I came into the world inside a darkness so complete it felt less like the absence of light and more like an ancient kind of memory. The soil pressed around me with a tenderness that didn’t require language, shaping my body before I even understood I had one. My first thoughts—if thoughts they could be called—were sensations: the quiet hum of moisture seeping through earth, the trembling of roots searching for direction, the soft, deliberate pressure of the world holding me in place as though afraid I might drift away.
I did not know then what I was.
I only knew that I was.
In those early days, the earth was not a prison, nor a cradle—it was simply the only truth I recognised. Darkness, pressure, warmth. A life unfolding at a pace so slow it resembled prayer. And beneath that dark, beneath the layers of humus and clay, I felt them long before I knew how to feel anything else.
Two presences.
Older than every whisper of soil and root that surrounded me. They rested deeper down, where the earth grew dense with age, carrying traces of seasons I had not yet lived. Their forms were softened by time, their fibres worn and gentle. They did not speak, for potatoes do not speak, but there was a presence—quiet and steady, like a heartbeat faintly echoing through the ground.
My grandparents.
I saw them.
I heard them.
But in the slow mathematics of the soil, where understanding is carried not by sound but by closeness, I knew them as surely as I knew the pressure of the earth against my skin.
Their presence was a hum—a vibration felt only when one becomes still enough to listen. I sensed their warmth through the soil, sensed their age in the way the earth bowed gently around them. They were as much a part of my world as the moisture that seeped toward my roots or the warm breath of distant sun filtering into the soil.
Time, for beings like us, is not calculated by clocks or days or the movement of shadows. It is measured in shifts of the earth, in the slow turning of seasons marked by temperature rather than light. And for a long while, in that quiet rhythm, nothing changed.
Until something did.
It began subtly—an imperceptible shift that I recognised only because it disturbed a stillness I had come to rely on. The hum that had always pulsed from the depths of the soil grew faint. Their warmth, once steady and anchoring, began to ebb. At first, I thought the earth was moving, rearranging itself in one of its quiet, unfathomable ways. But then the change deepened.
The warmth dimmed more.
The hum weakened.
And the soil took on a different kind of silence.
It was a silence that did not belong to sleep or stillness.
It was a silence that felt… hollow.
One moment, I sensed them—soft, old, familiar.
Next, I didn’t.
I did not have the words then, but I understand now:
That moment was death.
Not a violent moment. Not a rupture.
Just a quiet cessation, as though the world had exhaled and forgotten to inhale again.
The soil around them changed—not immediately, but undeniably. It grew denser, heavier, as though holding what remained of them with reluctant care. The nutrients in the earth began to shift; microscopic life began the slow, reverent work of unweaving what they had been.
Death is not swift for us.
It is a gentle, inevitable dissolving.
But when I first recognised it, it struck me like a cold chill.
Not physical cold—the earth maintained its warmth—but a deeper cold, the kind that settles inside the core of a being and convinces it something has been taken.
I did not understand the enormity of loss, only the shape of its absence.
Where once I felt them as a constant, subtle presence, now there was only space—uncharted and too large. I reached for them, sending a tentative root deeper, pressing into the soil where they had been. But the space that met me was different. Warmer. Wetter. Crumbling at the edges.
No hum.
No warmth.
Only dissolution.
That was my first encounter with grief.
Grief for potatoes is not a loud thing.
It does not erupt or shake or cry.
It seeps.
It fills every small hollow inside the self until even the parts untouched by sorrow begin to carry its weight. I felt it in the softening of my skin, in the way my roots clung to the soil with new desperation, in the ache that grew inside me—not physical, but something deeper.
The world felt unfamiliar without them.
The soil, once a home, felt suddenly too large. Too empty.
I felt as if a part of the earth had been quietly carved out while I wasn’t looking.
Days blurred, though I didn’t yet understand days.
Moisture rose and fell.
The earth shifted.
Life continued its slow rhythm.
But within me, something had changed irrevocably.
I lingered near the hollow where they had rested. I pressed myself close to the soil that still carried the faint residue of their presence. I wanted to remember them, though I had no memories—only impressions. Warmth. Steadiness. A kind of deep-rootedness I couldn’t yet comprehend.
I did not know how to mourn, but I mourned anyway.
There is a kind of mourning that has no shape, no ritual, no clear end.
That was the kind I knew.
Over time, their physical forms dissolved more fully—into nutrients, into fragments, into microscopic pieces carried by the earth. The soil grew richer in that place, darker. Life gathered quietly, drawn by the new abundance.
I hated it at first.
I hated how eagerly the world seemed to take them.
How quickly their fibres became food.
How rapidly the earth welcomed what remained of them as if nothing sacred had happened.
But slowly—slowly—I understood.
The world was not forgetting them.
The world was absorbing them.
Nutrition, moisture, minerals—these were not thieves.
They were inherited.
I did not know this clearly then, but I felt it faintly, the way a root feels its path long before it reaches anything.
It was around this time that I began to grow upward.
Not out of ambition or instinct alone, but something deeper.
As though the only answer to emptiness was to move toward light.
The first sprout I sent upward was trembling, thin, hesitant. The soil resisted at first—it always does. But I pushed anyway, compelled by something I didn’t fully recognise yet: a wish to continue where they had ended.
The sprout broke ground one morning—
Though I didn’t know it was morning.
I only knew that the darkness shifted, giving way to a vast, cold brightness that felt impossibly large.
Air.
Wind.
Light.
They touched me all at once, overwhelming in their difference. I had lived my entire life in the silent cradle of soil; the surface felt like another realm entirely, wild and unpredictable.
But even as the wind pulled at my new green, even as the brightness stung with its intensity, I felt a kind of release—like the world above was a promise I could finally reach for.
