Ya’aburnee, Four Ways
October 28, 2025 at 03:30PM
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Stevie Chedid | Longreads | October 28, 2025 | 3,757 words (13 minutes)
Levantine Arabic brims with untranslatable words, each of them a portal to the culture that first spoke them. Ya’aburnee, a lifelong favorite of the words I’ve struggled to translate accurately into English, is a phrase that illuminates how deeply, if dramatically, Arabs feel and profess affection. The phrase translates literally to “you bury me,” but connotes intense adoration and love. Bury me as in, I love you so much, I hope I die before you, so I never have to live without you—I hope it is you who buries me. The word is stitched into moments of acute affection, usually toward children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and not typically to elders. Parents are known to utter it when their kids are sick, perhaps in a slightly more literal sense.
Chedid, my last name, is more simply translated—it means “strong” in Arabic. The translation of Fares, my mother’s maiden name, eludes me. Perhaps it means “unlucky,” as Fares Luck means no luck at all.
My maternal jido, Elias Fares, was the eldest of five children, born plump with good health. He and his brothers grew to be stunning—tall, muscular yet lean, strong-nosed and browed, olive-skinned with colorful eyes. They were of local fame in their region of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley: I’ve been told by a handful of people that, back then, if a local woman was nitpicky about a suitor, friends would reply, “What do you think, you’re going to get one of the Fares boys?” My uncle once joked that their good looks were, perhaps, the result of a trade with the devil.
I’m curious about the Fareses whose lives were cut short, what they might’ve made of their days had they not succumbed to Fares Luck. I think especially of jido Elias’s sister, dead at 16 from appendicitis, jido Elias’s older brother, dead at 27 after slipping off his roof, and jido Elias’s youngest brother, killed at 22 in a motorcycle accident. I’ve wondered ponderously if my great-grandmother spoke ya’aburnee to her remaining children with more frequency after her daughter’s death, which came first. There’s no need to wonder if the same was true after the death of her sons.
When a relative approached my great-grandmother with the intimately familiar mannerisms of bad news, she quickly proclaimed, If another one of my children has died, I want God to strike me dead right now! The man, who came to deliver the word of Jamal’s fatal fall, did not take the theatrics to heart and proceeded to tell her.
The news immediately brought on a lethal heart attack, and my great-grandmother’s last ya’aburnee was partially granted—if Jamal could not bury her, she would not bury him, either.
My uncle once joked that their good looks were, perhaps, the result of a trade with the devil.
Crashing somewhere between the deaths of jido Elias’s three siblings was that of his younger cousin, Morris, who died alongside three friends when their car veered off a mountain road in the Beqaa. Amid this death, jido Elias had been building a family with teta Almaza. Though their time together wasn’t as unfortunate as it could have been during the civil war—the lives of their five children spared—Almaza did suffer a full-term stillbirth, which my mother suspects was due to Almaza, perpetually in black mourning dress, so deeply grieving the deaths of her in-laws. (It was customary in Lebanon to wear black while mourning the deceased. If the departed was a close relative, one wore black for six months to a year, with more distant relations calling for three to seven days of mourning dress.) My uncle, harking back to this time, recalls his father—who wore a uniform for work—pinning a black cloth stripe to his left sleeve, and his mother and aunts dressing in black for literal years due to the consecutive deaths: “The first time I saw my mother in colorful clothes after that era, I was in awe; like Wow, she is so beautiful.”
Over a decade later, while still fairly young, teta Almaza was simultaneously diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer and ovarian cancer—both went on to metastasize until her body turned on her limb by limb. Of the relatives whose lives were curtailed by misfortune, I think of her the most—I would’ve liked to know her rather than have her essence translated to me through her children. Jido Elias, whom I thankfully did know firsthand, would join his wife in the mausoleum at the foot of their village 18 years after her death, due to a faulty heart operation. As a family, we are not ones to genuinely believe in curses or even luck, but the words are still tossed around by aunts and uncles when they recall the Fares tales.
