How does one begin to pen an obituary for a person, amounting complex and fruitful lives into a tiny array of autopsied words? Where does one start when writing an obituary for more than 680,000 people, most of whom you don't even carry a name for? How can it ever be possible to honor a person in all their lived experiences, let alone honor the collective lives of an entire people?

When I and countless others inevitably pass, we will probably have people around our cold bodies to keep us warm, even if it is but for one more second. People will surely cry, embracing declining memories; the funny, sad, anger-driven, and good-hearted memories. Perhaps it is possible for somebody amidst that crowd to find words they are confident in, words they feel do us some resemblance of honor. How that can be, perhaps I will never truly know, and perhaps nobody across the string of human history has ever felt truly "complete" delivering an obituary

Where do you begin when delivering an obituary for a statistic, a statistic that within its numbers carries human lives you didn't know? Where do you begin when you have no memories to cherish for someone, and all you carry in your fragile hands are a number? Do you think about those little things you assume we've all experienced? Those things that perhaps you don't know to be fact, but you assume you share with another by virtue of being human?

The face your mother gave when she first carried you in her aching arms?
The confines of the room you were delivered in?
The warm touch and embrace of another beloved person?
The rain falling from a greying sky?
The sun shining through dusty windows on a Summer's day?
The first meal you developed a fondness for?

But where do you begin, when for some of the dead carried in that forsaken statistic, those experiences never even came into fruition? Where do you begin to write when for some, they were mere days away from being born? Where do you begin when for some, they were murdered in their first week of life, before they even saw the seasons or weather change? Where do you begin when some of the dead never had a meal amidst the man-made famine they were born into? Where do you begin when the only thing bounding these diverse lives together is the fact that their deaths fall at the hands of murderers? Where do you begin when there is nobody who remembers them alive left to record their name in a list of the missing? Where do you begin when there are no remains left to be found in the rubble, or when their remains have been thrown away like forgotten waste by the enemy? Where do you begin when the only thing you have to offer them in the moment you write is tears? Where do you begin when you won't know their name until the moment you apologise to them in Paradise?