A Moment of Recognition

Dear Friends

The year 2024 was especially difficult for my family. We lost my mother in law, my grandmother, my brother in law, my uncle and my cousin. All but my cousin died a natural death after a long full life surrounded by loved ones. My cousin tragically lost his life in a car accident.

We, like the rest of the world watched as death wrapped its dark skinny fingers around the lives of many in Gaza, as the genocide continued to be live streamed to a largely silent world.

Around the end of June I sat down to write and the below text came out. I did not send it at the time, because I felt that I could not send you guys one more entry about loss and death. I felt like I was burdening you with my dark thoughts. I also doubted you, dearest gentle readers, your interest in my story, the relevance of my observations, and I doubted your humanity in seeing me as one of you, as deserving of your time. Imposter syndrome much?

Anyway, I stopped writing (AGAIN) and instead poured myself into my work, convincing myself that I am already living the creative life i wanted through my work in developing educational materials, curricula and trainings.

So here I am again, giving this a try one more time. Maybe this time things will stick together. I will write more regularly, I will read more, and finally live the creative life I want to live. I think that we owe it to ourselves to keep trying, to keep chasing our dreams and passions as long as we live.

I share with you below my thoughts on loss and mourning , just like I have shared before my thoughts on many other topics. There is no real reason why I decided to share this with you now, mostly because I find myself writing more these days, now that USAID projects have stopped, and the one project that was both the source of my creative and the bane of my existence is still suspended, so I find myslef with more time. Possibly? Maybe? Or maybe it is because my brain is about to explode from all the ideas jumpin around and I am worried that if I don’t write they will go on to suffocate and die inside my head without every seeing the light of paper or post or whatever it is that I am writing on that day.

I hope you are still reading, and that you will continue to read… until I write again…be in peace.

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June 2024

This week, I want to take a moment to recognize loss. I don’t think we do enough of that around here. And when I say loss I mean death. The loss of life regardless of the reason.

Over the last seven months my family has jumped from one loss to the other, my aunt, my mother in law, my grandmother, my brother in law, and last Sunday my uncle. Death has a strange way of making us come to terms with our mortality, something I have struggled with over the last five years since my father passed away.

So this week, I am taking a moment not to excuse death, not to reasonably explain it as a fact of life, but to mourn. Not just all those my family lost, but also the beheaded child paraded to the background of burning tents, and the dead man pulled from the tents having just left this world, leaving behind a stunned face and a rigid body, and the sleeping baby whose internal organs imploded upon explosion leaving her to never wake up again.

I am taking a moment to recognize that death is the total sum of our lives, and the most definite end to all of our journeys, yes. There is nothing more certain than the end of a life. But to logically explain it, excuse it, is the ultimate act of dehumanization.

It may not hurt the departed, but it certainly hurts those left on Earth to grapple with the deafening silence it leaves behind. So what if we refuse to normalise it, or to justify it, and we just allow ourselves to mourn, to feel the sadness, to light a candle, to say a prayer in between tears, to recite a passage from a holy text in search of comfort. What if we allowed ourselves to be human.

In a land where life is lost at the whim of an 18 year old soldier holding a rifle, or pushing a tank button, we have certainly gotten good at justifying death to ourselves. If it is an old father or uncle or mother we say “ Oh Allah Yirhamhom they were old, what did you think they were going to live forever?” If it is a death after a long fight with a chronic disease we say “Hamdilla they can rest now.” If it is a young man or woman killed in an airstrike or shot on a check point, we say “Lucky for him/her, he/she is a martyr.”

Perhaps out of necessity we normalize death, like we have normalized birth. Perhaps because we have come to accept it. But acceptance is not the absence of mourning. In our acceptance we mourn the lost lives, and in our acceptance, our mourning and our continued push forward we express our humanity loud and clear.

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