“Life’s an exercise in making memories”: Our Sustained Existence

I first read Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr back in 2022, and immediately fell in love it with it. I recently picked up it back up and reread it. During this read through, I kept thinking about the ways that death impacts all of us and the ways that memory sustains us, topics I have been looking at fairly often over the past few years. The Many Deaths of Laila Starr deals with these themes extensively because it follows the avatar of Death, who has been cast to Earth and takes on the mortal form of Laila Starr, as she tries to kill Darius Shah and keep him from discovering immortality and thus eliminating death from existence. There is a lot to unpack in the series, but today I want to focus on the second issue, where Darius faces death for the first time and the avatar of Death converses with Kah, a funeral crow, and then Darius about death about memory.

At eight-years-old, Darius runs away from home, for a night, to attend the funeral of Bardhan, a servant who worked for his family when they lived in a bungalow outside the city. This even turned out to be a monumental evening because “it was Darius’s first real conversation with death, in more ways than one.” Bardhan worked the mango, jackfruit, and sapodilla trees on the Shah’s grounds, and Darius’s parents and grandmother sought to instill in Darius a…