they appear to me now as foreigners

"[My father] had always wanted to be buried in Egypt, in the El Akkad mausoleum where my step-aunts and grandfather are buried. And so we take him there. I crawl on my hands and knees into the catacomb. I help ease the shrouded body to the ground, beside the bones of these people who loved him from the day he was born. Outside, dozens of our relatives stand waiting, people I love similarly and who love me and with whom, in another life where we never left, I would have shared the normal bonds of family. Instead, they appear to me now as foreigners because we did leave. And so it has only ever been, for me, the three of us. And now we are two."

~~ from One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad