Memento Mori

Dust in the Wind

Evan Rook has spent his life trying to preserve what time erodes—mending brittle pages, stitching torn bindings, restoring words from the brink of disappearance. But when his own body begins to fail, preservation is no longer a vocation. It becomes impossible.

Haunted by his mother’s final request to keep her garden alive, estranged from a daughter who has grown beyond his reach, and stalked by the quiet accumulation of dust in his empty house, Evan finds himself confronting the inevitability of loss. Each room becomes a museum of absence, each breath a reminder that even memory crumbles.

Yet as his world narrows, unexpected presences return: a wild garden blooming without his hand, an old friend refusing to let him vanish into silence, and at last, the daughter whose absence has defined his grief. In their fragile reunion, Evan begins to see what endures—not the objects he tended, but the act of tending itself.

Memento Mori: Dust in the Wind is a stark, contemplative novel of mortality and inheritance, of promises broken and love remade at the edge of time. With prose both intimate and unflinching, L. Desmond delivers a haunting meditation on what it means to leave behind not permanence, but presence.