A year has passed, and they wanted Kian Pirfalak’s anniversary to be held early and pass quickly. They want there to be no narrative, no story. Pain may exist; it does not matter, so long as there is silence.

I am speaking to myself and to you. Let us never imagine that “life” can even be lived without the “narration of life”. If we do not narrate our pain and our time, our narrative has never happened. This is why the first demand so often made of a bereaved family is silence: what is not narrated never existed.

A nation that loses the capacity to narrate its pain will have no memory. What is homeland if not our shared narrative of the soil on which we live? What is a compatriot if not a narrative of our connectedness with one another? Without narrative, it is not only our history and our time that descend into darkness; concepts themselves lose their meaning.

If we do not speak, we will be destroyed from within. We will become unable to communicate with one another. We will have no shared story. There will be neither homeland nor compatriot.

Without narrative, each one of us will suffer in isolation, and these sufferings will not remain merely suffering. Pain felt alone will become an everyday violence beneath the skin of our society, inevitably experienced in our relationships with one another.

Let us never stop narrating our feelings, our stories, the pains of our society, our shared mourning, our desire for change and our dreams for tomorrow.

It is through this shared narrative that pain and mourning acquire meaning. It is through this shared narrative that homeland and compatriot acquire meaning again. Last year many people wrote about their experience of people becoming closer to one another and kinder during days of pain and hardship. What brought people closer was their shared narrative.

If you only read and suffer in silence without narrating, you will see the “world of narrative” captured by those who tell their own narrative, and another history will be written—a history in which you and your pain never existed. A human being without a narrative never lived upon this soil.

Even our historical continuity as a nation has depended through history upon those who narrated the past and our story for us.

Within our shared narrative we will heal, draw closer to one another and create a new world: a land worthy of children such as Kian.

Aydin Areta