On Wednesday 2 September 2015, Alan and Ghalip Kurdi’s bodies washed to the Mediterranean shore near Bodrum in Türkiye. They were just two and five years old and their fate brought into stark relief the horror of drowning. Ever since, I have been compelled to write about the drowned as once-subjects who must be acknowledged. In the process, I have realized that geographers have much to learn from the drowned and much to contribute to studies of and for the drowned. Hence this book. The ideas that surface in this chapter flow through those that follow. Here, I consider what drowning is and explain my focus on those who have been fatally drowned because, specifically, they have experienced diverse forms of oppression. I ask what happens when the drowned lose personhood because they lose their lives. I ask how we might better recognize their posthumous dignity and explore in the process how their silent absent presence and abjection matters. I wrangle with questions about the possibility of forgiving those who harm. And I explain how each case study to follow draws from archival records and other documents and artefacts. I then introduce each case in brief and touch on how each enables me to think with water—the element fundamental to the study. Doing so gestures to my ambition to produce, in coming years, other works on elemental geographies and their entanglements in all our lives.