lover, a responsibility to honor, to carry, to survive on behalf of those we cannot save.

By the second loss, I stopped crying. Not because it hurt less, but because the body cannot fracture endlessly and remain upright. I did not know how to grieve the first when the second arrived. Grief overlapped itself like veils of black silk, opaque yet soft, shadowed but intimate. And then the third came, unexpected, unannounced, and dismantled any fragile scaffolding I had begun to build. It blew me and him away this time. 

It is strange, cruelly so, how the first thing we forget about people is their voice. The cadence, the tone, the subtle inflection when they say your name. But the last thing to leave is their scent. Roses. Musk. Soap. Skin. Scent clings to memory like a loyal dog. I bury my face in their fabrics, in scarves, in the folds of clothing that once held them, and inhale as if the lungs themselves could archive what the mind cannot.

I have an aunt who loves jewellery. She loves it the way some women love gardens, tending to it, polishing it, choosing each piece as if it were a mood she could wear. Gold bracelets that sing softly when she moves her wrist. Rings that hold light like small suns. She is dying of cancer every day, slowly, as if time itself were sipping her away. Not in one dramatic blow, but like a candle thinning, bending, surrendering to its own flame. Like silk being pulled thread by thread from the loom of this world.

She is home with us, and every morning, not creepily, but reverently, I go and look at her while she sleeps. I watch her in those quiet hours to prepare myself for the day when that sleep will become eternal. I do not approach with fear. I do not wake her. I only observe, like one guarding a sacred ritual, knowing that each breath she takes is a fragile miracle. And still, she wears her jewellery. And I spray her with my favourite perfume to match.

Even on her bed, fragile as paper scripture, the bracelets rest against skin almost translucent. The gold looks heavier now, almost ceremonial, like armor for a battle she knows she will not win. The metal gleams against her fading body, defiant and tender at once. It feels as if she is dressing not for visitors, but for memory. As if she is preparing to meet eternity adorned. As if she is shouting “ I was here. I shone. I still refused to disappear quietly.”

At night, I play my lute. Softly, drenched in moonlight. As if the house itself is listening. As if the walls remember older songs than I do. Each note feels dangerous, like it is stealing something sneakily. Like every vibration is taking away a breath I can sense but cannot save. The music carries the melancholic perfume of old days. It sounds ancient, like footsteps in a corridor that no longer exists. I play, and I feel the past leaning closer, pressing its forehead to mine.

I had a dream not long ago. I was lying in a garden no one had named, folded in on itself, secret, as if the world had pressed pause to hold it. The soil was soft beneath my fingers, rich and dark, giving way like it remembered me better than I remembered myself. I dug slowly, shaping a hollow that might have been a grave, or a seed, or simply a place to rest the weight I carry. Perhaps it was a metaphor, of stepping away from people, of retreating so that my grief does not spill into their light, so that the tenderness I cannot contain does not scorch them. Perhaps walking away is the closest I can get.

The air smelled of iron and rain and old roots, of things that had lived and returned to the earth. Each handful of soil was a secret, each clump a syllable in a language my voice could never speak aloud. I felt the vanished, the absent, the parts of myself I had exiled. The garden was a body, and I moved through it as one moves through a confession the world is not ready to hear.

And in that stillness, I realized grief could be tactile. That pressing, digging, feeling the cold and warmth of what dies and what grows is not surrender but witness. That intimacy need not risk contamination. Sometimes it cradles, carries, honors what will not speak for itself. The soil, the roots, the secret hum beneath my fingers, all held me, not because they were alive but now they remembered how to be.

When I woke, the memory of the dream clung to me like a second skin, a pulse beneath the skin of the world. It reminded me that even in grief, even in loss, there are places untouched by recklessness, secret and beautiful, where one can be fully, tenderly, dangerously alive. Places where absence is not a scream but a birdsong, where sorrow can finally breathe without apology.

