How might we ethnographically render what it is to inherit war? This talk brings us into writing from within affliction and the dying space. This talk is written from the dying space that I have inhabited. Staying close to the distortions of time, place and person within disease and dying shows us that we cannot bound or define in advance what a story is “about”: affliction can at once be the story of dementia, the story of war, and the story of kinship. By asking how we render description in anthropology, I ask if we can hone a method that is attentive to how we learn what counts in healing a broken world. Do we give importance to this learning in anthropology?