Just as I’d begun to think that the demons and the Fareses had come to a shaky truce, my dog Kai seemed to inherit Fares Luck. At least that’s the joke I made on the phone to my mom from the pet hospital.
Amid COVID, when Kai was about five months old, she began to shit all over the place. Under the kitchen table, in the back seat of my cloth-upholstered car, on my neighbor’s new Persian rug just as he flaunted its rarity. The vet told me to wait for more symptoms to emerge. Everything became suspect while we waited: the ingredients in Kai’s treats, the last dog park we visited, the public water bowl she drank from a week ago. When you have a puppy, potential death is everywhere. On the sidewalk, I noticed shards of glass beyond tally, half a dozen chicken bones, and a used condom—all feasible culprits if swallowed.
Help us fund our next story
We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.
My friends who have children are known to say things like, “The thing they never tell you when you have kids is [insert thing here].” Typically, the [thing] is something I’m fairly surprised they didn’t expect—like chronic sleep deprivation, the extreme cost of daycare in metropolitan areas, or the horrors of mastitis—but that may be because I grew up in a large, oversharing, fecund family where relatives perennially announce pregnancies and a baby is forever being passed around the dinner table. The thing they never tell you when you get a dog is how much more time you’ll spend looking at shit. When another veterinarian said Kai’s poop could indicate the issue, I spent a cumulative hour each day looking at it, was sometimes phalanx-deep in it. I quickly gleaned that there was an entire dialect used to describe types of feces in the medical community: playdough, firm, log-shaped, gelatinous, watery, bubbly, mucusy. Log-shaped poop with playdough texture is, I was told, the crème de la crème of canine poop—the healthy ideal that dog parents must all strive for. Kai’s poops became increasingly gelatinous, mucusy, and within a week had conspicuous traces of blood. I sped to a pet hospital.
At the clinic, the front-desk receptionist couldn’t acknowledge me because the woman at the head of the line was mid-rigamarole, trying to explain that her parrot (or some bird of the parrot persuasion, from what I saw) was suddenly at death’s door. His name was Monsieur Chomsky. The woman was too overwhelmed to explain what happened—if anything had happened at all. As the receptionist tried to help the woman, I readjusted my awkward grip on the then 60-pound Kai, who I was carrying against my shoulder like a sleeping child because she was in too much pain to walk. This is when I noticed Monsieur Chomsky mimicking “Oh no!” every time his owner splurted the same words over her breath. The third time it happened, I had to bury a smirk in Kai’s ruff. How sick could a bird be if it’s mimicking with perfect enunciation? I felt guilty for the thought. Another “Oh no!” and I judged from the repetition of these two syllables that he didn’t live up to the Chomsky name. Before I could absorb her panic, the woman was helped—M. Chomsky’s “Oh nooo” echoed behind them as they walked their calamity to the elevator—and I was sent to the 6th floor.
The thing they never tell you when you get a dog is how much more time you’ll spend looking at shit.
The clock stretched to 10 p.m. as I sat in the waiting room, which was as sterile and weary-filled as in any human hospital. I video-called my mom to fill her in and made my Fares Luck joke, noticing her late-night backdrop was similar to mine. “Where are you?”
“Jido has been feeling not so great.” She was referring to my paternal grandfather. When it comes to bad news, my mother leaves only breadcrumbs, maintaining a facade of normalcy as long as possible—probably a result of growing up amid abundant Fares misfortune and having had her fill. My father, on the other hand, shares bad news before it’s happened—seems to revel in it. The weeks leading up to my move to California at the age of 22, he warned, à la Gus from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, of an imminent heart attack: You’re going to kill me! The hyperbole wasn’t fun for anyone, as he’d had a non-hypothetical heart attack three years prior.
