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I remember it vividly all those years ago– my mum sitting on a prayer mat crying softly as if something had broken inside her. She had just heard the news that her father had died in Karachi – England was our home now and she hadn’t been able to return to visit him. I knew she was close to him and I’m sure she must have felt huge regret but then, we never talked about it – neither death nor grief were subjects to linger on. Like so many women of her generation, she had adapted to a new life in a new country, to new challenges and now to a new loss. So when I lost her almost 25 years ago, I wanted to talk about the bereavement with family and friends. My Muslim faith reminded me that death is a part of life, that it’s not something to be feared nor a taboo subject. I had read countless times the Qur’anic verse ‘life and death are given by God,’ that ` every soul shall taste death’ and that `death and life are a trial for us.’ I had internalised all of these teachings as sobering values because traditional piety encourages us to think of this world with all its attractions as fleeting and the next world as real. But at the time, these verses provided little solace because while faith helps, it takes time and other people to heal. Death is universal, but it can be almost meaningless until you lose someone you love. And yet life resumes and renews. Death ends the possibility of new memories, but we can still remember how someone made us feel, the good and the bad, we can keep a person alive in the stories we tell our children, our friends and family. As George Eliot said ` our dead are never dead until we have forgotten them.’ And after a while when you learn to manage the grief, there’s also this profound sense of gratitude, for life itself. Because more than anything else, death and love give weight to our lives, they show us what is really important for living well, with purpose, humility and compassion. Accepting that life ends, that this vulnerability is what makes us human, that there can be a very thin line between hope and despair, makes life’s pain bearable and its joys even more precious. This awareness is nothing less than a gift, a gift that should both humble and inspire us.