My family and I stood on the margins of a reality we couldn’t make sense of and tried to answer impossible questions. We tried to piece together her last few hours, that last year. We had spent decades masking our pain and pretending we could survive intact. There were no words for what happened to lost people like us. Was this way of dying inevitable for the fragmented selves we carried in our chests?  Sam came back to Zimbabwe in a biodegradable wooden urn. She’d been away from home for 15 years, disappeared into an exile of sorts. We buried her in a tomb built by her father’s brothers. She was buried in the southwest corner of the country, in the land of balancing rocks and sun-kissed skies. A crowd of heaving mourners stood with us; they called her daughter and buried her like their own. We planted a tree beside the tomb to give her shade. She was an ancestor now.

I was unmoored and untethered after the burial. I wandered through the city I lived in, carrying grief in my chest. Well-meaning friends told me there’d be an after. That one day, I wouldn’t wake up to feel my heart rattling erratically in my ribcage. I didn’t believe them. If your twin dies, aren’t you dying too? Loss haunted me; I found myself retreating inwards. I envied the Yorubas who create sculptures to remember. They believe twins share a soul. If one twin dies, steps are taken to preserve balance for the living twin. They pour out their grief for the lost twin in the sculptures, and, in so doing, ensure they won’t be erased from memory. They give the living twin a path back to wholeness.

Lately, my twin has been visiting me in my dreams. In the last one, I live in the Canadian city built on two rivers, in a 1920s era apartment with creaking hardwood floors and whistling radiators. We stand together, looking through the window at an elm tree in the courtyard. She has a smile on her face. Now, the ghost of my face dances on hers.