“Something’s wrong with his mouth,” my mother said, collectedly. My father took the phone and greeted me enthusiastically, then, with his usual unabashed straightforwardness, nonchalantly said, “Yes, cancer. He has mouth cancer.” More was said on the subject that I can’t recall, but I remember that first sentence. You remember the moment someone’s ending begins.
The funny thing about animal hospitals is that when they call on you, they call the name of your animal. One shout of “Kai!” and I bid farewell to my parents and jumped up like it was my god-given name. It occurred to me that the woman at the front desk would be shooting to attention in her respective waiting room to the bellow of “Monsieur Chomsky!”
There is a brand of doctor whose combination of fastidiousness and Mr.Rogers-like compassion puts a patient at ease. None of the veterinarians in this hospital subscribed to that brand. This vet had long, unkempt whiskers on his upper lip, as if styled to bond with his four-legged patients. As he gathered information, I found myself in the role of canine translator for the third time that week. The vets would ask what was wrong, and Kai—seemingly understanding—would look at me on cue as if saying Go on, tell ’em ’bout my shits again. To the best of my abilities, I would—no tales of mucus or blood spared. As I spoke, the present vet examined Kai, who lay cooperatively still, as though she’d caught the sense that there was a problem to be solved and that a whiskered human might be her best bet. He fondled his telescope for a minute, then said, “I’m really not sure what’s wrong. Some blood tests wouldn’t hurt.” I agreed. One of the authorization forms I filled out after her exam included the option to check a box for cremation if she dies while under hospital care. You cremate me didn’t have the same ring to it.
Waiting again in the stiff vinyl chair, I let myself momentarily sink into an overwhelming fear of losing Kai. Parallel to that feeling were ones of shame: When a living thing is under your realm of responsibility, you don’t only have a persistent, if subterranean, fear that it may die, but that it may die in an especially ignominious way due to your own idiocy. Like not realizing you’ve fed it a known poison like cacao, or accidentally backing into it while parking your Honda Accord. The kind of shameful death that haunts all recollections—not Kai, the sweet dog that Stevie got during COVID, but Kai, the dog that Stevie killed with her poor parallel parking skills. When no longer preoccupied with different permutations of Kai’s death, I dove into a new Google hole, this time for mouth cancer. Just as I started to read, they brought out Kai.
When a living thing is under your realm of responsibility, you don’t only have a persistent, if subterranean, fear that it may die, but that it may die in an especially ignominious way due to your own idiocy.
The blood tests were inconclusive, but suggested that she could have Addison’s disease. “But that doesn’t really explain any of the other stuff, it’s just extra,” the vet said. Great, I thought, a bonus ailment. I wished Kai could vocalize what was wrong. I’d spent so much of my life struggling to translate my first native language to another, I’d never considered the difficulty of translating sounds and behaviors and looks—of interpreting silence.
On the sixth visit to an animal hospital that month, I wondered aloud if it was time for a CAT scan. This final veterinarian seemed, frankly, high out of her goddamn mind. I wouldn’t have cared if she was high off the sometimes-productive white stuff—perhaps that would’ve motivated her to crack the case—but this was a green high, slow and disinterested. CAT scan? She asked through her face mask, the two syllables drawn out. When she agreed, it felt oddly like a compromise: “Yeah, ok, fine. Not a bad idea.”
“Good call on the CAT scan,” she said, syllables still dragging. “Who would’ve thought . . .” You, I didn’t say, You, the doctor, could have thought. The scan revealed one part of Kai’s intestines had become inserted into the other, like a telescope folding in on itself. The vet did something with her hands to portray the phenomenon, which looked nothing like a telescope folding in on itself, but exactly like the word “battery” in sign language. Selfishly, I asked if this kind of ailment was planted like a bad seed from birth, or if it had been caretaker error: Was it just Fares Luck, or had I failed Kai? “No way to tell, but probably nothing you did.” An answer I could handle.
