Global Dialogues

Last week, Pope Francis died. His was a voice raised for the powerless, for the poor, for refugees, for victims of war, for the people of Gaza. He commanded a moral authority rare in our predatory age. I found my thoughts lingering on his death, and on other deaths, and also on what death has to offer us, the living.

Recently, my uncle died on my father’s birthday. My last memory is of him laughing and smiling at us from behind his oxygen mask as he was wheeled back into the ICU. I rode to the graveyard in the ambulance that was used to transport his body, sitting beside my cousins, his sons, who had arrived in Lahore from North America. The final streets on his journey were lined by trees bursting with yellow flowers, trees that I was certain were amaltas, known also as golden shower trees—but I was later to be told that they were another variety entirely. His grave was the last in its row, and the first in its column, a corner grave, shaded on that hot early spring day by yet another tree, solitary, sinewy, and this detail, too, stayed with me. For my uncle loved his garden, visible from every window of his house, a house he had designed to gaze upon the lush foliage he had tended over decades, and so I thought he would have liked the city to say farewell to him as it was: with its trees.

Deaths can be reunions, possibly for those who have passed, though it is too soon for me to say, but certainly for those left behind, who gather as we gathered. There were friends of my uncle’s from his primary school days, some of whom I knew well without knowing, until then, how well they knew him. There was an ancient grand-aunt who came in a wheelchair, bringing with her memories of my grandmother. And, of course, there was my uncle’s immediate family, half of whom lived abroad, as well as my parents, my sister, my wife, my children, my friends, some of whom came for my uncle, and some of whom came for me. Stories were told, prayers were said, and, it being the month of fasting, fasts were concluded together, with dates and lemonade and fruit chaat and much else. We gathered on the day of my uncle’s death, and on the day of his burial, and on the day marking one week of his passing, and on days between and days after. We were, even those of us who were strangers to each other, reunited.

Deaths remind us of our own frailty, and in reminding us of our own frailty, they offer much to the living. They offer us the chance to be more present in our own lives, to live, and not just pass, our time. And they offer us the chance to feel the mortality in others echo within ourselves, to remember that we, human beings, are all united in being, which is a temporary state, that we too will go from being to having been, and that this tragedy, which befalls every one of us, stands as the foundation for a powerful solidarity, if we only permit it, powerful but also destabilizing, for in uniting us, it threatens to take from us some of the satisfaction we derive in spurning the misfortune of others.

It being early in the year 2025, and a time of mourning, talk turned, inevitably, to Gaza, to the massacres being perpetrated there, to the tens of thousands of untimely funerals occurring there, to the hunger being imposed upon the people there—a condition which, in the month of fasting, inspired a particularly strong sense of alarm. Through our phones, we were witness, even in far-off Lahore, to the silencing of protest that was occurring in the West, to the abandonment of international law and human rights, and at the funeral gatherings for my uncle it seemed everyone had a story of a relative or acquaintance who was living in fear of the purges being directed at those who dared empathize with the suffering in Gaza—and this, not just the support by the most powerful for such wanton killing, but the previously unimaginable criminalization of empathy for the dead and dying, well, this could not help but season the atmosphere in which we gathered.

And so it was that my uncle’s death caused me, for a while, to feel repulsed by my phone, repulsed by its ability to take me from my present, from a natural solidarity, and to deposit me in a realm of warring tribes, of inhumanity. I turned away from it. I slept a little better. I smiled with less difficulty. I found it easier to be gentle with myself, and with others. Time returned to me, and even, intermittently, the precursors of a sense of optimism. But yes, eventually, inevitably, my phone called out to me. Gravity reasserted itself. I began to gaze upon it again, to be pulled into it again.

Our shared technological utopia would not let go of me. It will not let go of any of us. Not without a mighty collective struggle, which seems barely to have begun. But still, in those deaths that retain the power to touch us, there is an opportunity, while we yet have time, to mourn, fully, and in so doing, to come together, to dream of another way.

Mohsin Hamid is a novelist and essayist who explores contemporary global and political issues.