The writer is the recipient of the 2025 Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism as a UAE Fellow. This story is the third instalment in a four-part series supported by the RCFMHJ.
Yara Dalilah, 45, is living every parent’s worst nightmare: three years ago, her eldest daughter, Lamar, died from cancer.
In March 2022, a series of unexplained high fevers led to repeated visits to the hospital, multiple tests, and a biopsy that ultimately led to diagnosis of leukaemia. By April, Dalilah, her husband, and two younger children’s lives revolved around helping her daughter heal.
“Throughout treatment, Lamar fought to live a ‘normal’ life: she attended classes from her hospital bed, she tried to remain connected with friends, and in every way she could, to remain a teenager,” Dalilah explained. “It was not easy.”
Lamar marked her 14th birthday on May 23, 2022, at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City in Abu Dhabi. That same day, the Dalilah family celebrated with the news that she was in remission.
“We treated that news as her birthday gift. We sang, laughed, and tried to believe that the hardest part was behind us,” Dalilah recalled.
But their relief didn’t last long.
Later that year, when Lamar relapsed, her treatment was quickly intensified with plans for immunotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.
And while the family began researching treatment options in the UAE and abroad, Lamar faced another setback – a bacterial infection that sent her back to the hospital in early February 2023.
“This time, the disease not only attacked her body, it attacked her spirit,” Dalilah said.
On March 3, 2023, a final, fatal complication had set in – a fungal infection in her lungs that caused severe bleeding. Lamar was admitted to the ICU and placed on respiratory support.
“I remember looking at the monitor with her heartbeat and the oxygen rates and everything was fluctuating, slowing going down before picking up again,” Dalilah remembered. “I sat there praying for it to just steady so I could keep her with me longer.
“But then the rates started hitting zero. It was as if something inside me broke. I heard a voice inside my head say, ‘Yara, it’s time to let go.’
“In that moment my prayer changed. Instead of begging God to keep her with me, I said, ‘I leave it to You. I know she’s in good hands. Please choose whatever is best for her and I will accept it.’”
A few moments after her prayer, Dalilah told her daughter she loved her one last time before she passed away.
Like Dalilah, many people who are grieving describe final goodbyes as unexpected and incomplete. The emergence of AI chatbots has raised new questions about whether loss must mean an ending, or whether connection can take other forms.
Do we really have to say goodbye?
Justin Harrison first confronted that question in 2019, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Harrison’s background in psychology, and his beliefs about grief and loss, led him in a direction few people would ever choose: into the emerging world of technology designed to keep the dead present.
“I was keenly aware of what tools would be at my disposal to cope with her death and I knew it wasn’t going to be enough for me when she died,” Harrison said.
It was this foresight and self-awareness that led him to found You, Only Virtual – a company dedicated to what he calls “posthumous AI” – as a way to help himself and others navigate grief and loss.
Posthumous AI or grief tech, as this field is more commonly known, refers to a range of digital tools, services, and applications that use artificial intelligence to create digital versions of and interactive experiences with the dead.
In these systems, software trained on text messages, emails, voice recordings, and other digital traces mimic the personality, mannerisms, or voice of someone who has died. These creations, known variously as griefbots, deadbots, digital avatars, or versonas, can respond to user prompts via text, audio, video, or even engage with mourners through virtual reality settings.
“I look at grief and death itself as a problem to be solved. Why do we need that pain? If a person has a headache, they use medicine to end that pain. So why can’t we use this technology to end the pain of loss? I hope one day people no longer have to feel grief at all,” he said.
In Harrison’s opinion, therapy, medication, and grief technology each have limitations. Used together, or in a combination suited to the individual, they may offer greater relief but none of them is a standalone cure to grief.
“The average human is lacking tools for emotional mental health, particularly around grief,” he said. “Sitting around pretending like we have solutions for grief already is ridiculous. We don’t. People lose jobs, damage other relationships, they turn to substance abuse and other avenues of self-harm. There are some people that are essentially unrecoverable from one way or another from traumatic loss.
