Grief Across Borders: Can AI Bring Back The Conversations We Never Had?

Ghenwa Yehia is the recipient of the 2025 Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism as a UAE Fellow. This story begins a four-part series supported by the RCFMHJ.

In December 2021, I received a voice note from my aunt.

She was planning to visit her daughter, my cousin, in Doha, Qatar, and I was thrilled at the chance to see her again.

Now I know, for most people, family visiting can be a source of stress. But as a Lebanese-Canadian-first-generation-immigrant-turned-expat whose family is literally scattered across continents, any opportunity to reconnect is more than welcome.

My maternal aunt in particular, Khalto Sawson, is my favourite among favourites. I've never seen her smile leave her face. When I would visit Lebanon as a kid, I remember her catch-all answer to any request ready at her lips: ba'd wehdi habibti – just one more. Just one more plate of food. Just one more hour to stay up. Just one more kiss, just one more hug.

When I got married and had kids, she extended this unrelenting love and generosity to my family. My kids came to know Khalto as a bonus grandma. And they loved taking advantage of the“just one more” rule whenever she was around.

My husband even joked that he is probably the only man in history that is happy that he had two mothers-in-law instead of one.

So, when I got he her message I remember feeling all the warm fuzzies associated with my aunt's voice.

But I didn't reply to her right away because I was busy. I was in the middle of packing for my family's first trip since the chaos of the pandemic to attend my master's graduation ceremony in Richmond, Virginia.

I'll call her back tomorrow, I thought.

Somewhere between finalising packing, PCR tests, a 15-hour flight from Doha to Washington DC, between immigration lines, luggage claim, a 2-hour drive to Richmond in the middle of the night and jet lag, I finally collapsed on my hotel bed and opened my phone.

Ready to message her that I couldn't wait to see her when we got back.

But when I opened WhatsApp, I couldn't see her message anywhere because of all the unread messages that popped up.

Condolence messages. Allah yerhama – may she rest in peace.

My aunt had died suddenly while I was in the air.

It didn't feel real. It still doesn't feel real. As I waded through my shock, the thing my brain decided to zero in on was the fact that I didn't respond to her. Why didn't I reply to her? Why didn't I just call her back and talk to her – one more time? Just one more conversation with my beloved Khalto?

Unfortunately, as an expatriate of 16 years, this is not the only time that I have been blindsided by death. Grief, I've learned, has a way of arriving in the space between I'll call tomorrow and it's too late.

That space is familiar to anyone living far from the people they love. As expats, we build lives across time zones and borders, sustained by voice notes, missed calls, and hurried messages sent between obligations. We promise ourselves that we will call tomorrow, visit next summer, stay longer each time we do. Distance teaches us to believe that connection can wait.

But loss does not wait.

In the Gulf, where millions of expats live far from their countries of origin, grief unfolds at a distance. Flights are expensive, visas uncertain, conflicts erupt without warning, and funerals happen before loved ones can arrive. Technology may give us the illusion that we are connected, but in terms of loss, it simply reminds us, relentlessly, of the distance we cannot collapse.

Therefore, closure is often fragmented.

After Khalto's death, and in the years since, I have come to understand that grief is not only the absence of a person. It is the accumulation of unsaid things. The small, ordinary exchanges we assume will always be available to us later.

It is this“unfinishedness” more than death itself that causes suffering.

So what happens when technology attempts to occupy that unfinished space? To collapse the distance between here and gone?

Today, as artificial intelligence creeps into the most intimate parts of the human experience, grief technology – apps using algorithms trained on digital data to create simulations of the deceased – provides a way to interact with loved ones long gone.

Is that unsettling? Maybe. Comforting? For some, surely so.

I chose to focus my Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship reporting on grief technology because I wanted to examine whether its potential benefits outweigh its psychological and ethical risks.

And while I have not arrived at a personal conclusion about whether it is“good” or“bad,” months of reporting, speaking with both proponents and critics, have made one thing clear: grief technology speaks to a deeply human desire for continued connection.

And I understand that desire intimately.

I still have Khalto's voice notes and pictures saved on my phone. And I sometimes wonder what it would be like to experience an interaction with her that that offers something more than memory: a response. The possibility of saying all of the things left unsaid.

But I have yet to seek it out.

Her absence, as painful as it is, feels honest. Because grief in its rawness affirms the depth of what was lost. Because I have come to understand the silence she left behind as the shape of how much I love her: proof that she was here, that she mattered, that she cannot be replaced by simulation.

I share my experience not as an answer, but as an invitation. Grief technology represents one emerging pathway in a rapidly evolving landscape where wellness, psychology, and technology increasingly intersect. It will not be right for everyone. But in a world reshaped by distance, digital presence, and the only guarantee in life – death – it raises questions worth asking:

What psychological purpose does grief serve, and what happens when we try to bypass it?

If love endures beyond death, what does it mean to say goodbye? And, do we have to?

When technology offers continued connection, does it help us live with loss or keep us from letting go?

If this reporting does anything, I hope it opens space for those conversations.

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