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June 22, 2024 - September 17, 2025
She would pioneer financial journalism when Malta became an offshore haven, turning leaks like the Panama Papers into dramas that kept a population in suspense.
Set on a peninsula in the north of Malta, the capital city was built as a fortress, bordered by walls nine meters thick and stretching thirty meters high. It had won its United Nations designation as a World Heritage Site early, protecting it from us. I found it utterly beautiful.
She refused to forget because she did not want to return to a time when human rights could be suspended and power could be wielded autocratically. She passed on the story to her sons because she did not want us to live in that kind of country.
Malta had only one university, and Mintoff had closed its arts, humanities, and social sciences programs. He believed these subjects belonged to a colonial past he wanted to “reshape.” He wanted practical, useful courses that would produce teachers, architects, doctors, and lawyers. He said it was a way to “assert ourselves as Maltese.”
“The rank corruption at the top seeped all the way to the bottom,” my mother later wrote.
Two worlds, corruption and writing about it, collided.
My great-great-grandfather Antonio Annetto Caruana had bought the town house in the late nineteenth century. He had trained to become a priest, but walking to church with his fellow seminarians one day, he heard a young woman playing the piano. He and Maria Metropoli fell in love, and he forgot about the priesthood.
But the deeper change—a transition to a true liberal democracy based on secular rather than Catholic ethics, on a civic identity rather than a partisan one—never arrived. The EU opened up the opportunity for this, but something else happened. It showed us that we didn’t need to change; that we could be the same Malta, divided and corrupt, without any real consequences from Brussels, yet now with access to a global market.
“We are becoming more and more shallow, more and more frivolous, less and less concerned with permanence, more and more self-involved.”
It had taken a delivery job one summer to get me a bit farther along the coast, to see that you could go from a harbor area as deprived as Marsa, with its decaying shipyards and criminal gangs, to one as affluent as Portomaso, with its yacht marina and oligarchs, almost before you could finish a cigarette.
“you are not going to change amoral familism by pandering to it, or by making its practitioners believe they are right.”
The office centralized the distribution of government jobs and benefits to the Poodle’s supporters and would-be supporters. By Schembri’s own estimate, no fewer than sixty requests for government jobs came in every single day. The government’s wage bill grew. To fund it, the government sold state assets, privatized companies, and developed new products for new markets, including the sale of passports to the world’s rich.
Outside, the sun was the color of blood and the sky purple. Hurricane Ophelia had started near the Azores and reached London, blowing Saharan dust into the city, scattering the sunlight differently. Purple was my mother’s favorite color. Ophelia, who in Hamlet didn’t realize the danger she was in until her “muddy death,” brought it to me.
“Those who have children are never safe. They are forever haunted by fear.”
The children carried flowers and cards with messages for my mother and left them at the foot of the Great Siege Monument opposite the courthouse, which commemorated the Maltese who’d died fighting the Ottoman siege five centuries ago. Its three bronze figures symbolize faith, valor, and civilization. It became a memorial to my mother, the site of monthly evening vigils held in her memory.
Then I thought about what it must have been like for my mother to swim upstream for thirty years.
A Green MEP called my mother’s murder “a brutal demonstration of power by those who consider themselves above the law.”
He said she was killed, rather than a police officer or magistrate, because she had had to take on the functions of such officials. A Dutch Liberal MEP argued that if a member state did not “uphold the European standards when it comes to the rule of law,” there was in effect “no rule of law in the European Union.”
“A mother’s love doesn’t reward mothers; it empowers her children.”
“Never grow weary in your mission to be the eyes, the ears, and the mouth of the people.”
And to the murderers: “However hard you try to evade from the justice of men, you will never escape from the justice of God.” He then turned to my brothers and me. “Your beloved mother died a cruel death by the hidden hand of someone who valued darkness over the light, for his actions are evil. See that you will always be the children of the light.”
Then out of the silence came a man’s voice. “Justice! We want justice!” he shouted. As we drove away, I could see in the rearview mirror people raising two fingers in the shape of a V, an Allied symbol of democracy and victory, and I could hear them singing the national anthem. “It was the first time,” my grandfather Michael told me, “that I felt Maltese.”
“Why aren’t Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi in prison, Police Commissioner? Why isn’t your wife being investigated by the police, Joseph Muscat? Who paid for Daphne Caruana Galizia to be blown up after she asked these questions?”
But in the end, he ruled that the government was “arrogantly wanting to dictate to [the victim’s family] what they should say” and “seeking to intimidate them.” Its argument exceeded the “limits of acceptable legal behavior” and it merited “the utmost level of censure.” We had never expected such a strong finding.
As one Russian journalist wrote, totalitarianism first kills people, then the will, and finally it kills memory.
“I survived in Malta,” she’d said, “because I had no choice, and by keeping myself to myself. What kept me going was bringing up my sons to know that what they saw around them in Malta and Maltese society is not normal, and the knowledge that they—unlike me—could and probably would leave, which they did.”
and they gave us an old idiom, iż-żejt dejjem jitla f’wiċċ l-ilma—oil always rises to the water’s surface; justice is inevitable.
The icon of Our Lady of Damascus would make it into my mother’s magazine, but I suspected the point of the excursion had simply been for me to see it. Most Catholic iconography seemed like drama for the sake of drama to our irreligious family, but this particular image came to mean more and more to my mother. She would talk about it afterward, and as her death approached, she decorated an entire wall at Dar Riħana with pictures of the Madonna and Child. She even became involved in the restoration of one of the city’s first churches, and once its main parish church.
I can see why, when I first asked him to look back on it, he described his life with her as “very helter-skelter. But fun.”
“It is not easy to accept that among the rats who scurry on the peripheries of politics (and who sometimes make it to the inside) there are those who are capable of executing a plan to blow up another human being,” she wrote. “If the murderers are traced eventually—a really small probability—the parents of Karin Grech may find that they are in for yet more suffering, if that is possible. They will have to sit through a trial in which the accused is let off because of insufficient proof, or is given a jail sentence which does not measure up to the destruction, in ghastly agony, of a 15-year-old
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As a correctional services van drove him into prison, where he was briefly held on remand, a woman shouted: “How I wish Daphne could see you now!”
To Jessica, I offer my deepest thanks for everything and ask for forgiveness for the tumult. And to our boy, our son; my joy and my sorrows’ cure: one day, you will find your grandmother in these pages.
