When Matthew Phillip Long returned to Cyprus three decades after leaving the island as a child, he believed he was searching for his mother. In seeking to understand her, however, he finds himself and the question of what remains when everything changes and life moves on.
“At first, I thought I was returning to Cyprus in search of my mother,” Long tells Neos Kosmos.
“After she died, I found myself drawn to the island because it was one of the places where she still felt present to me. I wanted to walk through the landscapes she had loved, to see what remained, and perhaps to find some way back to her through memory.”
In his debut novella, Life Goes On Without You and Me, the story begins with a death. The narrator’s mother has succumbed to terminal cancer, leaving behind a grief so profound that it reshapes the way he sees the world. In the aftermath of her loss, he returns to Cyprus, the island of his birth, hoping the landscapes she loved might bring him closer to her memory. What unfolds, however, is far more than a story about mourning. It is a meditation on belonging, inheritance and the enduring power of place.
Written as a conversation between a grieving son and Cyprus itself, the novella opens with a direct address to the island.
“Mother died on the sixth of January. Do you remember her?” he asks.
“The reason grief remains with us is because love remains with us. We continue to carry people because they continue to matter. In that sense, grief is not the opposite of love. It is one of the forms love takes when someone is gone,” says Matthew Phillip Long. Photo: Supplied
The question is deceptively simple, yet within it lies the emotional heart of the book. Cyprus becomes more than a setting; it emerges as confidant, witness and companion, a living presence through which grief, memory and identity are explored. Long’s attempt to understand the death of his mother gradually expands into an exploration of the stories we inherit, the places we imagine and the often uncomfortable distance between memory and lived reality. Yet as he travelled through Cyprus, moving through landscapes that had long existed in family stories and photographs, Long began to realise that the journey he had undertaken was about far more than mourning. What began as an attempt to reconnect with his mother’s memory evolved into a confrontation with questions of identity, inheritance and belonging, forcing him to reckon with the difference between the Cyprus he had imagined and the Cyprus that existed before him.
“I began to realise that I wasn’t only searching for her,” he says.
“I was also confronting the gap between the Cyprus I had inherited through her stories and the Cyprus that existed before me.”
That gap between inherited memory and lived reality became one of the novella’s defining themes.
“The search for my mother gradually became a search for how memory shapes belonging. Not belonging in a straightforward sense of finding where I fit, but belonging as something more fragile and unresolved. The novella is, in many ways, about discovering that you can return to a place and remain a stranger to it. Yet there is something meaningful in that search. Sometimes we return not because we expect to find answers, but because the act of searching itself becomes a way of keeping alive something we have lost. By the end, I think I understood that I wasn’t looking for a route back to my mother so much as a way of carrying her forward. The island became the space in which that realisation could emerge,” he adds.
Larnaca, Cyprus. Photo: Hert Niks/Unslash
For both the writer and the reader, the tension between those competing realities extends beyond questions of place and identity, touching on the experience of grief that sits at the centre of the novella. Throughout the narrative there is a quiet recognition that personal loss and collective memory often mirror one another. Cyprus emerges as a landscape marked by absence, interrupted histories and competing understandings of home, while the narrator navigates a world reshaped by the equally profound absence of his mother. In both cases, what is missing remains deeply present, shaping how the past is remembered and how the future is understood. By the end, the mother’s absence becomes a symbol of the enduring human desire to find meaning in the void of what has been lost.
For many people in the Greek and Cypriot diaspora, the idea of homeland is formed long before any physical return takes place, shaped by family stories, old photographs, language, traditions and a longing passed between generations. In this sense, home often becomes something imagined and inherited rather than directly experienced, carrying emotional significance that can feel just as real as the place itself.
Long argues that what we inherit is rarely a place in its entirety, but rather a particular version of it.
“We never inherit places themselves. We inherit versions of them,” he muses. “Places arrive with us through the stories people tell, through photographs, through family myths, through longing. By the time we encounter them, they are already layered with memory.”