While Kai was in surgery, I called my father, who was back in the human hospital. My grandfather looked less vibrant with each FaceTime. When you see a living thing in a state of declining health, you almost can’t recall what they were like prior. This was true for both my grandfather and Kai—Kai, whose bones were also starting to jut out, whose demeanor, too, was muted. In brief traces of waiting-room downtime, I found myself scrolling through photos of them in The Before. My grandfather in a tweed houndstooth coat and Stetson hat, looking like a Lebanese Anthony Hopkins, his smiling eyes fully hazel, not yet faded gray with mortality. A video of Kai, ruff all puffed out, chasing me as I skate across a frozen, northeastern lake. On this particular day, the two resembled each other in their undoing.
When you see a living thing in a state of declining health, you almost can’t recall what they were like prior.
The weeks that followed Kai’s surgery are a blur. Innumerable hours cleaning an unceremoniously stitched wound and endless bowls of pumpkin purée—which, if you have a canine, you quickly learn is the supposed cure-all for digestive ailments, WD40 for dog innards. To this day, getting Kai to walk past Halloween decorations without stealing a gourd is an enduring, seasonal challenge.
Kai did eventually heal. I assumed I’d still be the one of us to bury the other if I survived her projected 10-14 years, but was relieved to kick the can further down the line.
When Kai was healthy enough to travel, I took her to meet my grandfather, now back home from the hospital. He watched Kai with reverence, which surprised me because I’d always thought he hated dogs. Likely because he lived with my aunt and uncle’s Yorkie, Prince, a small but obnoxiously loud dog that regularly startled him with shrill yaps, to which my grandfather would respond by cursing Prince in Arabic (which, fortunately, my American Uncle Tom—who loved the Yorkie like a last born—could not understand).
“She looks like a lamb,” he said of Kai, coiled between us. He only spoke to me in Arabic. Others have said that he could speak English well, but I never heard it. He’d pretend that he couldn’t, in hopes that his grandkids wouldn’t lose the language as long as they had to practice with him. On more than one occasion, I saw jido in long conversations with my very American brother-in-law, only for jido to become mute as soon as I walked within earshot.
He proceeded to share a story of when he was young, told with a vividness that starkly contrasted with his frail body: He had been from a family of farmers in the Beqaa Valley, and they had a dog. This came as a shock to me, not only because I thought he detested dogs, but because I projected this assumption to represent Lebanese culture at large. Even the word for dog—kelb—is one of the most common insults in Arabic. He assured me he did have a dog—an amazing one. One evening, when he and his brother had left the scale they’d used to weigh produce in the fields before sending the harvest to a market in a nearby village, the dog didn’t follow them home. In the morning, they found him panting in the hot valley sun, protecting the scale they’d forgotten. He smiled at the memory, from his cataract-blurred eyes and from his lips, and for the first time forgot to bashfully cover his mouth. I saw the cancer. It looked even worse than imagined—like a mix of sea anemone and brain coral growing from the corner of his mouth.
“Once, a boy in the neighborhood was kind of messing around with me, pushing me. The dog bit him in the leg, to protect me.” The boy’s father came to my grandfather’s house and demanded they put the dog down. “Do it yourself, or I’ll get the sheriff to do it for you,” the man had said. “That night, when the dog was asleep on the balcony, my father struck him in the head with a shovel . . . killed him in one blow. I could hear it from my room.” He stayed at his aunt’s house for the rest of the week, in protest. I didn’t ask if they had buried the dog, though I wondered if its grave might still be near our family home.
He smiled at the memory, from his cataract-blurred eyes and from his lips, and for the first time forgot to bashfully cover his mouth. I saw the cancer.
Storytelling was, for my grandfather, like my father, a primary mode of communication. Sometimes my grandfather, about to tell a story we’d heard countless times before, would apologize in advance before retelling it, “But let me tell it anyway, I just like to tell them . . .” I imagine what he really meant, reciting from his couch in the strip-mall mecca of the Northeast, was this makes me feel like I am back there, back then, back home.
