The Correct Way to Mourn

Grandmother Selamawit died on a Thursday, which everyone agreed was inconvenient. The funeral would cut across two school days, one government office deadline, and the cousin Fekadu's driving test, which he had already rescheduled twice and could not reschedule again without losing his deposit.

The family gathered anyway. This is what families do. They abandon their deposits and come.

Yonas, twenty-three, arrived from his shared apartment in Megenagna with the particular expression of a young man who has decided grief is something he already understands. He had read about it. He had, in fact, shared an article about the five stages, translated into Amharic by someone who had clearly translated it from a French translation of the English original, which explained why the stages felt vaguely like instructions for assembling furniture.

His mother, Hiwot, met him at the gate. She was wearing her mourning dress and carrying a tray of coffee. She did not put down the tray to embrace him. This was not coldness. This was efficiency. There were sixty people in the compound and the coffee would not pour itself.

"You look thin," she said.

"I am not thin," he said.

"You are thin and you have not eaten."

"I ate on the minibus."

She looked at him with the expression that mothers in this family had apparently been handing down like silverware for generations. It said: what you ate on the minibus does not count.

Inside, the older women sat in the inner room with Grandmother's photograph, which had been taken at a studio in 1987 and showed her looking startled, as though someone had just told her something she refused to believe. This was accurate. Grandmother had spent the last forty years refusing to believe things. It had served her well.

Yonas sat with the men his age, who were mostly looking at their phones. He put his phone away pointedly, which no one noticed. He folded his hands. He tried to access grief in the correct way.

His uncle Tesfaye, sixty-one, arrived late and sat beside him without explanation. Tesfaye smelled of cigarettes and the particular cologne he had worn since 1994. He had driven four hours from Adama. He did not explain this either. He simply sat, and his sitting had a weight to it that Yonas found, unexpectedly, steadying.

"She told me," Tesfaye said finally, "that you were the one who fixed her telephone last year."

"It was just the settings," Yonas said.

"She called me every week after that. She had not been able to call me for eight months. The settings."

Yonas said nothing. He was discovering, slowly and without the article's assistance, that grief does not arrive in stages. It arrives in small specific facts, each one a door opening onto a room you did not know was there.

Hiwot came back through with the coffee tray and paused beside them. She poured without asking, the way women in this family poured — as a statement, not a question.

"She talked about you," Hiwot said to Yonas, not looking at him, looking at the coffee. "More than she told you."

"What did she say?"

"That you were serious. That serious people need watching." She moved on. The tray did not wait.

Outside in the compound, the children were running. Three of them belonged to Fekadu, who had passed his driving test by the way — nobody had thought to tell Yonas this — and who was now standing near the gate looking at his phone with the expression of a man recalculating the geometry of his life.

The children ran in circles. They did not know they were supposed to be sad. Or they knew and had decided that running was a reasonable response to sadness, which is arguably correct.

Yonas watched them. One girl, maybe seven, stopped directly in front of him, assessed him the way small children assess adults they have not categorized yet, and then ran away again. He felt this as a kind of verdict.

Tesfaye was still beside him. He had not moved in forty minutes. His stillness was a kind of instruction, Yonas was beginning to understand. You do not perform grief for the dead. You simply stay in the compound where they used to be, you drink the coffee that is poured whether you want it or not, you let the children run, and you remain.

This, apparently, was the correct way.

Hiwot passed through a third time. This time she left the tray and put her hand briefly on Yonas's shoulder — one second, no more — and kept walking.

It was enough. It was, in fact, the whole inheritance.

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