On Saturday, my funny and kind uncle - my mama’s baby brother - died. He fell ill very suddenly on Friday and was taken to hospital for emergency surgery. On Saturday my mama drove the 300 miles to her home town to be by his side as he left this world. When I was told he wasn’t going to make it, I sobbed on the floor, clutching at the ache in my heart.

I am thinking a lot about my relationship with grief, and how deeply shaped by colonial conditioning it has been. My first instinct when it came to this article was ‘I shouldn’t write my newsletter this week, out of respect’. Coloniser mourning would have us silent and solemn, supposedly respecting my uncle by closing down an opportunity to grieve for him, by replacing outpouring and catharsis with nothingness. I have woken up today feeling low and empty - the nothingness is already trying to take over. And that is one of the reasons I choose to write today. Because the low, empty, nothingness is fed by silence and solemnity, by ‘getting on with things’, by ‘keeping busy’. Grief is not a void, that is what grieving under extractive capitalism is. Running from it, hiding from it, ignoring it, are all paths to fear, trauma, anxiety, depression. We live in systems designed by those desperate to control everything - and death cannot be controlled. Death is devastating, inevitable and essential, and it is the only guarantee. Those in power are so afraid of dying that they hoard wealth and resources, they pour energy and money into looking younger, they kill other life of all kinds, all in their pursuit of invincibility. And they are filled up with nothingness. We fight them and the systems they created by showing up fully in the agony of death.