Returning to the present, he said, “This summer, inshallah, I will go to Lebanon—will you come with me?”
Yes, I said, I will. We held each other’s hands. I feared my grip might tear his brittle skin.
Ya’aburnee, he said to me. And a month later, I did.
Like many only-writers in a family, I was tasked with writing a eulogy. It was a genre detour I hadn’t planned to take, hoping for a more passive participation in our communal loss. Looking out from the podium, the church was densely packed with masked faces.
I think every eulogy fails. What an impossible burden, to properly summarize a life in less than 2,000 words. If it had been up to me, there would have been no eulogy, only stories shared by attendees—true to my grandfather’s style. I would have told the story of his beloved dog, and the last time I saw him smile while staring at mine.
Nevertheless, the eulogy went well, which—if you’ve made one and not bombed it—you’ll know results in fielding compliments for the rest of the day, similar to the aftermath of a best man’s speech, but awkwardly told through leaned-in whispers and straight-faced expressions. He was so proud of you, the praisers would predictably add.
I think every eulogy fails. What an impossible burden, to properly summarize a life in less than 2,000 words.
At the burial, I held my father’s hand in the bitter cold. The sun shone with inconsiderate brightness, an affront to our state of mourning. Red carnations were placed on jido’s casket by each attendant, a final parting gift. At first, not many people were crying. My grandfather was old, well into his 90s—his departure was smooth compared to the tectonic shifts caused by young Fares Luck tragedies. Jido was buried in a plot beside his wife of 70-plus years and his best friend, whom he’d known since childhood. The son of this best friend lingered after placing his carnation on the casket. Moments later, he dropped to his knees. He began to cry over the broken soil, curling over in unobscured grief. This is when I noticed his hand dipping into the hole in the ground, grasping for something. Guests, once dry-eyed, began to sob.
Were they that close? I wondered. Handkerchiefs appeared from pockets for the first time, tissues grew audibly soggy with saturation. Why is everyone crying? Then I realized: This man’s son, whom we had all admired for his good nature and taken turns crushing on in our adolescence, had recently died in a fatal car accident. A young death, cataclysmic for those in his orbit. His grave was above my grandfather’s, positioned next to his own grandfather. The man had been stretching his forearm into the earth, yearning to touch his son’s casket. Ya’aburnee, I saw him whisper through wet sobs. We shed more tears for the man who had buried his son a year ago than for the beloved grandfather we were burying that day.
There are young relatives we cannot bear to think of putting in the ground. Then there are those we expect to bury, like grandparents. It’s a strange thing how we, with little control over the matter, so fiercely love the beings whom we know—if all goes as planned and Fares Luck doesn’t intervene—we might someday bury.
I think of jido Elias, the cousin and siblings and mother and infant and wife he buried. I think of my paternal grandfather, all his casual, adoring wishes for us to bury him at last fulfilled. I think of our family friend leaning for a mere touch of the box that cradles his son’s collapsing bones. I think of Kai, who’s become my favorite appendage, and when she almost died.
What’s in a word? Subjective multitudes. Memories—an endless string of cherished, ephemeral moments. What does it really mean, ya’aburnee? Three rounded syllables, in its barest form. Is it the innocent, colloquial expression of affection we’ve taken it to be? Or, if we linger beside it, does it remind us of the ultimate burden of bond, perhaps haunt us with impregnable questions: Did you forget love is just two living things on a scale? Did you forget that before both weights transcend, one ends up alone, on the ground?
Stevie Chedid is a Lebanese-American writer currently completing her MFA at the University of Montana, where she is the recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. Her writing can be found in The New York Times Magazine, New Orleans Review, Tahoma Review, Edge Effects, The Sun Magazine, and elsewhere.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/10/28/yaaburnee-four-ways/
via IFTTT
Watch