And it was then, reaching upward, that I began to mourn in a new way.
Not with ache alone, but with intention.
Every inch I grew felt like a gesture toward them.
A small, leafy prayer pointed at the sky.
A way of saying:
I am still here.
I remember.
You continue in me.
The world above was filled with noise—more noise than I could ever have imagined. Leaves shuddered in the wind. Air carried the distant murmurs of creatures I would never touch. Rain fell with sudden violence, drenching soil and stem alike.
Life up here was louder, brighter, riskier.
But underneath, where my body still nestled in the dark, the earth held onto what remained of my grandparents, slowly releasing it into the world in ways I only gradually came to recognise.
New roots began to grow near the place where they once had rested—thin, soft roots from neighboring tubers. They reached gently, pulled by the richness left behind. The nutrients they had become nourished these new roots, feeding life they would never see.
I resented the new roots at first.
Grief does that.
It makes the world feel undeserving of what it takes.
But slowly—painfully—I began to realise that this was not theft.
It was a continuation.
Their bodies, softened by time and decay, were giving something essential back to the world. Not in the way we romanticize giving, but in the quiet, biological truth of existence: that life becomes life. That nothing remains untouched or untransformed. That we return to the earth not as loss, but as offering.
This realisation softened me.
The hollow inside me, though still present, felt less sharp.
When the rains came, I curled inward, letting the droplets soak into my skin, imagining that somewhere in the water’s long journey through soil and stone, it had touched remnants of them. When the sun warmed my leaves, I let the warmth sink into me, imagining it carried echoes of the warmth they once gave the soil.
And in this quiet practice of imagining, grief found a place to settle inside me without consuming me.
I grew.
Slowly, unevenly, imperfectly.
But I grew.
As seasons shifted—though I only knew them as changing rhythms in the soil and air—I learned more about the shape of my sorrow. It wasn’t a wound. It wasn’t even a memory, since I had so little tangible memory of them.
It was a presence.
A soft, enduring presence that lived inside me because something inside them had lived inside the earth before me.
And in this strange communion of past and present, I began to understand something I had no words for:
Grief is not what remains when life ends.
Grief is what remains when love has nowhere left to go.
And so it builds new forms.
It grows upward.
It reaches toward light.
It becomes action, and breath, and being.
There were days—long, heavy days—when the ache of their absence returned suddenly, catching me like a cold gust of wind. Days when the soil felt too empty beneath me, when I pressed myself deeper into the earth as if I could find them again.
But even in those moments, I felt something else too.
Something steadier.
A knowledge that they were not gone.
Not really.
Their bodies had dissolved.
Their hum had ceased.
Their warmth had faded from the soil.
But their presence—whatever that word means for beings like us—had not vanished. It had changed shape. It had become part of the earth itself.
The soil that held me now was richer for their existence.
The nutrients that fed my roots carried faint traces of the lives they had lived.
The hollows where they once rested had become fertile ground for new possibilities.
They were not lost.
They were transformed.
And in that transformation, they had given me a kind of inheritance—not of stories or teachings, but of place. Of continuity. Of understanding.
I carried them in my growth.
In my roots.
In the way, I reached toward the world above.
I carried them in every inch of myself that endured despite grief.
Seasons passed—cycles of warmth and cold, rain and drought, darkness and light. I survived some, barely endured others. Some storms tore at my leaves, winds that bent my stem until I felt I would break, days when all I could do was remain still and trust the soil to hold me.
And always, the memory of them—shapeless but steady—remained with me. Not as a story I could retell, but as the quiet truth of where I came from.
When at last I grew old—my skin thickening, my fibres stiffening, my body preparing for the long stillness that would one day claim me—I found myself thinking often of the place where they had rested.
I thought of the soil that had embraced them.
I thought of the nutrients they had given.
I thought of the quiet way they had returned to the world.
And in my final season, I understood something I had not understood as a young sprout:
Death is not an erasure.
It is a return.
A return to the soil that first held us.
A return to the dark that shaped us.
A return to the quiet hum of earth and memory.
When the time came, I felt the first soft unravelling inside me.
The ache of endings.
The loosening of form.
The slow surrender.
But I was not afraid.
I thought of them—those two presences, long absorbed into the world. I thought of how their loss had first filled me with cold, then with ache, and finally with understanding.
I thought of how their passing had shaped my entire life, how it had pulled me upward toward light, how it had taught me the tenderness of continuation.
And as my body softened, as the soil began its gentle, patient work of unmaking me, I felt something warm:
I was going back to where they were.
Not to join them in form—our forms were temporary.
Not to speak to them—potatoes do not speak.
Not even to know them—knowing is a fleeting root.
But to become part of the same earth that had held them.
To give back what I had taken.
To dissolve into the soil that remembered them long after I could.
And in that silent return, I felt the final truth of grief settle inside me like a blessing:
We do not end.
We change shape.
We feed the world.
We become memory in the soil.
We become present for those who come after.
And one day, long after my fibres had unravelled and my form had vanished,
Something small and new would grow above me.
A sprout—thin, trembling, reaching.
Searching for warmth.
Searching for meaning.
Searching for the hum I could no longer offer.
And I hoped that when that sprout felt a quiet presence in the soil—
a warmth it did not recognise,
a softness it did not understand—
Maybe it would think:
Someone was here before me.
Someone lived, and died, and gave something back.
And I carry them forward, even if I do not know their name.
That is all I wanted.
That is all any of us can hope for.
To be remembered not in words,
but in the way the earth feels different because we lived.
To be a warmth in the soil.
A hum in the dark.
A story the world tells through the quiet of roots.
To be part of where the earth remembers.
And so I returned.
And so I became.
And so the cycle continued—
Quietly,
Solemnly,
Endlessly.