Almost Surely Dead

by Amina Akhtar

No one ever tells you how to get through grief, how to not let it take over your life. Because it does. Every part of your life is hit. And sometimes, just when you think you’re turning a corner, months after your loved one died, you get hit by something new all over again. It doesn’t stop. You just have to learn how to live with it, until the pain of them not being in your life anymore becomes a dull ache.

Adnan—Nadia told me—was Jamal’s brother, but he’d died when he was born.