The Cyprus Long inherited from his mother was shaped by nostalgia preserved through family stories and recollections. The Cyprus he encountered on his return, however, was a modern and often contradictory place carrying the weight of political division, conflicting histories and multiple understandings of what the island means to those who call it home.
“When I returned, I found an island that was more complicated than the one I had imagined. Divided, contested, constantly changing, carrying histories that could not be contained within a single narrative,” he explains.
The realisation was initially unsettling. Like many diaspora descendants who return to a homeland they have known primarily through the stories of others, Long arrived expecting a degree of recognition and confirmation. Instead, he found uncertainty. Yet rather than undermining the project, that uncertainty ultimately became its foundation.
Turkey’s military helicopter fly in front of the giant Turkish Cypriot breakaway paint flag on the Pentadahtilos mountain as take part in a military parade marking the 48th anniversary of the 1974 Turkish invasion in the Turkish occupied area of the divided capital Nicosia. Photo: AAP via AP/Petros Karadjias
“What interested me was not whether my mother’s Cyprus was truer than the Cyprus I encountered,” he says. “Both were real in different ways. One existed in memory; the other existed in the present. The challenge was learning to hold both at once.”
That tension between memory and reality gradually became one of the novella’s defining themes, extending beyond questions of place and identity into a broader exploration of grief itself.
“We carry a version of the people we have lost, but life continues around their absence,” Long says.
“The book gradually became an exploration of how we live between those realities, between memory and history, inheritance and experience, longing and acceptance. I came to realise that healing was never to be found in the Cyprus my mother remembered. That place disappeared the moment it became memory. What mattered was understanding why she carried it, and what that inheritance might still reveal about the person I had become. Perhaps belonging is not finding a place exactly as it was described to us, but learning how to live within the distance between the story and the reality.”
While Long did not set out to draw a direct parallel between personal grief and Cyprus’ history of division and displacement, he found himself increasingly aware of the similarities between the two.
Limassol, Cyprus. Photo: Karoly Karkus/Unsplash
“Grief changes the way you see things. It heightens your awareness of what is missing. It makes you attentive to silences, to absences, to traces of what once was. As I spent time in Cyprus, I found myself recognising those same qualities in the landscape around me,” he says.
For Long, Cyprus is a place where history often announces itself through absence: through empty houses, interrupted lives, contested memories and places that remain emotionally present even when they are physically inaccessible. Like grief, the island seems to carry multiple versions of itself at once. The Cyprus that exists today, the Cyprus that people remember and the Cyprus many still long for.
“We often imagine healing as a return to what existed before loss, but neither individuals nor societies work that way,” he argues. “The past remains with us, but it cannot be restored. We have to find a way of carrying it forward. Perhaps that’s why these themes continue to resonate so strongly today. We live in a world marked by war, migration, exile and separation. Across different cultures and circumstances, many people are wrestling with questions of home, memory and belonging. The details may differ, but the emotional terrain is often recognisable.”
That idea extends to the relationship between people and places themselves. Part of Long believes that landscapes remember, “ot literally, but through the emotional residue left behind by those who have passed through them”. The places that move us most deeply, he suggests, are often those in which we have already invested part of ourselves.
“The title of the novella suggests that life goes on, and of course it does. But writing it taught me something else as well: that the people we lose do not simply remain behind us in the past. They continue to accompany us into the future,” says Matthew Phillip Long.Photo: Supplied
“You arrive somewhere and feel as though you are stepping into something already in progress, as though the place contains layers of lives, histories, departures and returns that continue to shape the atmosphere around it,” he says.
“Anyone who has seen the abandoned villages of Cyprus, stood beside the Green Line, or visited a childhood home after many years away will recognise that feeling.”
At its heart, Life Goes On Without You and Me asks a deceptively simple question.
How do we continue to live meaningfully alongside loss, whether personal or collective, without allowing it to define the limits of our future?
The answer Long arrives at is not recovery or a return to what was, but a search for a way forward accepting multiple or opposing realities.
“Both (mother and Cyprus) were real in different ways. One existed in memory; the other existed in the present. The challenge was learning to hold both at once.”