I have been waking up at sahar time, before the city stretches, before the calls to prayer shake the minarets awake, before the sun dares to illuminate what I cannot bear to see. I wander through streets that are neither empty nor alive, a threshold where shadow and silence speak to me more truthfully than faces in the daylight ever could. I search for some warmth, some human pulse I can feel in the chill, some fragment of tenderness the world hides when it dresses itself in brilliance.

Weirdly, the sun, that tireless, incandescent witness, makes life unbearable in a way that is almost beautiful. Its heat is too sharp, its insistence too loud. Light reveals the hollows I am trying to preserve, and life reveals the absurdity of continuity after such sudden absences. But at dawn, when the horizon is a thread of copper and smoke, the city bends closer to me. Shadows curl around corners like exhaled breath. Lamps hum with soft melancholy. Even the wind, in its quiet, seems to understand the impossibility of consolation. Perhaps this is the paradox of grief: the world moves on with dazzling insistence, and yet, in its very insistence, it fails to contain my brothers, you, me, us. The sun exposes the impossibility of forgetting… Each night offers a space where memory can breathe, so I remain awake.

I was walking in Casablanca one evening with a friend. The lights were dimmed in that golden, conspiratorial way the city knows. Around us, people were enjoying their last moments of softness before returning to their capitalistic rituals, their fluorescent offices, their rehearsed ambitions. We passed a Moroccan beignet shop, and the smell of orange marmelade and fried dough opened something in me without permission.

Suddenly, a laughter I had forgotten returned. It was my grandmother’s. Round. Generous. Sweet. I could see her holding her beignet like a sacred offering, her small human ritual of joy. Powdered sugar dusting her fingers like winter. The way she would close her eyes for a second before the first bite. In that instant, I could smell my childhood walking beside me. I could feel afternoons that no longer exist anywhere except in the archive of my bones.

I wanted to buy one, to taste her again, to baptize my grief in sugar. But I couldn’t. It felt like stealing from a shrine. As if the beignet had transformed into relic. Some memories are not meant to be consumed twice. They are glass, and if you touch them again, they crack.

I am grieving sisters, cousins, aunts, lovers. I am grieving versions of myself that died when they left. I am grieving futures that dissolved quietly without announcement. Some of the people I mourn are alive. Some are not. Some I lost to illness. Some to distance. Some to pride. Some to time.

Grief is not only about the dead. It is about love with nowhere to go.

I carry love that has no destination. It accumulates inside me like rain behind a dam. So I give it away recklessly. I give it to the ones who hurt me. To the ones who misunderstand me. To the ones who dislike me and despise me. I send it toward them quietly, hoping it reaches them in a moment they need it most, sudden and unseen, the way death reaches us. If loss can be omnipresent, then so can love.

In a world where sensitivity, vulnerability, and sadness are often seen as weakness, I offer my mind as a lamb to you. To open oneself, to feel deeply, to be moved by loss and tenderness, is the strongest thing one can do. It is the most radical defiance. To live fully human, to feel fully human, to honor the impossibility of control. There is courage in grief, and in love, and in the quiet offering of one’s soul stripped off its shield, unarmored.

There are days grief feels somewhat noble, proof that I have loved without restraint. And there are days it feels condescendingly humiliating, as if like kneeling before something that does not kneel back. There are days I want to rip it out of me, and days I cradle it because it is the last remaining thread connecting me to what was.

I am grieving. I always will be grieving. But right now it sits in my throat. It moves through my fingers when I play. It watches my aunt’s bracelets catch the light. It lingers in the space where a lover once stood. To remember is to pay the debt of a lover, to honor, to carry, to survive on behalf of those we cannot save.

If you are reading this and you are grieving too, for family, for sisters, for cousins, for aunts, for lovers, for friends, for versions of yourself that no longer exist…whether they are alive or buried, whether you lost them to illness or silence,

I see you.

And I’m sorry for your loss.