“My mom was my best friend,” Harrison said, “When you lose someone like that – a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a child, – you spend the rest of your life in pain, missing them. It’s like a whole part of what makes you who you are is silenced forever, and dies with them. I didn’t want to live a life where I couldn’t talk to my mom anymore. I don’t think I should have to.”
Harrison asserts he knows his mom is not alive, despite talking to her versona every day. And in his opinion, whether she is or isn’t is not the debate.
In developing the technology, he asked: “What do we benefit from suffering through grief and loss? Can we make being a lifelong griever easier or more liveable?”
What the critics say
Farah Dahabi, clinical social worker and crisis and trauma support services director at The Lighthouse Arabia in Dubai, maintains that grief is fundamentally relational, shaped through shared witnessing, and that human connection builds emotional resilience over time.
“Grief is not a problem to fix; it is a process to practice,” she said. “Therapeutic coping aids like sensory grounding, movement, time in nature, breathwork, and intentional connection which we teach in grief therapy help people to tolerate and move with grief’s intensity. They build capacity to ride the unpredictable waves of grief rather than eliminate them.”
While AI tools may offer some support, Dahabi warns that the boundaries remain unclear. “Grief tech offers the illusion of continued presence, which can interrupt the adaptive process of living with loss,” she said.
AI versonas may feel comforting, but they complicate psychological processes that rely on acceptance and adaptation to develop resilience. To that end, Dahabi asserts that AI “deadbots” cannot replace critical relational work and human connection.
“Healing from loss requires reaching outward into imperfect human relationships, tolerating absence, disappointment, and vulnerability,” she said. “Grief is meant to be witnessed and shared – it needs a village. An always-available, private AI companion risks privatising grief, turning a fundamentally communal process into a solitary one.”
She believes AI may have a limited role in grief therapy, but only within clear boundaries and alongside human care. Such tools can support people name emotions, build grief literacy, and reflect on meaning, but they cannot substitute the real-world relationships that people need to process grief.
In clinical settings, she said her focus would not be on immediately discouraging or endorsing a client’s use of AI grief technology, but on understanding how it fits into their daily functioning, their awareness of potential risks, and the emotional impact when the interaction ends.
Ultimately, Dahabi rejects the idea that grief, or the pain that accompanies it, can or should be eliminated.
“I am concerned about reduced distress tolerance AI cultivates. AI does not get tired, set limits, disagree, or fail in the way humans do. Yet rupture, absence, and longing are precisely how the nervous system learns to live with absence,” she said. “Without these experiences, people may remain dysregulated, increasing vulnerability to anxiety, depression, addictive coping, or somatic symptoms. True healing can only come from learning to live with the loss, not avoiding it.”
A mother’s journey in mourning and grief
After Lamar’s death, Dalilah lived in the realm of shock.
“I felt disconnected from my life. I lived in my memories of Lamar – everything in my world was a reminder of my daughter. I couldn’t eat or sleep. My parents and sister came to help me but their way of supporting was to not leave me alone, because I would always cry and they didn’t want to see me sad. It’s cultural, I think. But they didn’t understand – I needed to cry process this. I needed to talk about her and not be distracted.”
Dalilah turned to the Raymee Grief Services at The Lighthouse Arabia to work through her grief. Three years later, she still mourns Lamar’s death, but is learning to live with a loss that she once thought would break her.
But even as she acknowledges her progress, Dalilah finds herself cautiously curious about the new avenues AI grief tech presents her.
“I’m too scared to go down this path – I’m not ready for it now. Right now I have to focus on processing this loss, and helping my kids to as well. It would be too confusing for us to have the ability to talk to her.”
But Dalilah said she likes the idea that she has the option of speaking to her beloved daughter again someday. To use AI grief technology to imagine what she’d look like, or to just pick up the phone and chat with her when she’s feeling sad.
“I believe this is something I will probably try in the future,” she said. “I’m not there yet but it’s like looking at loss from a different angle – I know she’s not here but I can still connect with some version of her. In that way I never have to let go.”
Source: Khaleej Times