There is no word for what I feel. My mother’s younger brother died suddenly. I felt almost nothing, only a blank like a dream in which I kept thinking of my mother, and of the cord that has bound her to her natal family all her life, how it might tighten again.

Long ago, people already urged me to write my autobiography, but back then I thought: “Me? Why me? Who am I?” I seem to have asked myself that across different times and spaces. But now I write for myself.