This past July, I bought eggplants at the farmers’ market, intending to make my grandmother’s signature maqlubeh: the cinnamon-and-allspice-scented rice dish layered with fried eggplants and chicken, cooked in a pot, then flipped onto a serving platter, forming a golden dome. Before I had the chance to peel the eggplants, stripe by stripe, and drop them into hot oil, a WhatsApp message came in from my mother—a single, waving-hand emoji at an unusual hour. I knew immediately what it meant. My grandmother Teta Fatmeh, who had been ill for a while, had died. I experienced no tightness in my chest, no burning behind my eyes. Just a hollow stillness and sense of guilt.

Over the next few days, the eggplants sat in my crisper drawer, soft spots spreading across their skin like bruises. Every morning, I opened the drawer planning to make the maqlubeh. Every morning, I closed it again.

That week, I was supposed to be in Jaljulia—a small Palestinian town in Israel, near the West Bank—where my grandmother had lived her entire life. But our flights had been canceled amid rocket fire and regional escalation, fallout from Israel’s latest offensive in Gaza and its war with Iran. I found myself instead in my Pennsylvania kitchen, 5,000 miles away, doing math: one peaceful death compared with the thousands of violent deaths happening in Gaza; a woman who lived nearly nine decades compared with the children suffering from malnutrition and starvation who might not live nine years; a death witnessed by family compared with entire families erased, no one left t