Dad, it has been six years and I still hear you counting the seconds at the gate. Thank you for every early morning.

As children we shared a bed in Maua, and Faith would preach to me in the dark about being kind to goats. I laughed then. She went on to preach it to a whole county, and I stopped laughing a long time ago.

When Mzee Elijah died she handed out his shirts to neighbours and kept only the watch. She said a man should be remembered by what he gave. She made the same gift of herself for fifteen years afterwards, and our village is warmer for it.

“In loving memory — always.”

I left Lahore in 2003 with Abbu's reed pen in my suitcase. He said, 'It will feel heavy until you need it.' Last night I wrote his name in Nastaliq for the first time and my hand did not shake. He is in the pen.

“Sending love from far away.”

Faith could hear a flat note from three pews away and would simply raise one eyebrow, and we would correct ourselves. Under her baton the Kimeru hymns became something extraordinary. We will sing them at her grave in four parts, as she taught us.

Rose was the cousin who made it to America and then pulled the rest of us along behind her. She sent the first computers to our village primary school and the first airfare to my sister. She called it nothing. We called it everything.

Rose sat in the third pew on the left and sang alto as if the roof needed lifting. Every December she ran our harambee, and when we came up short she quietly made up the difference. Our choir will be a half-beat behind without her.

We walked to school together barefoot, and Rose carried my books the whole week I had malaria. For years after she left for America she paid my daughter's school fees and never once called it a favour. Safiri salama, rafiki yangu. The red earth of Kirinyaga will welcome you.

Mrs Mwiti taught us Standard Four in 1980 and made every child feel they were her favourite. When I left for Australia she gave me a hymnbook and a small bag of Meru soil. The soil is under my doorstep, and the hymnbook is on my pillow.

In twenty-two years I never saw Rose let a patient's family leave the unit without knowing exactly what would happen next. Residents learned more about bedside medicine from her than from any lecture. She also remembered every colleague's birthday and arrived each time with chapati.

“Remembering you on this anniversary.”

Rose coached me for the licensing exam at her kitchen table for six months. I failed the first time. She fed me githeri, told me failing was an appointment, not a verdict, and sat beside me for the retake. I passed. I run a clinic in Maryland today because of her.

Rose precepted me on my first night. She handed me a cup of tea before she handed me a chart and said, “Breathe, then work.” Eleven years later I say it to my own new nurses. She never raised her voice and she never missed anything on the monitor. The unit is quieter without her humming.

On press nights he wrote thirty headlines without once looking up. The sub-editors used to say the paper's errors were all in the typesetting, never in Aslam's handwriting. When computers came he wept quietly into his tea, then went home and opened a school.

“With deepest sympathy from the whole family.”

At three in the morning, when a family heard the worst news, Chaplain Faith was already in the corridor with tea. She never preached; she sat. Doctors learned from her how to stay with grief, and I am a better physician for it.

“With deepest sympathy from the whole family.”

I walked into his front room at nine with a broken pen and a bad attitude. He taught me to breathe before every stroke. I design logos in Birmingham now, and every curve I draw still starts with a breath. His last lesson to me, on a video call, was a single word: 'Slower.'

“With love and gratitude.”

He was the first calligrapher in my life who let a girl hold the qalam. 'The reed does not know who holds it,' he said. I teach at a girls' school in Gulberg now and say the same thing. He changed my family's mind about what I could do.

Mama Faith told me my first sermon was 'too clever for the people who needed it'. I rewrote it three times. She sat in the front row and nodded at the right places. Now I preach from the same pulpit, and I can still feel her nodding.

He paced behind us during practice, never saying a word, and then turned a single stroke by a hair with a touch of his finger. We felt that correction in our hands for the rest of the week. On Friday I wrote his name on my wrist.

For thirty-nine years he led our Fajr prayer, even in winter, even with a cough. His recitation was like his calligraphy: unhurried, balanced, never showy. The mosque feels like a page from which the master's pen has just been lifted.

“Remembering you on this anniversary.”

“You will never be forgotten.”

Maman disait que chaque naissance était un cadeau, et que la seule façon de le rendre était d'en prendre soin. Elle a pris soin de milliers de gens. Merci à tous ceux qui nous ont écrit, nous lisons chaque message ensemble le soir, en famille.

Ma mère m'a toujours dit que Fatou Ndiaye m'avait mise au monde en 1990, pendant une coupure d'électricité, à la lueur d'une lampe-tempête. J'ai grandi en entendant cette histoire. J'ai pu la remercier en personne il y a trois ans.

Fatou enseignait aux futurs médecins que la sage-femme est la première à voir un enfant et la dernière à partir quand la mère s'endort. Ses cours étaient les seuls où les étudiants applaudissaient. Nous avons perdu une grande pédagogue.

Chaque vendredi, un plat de thiéboudienne débarquait chez nous, porté par un de ses petits-enfants. Elle ne nous a jamais laissés sans rien, même dans les années difficiles. La Médina vient de perdre sa maman à tous.

Elle m'a appris à tenir la main d'une patiente avant de tenir un instrument. Un soir de garde difficile, elle m'a dit : « Respire, et elle respirera avec toi. » Je répète cette phrase à mes propres étudiantes. Merci, Maman Fatou.

He asked for my sister's hand in the most Jordi way possible: with a spreadsheet of reasons and a fully worked-out plan for the wedding. I said yes before he got to page two. He was the brother I never knew I needed.

We shared a flat in Sants for five years and one frying pan. Jordi cooked, I cleaned, and neither of us ever mentioned it. When I moved to Berlin he posted me a parcel of Catalan sausage with a note: 'Don't forget where the bread is from.' I never have.