Episode 3: From the River to the Sea
We All Need To Grieve
When the world burns, what happens to us? As people, as witnesses?
I struggle with the collective grief I feel for the Palestinian people. This coupled with the death of a few family members earlier this year mean that October 7, 2023 rapidly heightened what I was already feeling. A daily onslaught that only grows with each swipe, each tweet, each terror.
Unable to air out its wings and soar, the grief gnaws at me.
Earlier this year, my partner’s grandmother, Ajji, passed after one week of hospice care. My devastated partner attended to her family’s collective sorrow by taking on the now surreal task of finding a funeral home. Our children played without abandon with the other kids on the verdant lawn outside the funeral parlor, as if nothing had changed.
We put on our best respectable faces at the many Hindu rituals we went to before we stopped because acting too social and too normal just deflected feeling the loss.
After her services, in a single moment of clarity, I shared what she meant to my side of the family, particularly my mother who shares a love of Hindu rituals with Ajji and loved reading Ajji’s book on the subject.
It was a beautiful tribute to a wonderful woman that all of us had the privilege to know, even for a short time. I’m still processing her loss, and have been for the past week.
But we woke up this morning to rain and humidity, reminding us of Ajji’s beloved Bangalore, and we saw many friends and relatives at the services who came to show their love for a woman who truly loved everyone she met, including you all.
I miss her coming to our house and folding our clothes because she always wanted to feel useful, I miss her embrace and heartfelt kisses, and I miss her dedication to everyone she loved and that loved her. Sometimes I regret not seeing her one last time before she passed on, and sometimes I remember all the times she beamed when all her great grandchildren played about her feet, brushing against her legs.
I miss her because she mothered everyone I love, and I miss her because she raised my partner to be the beautiful and fierce woman she is today, and I miss her because she took me in too as her own. Truly a blessing she was, our Ajji.
Until now, this message was the most public I had been about my grief, when much of my energy went into keeping our home functioning and caring for our children and my partner as soon as we heard the news.
But the difference is that we expected her passing. She was 90. She poured her life into everyone, raising my partner from a young age, and living between the United States and India.
And then, a few weeks later, my mother’s last living brother passed at the age of 81. Her despair was compounded because she didn’t know him well, and neither did we. My mother lost touch with him over the years and though we would see him and his family on our sparse trips to New Delhi, there was little discussed and the short chai and snack visits usually ended after the exchange of pleasantries and brief updates on our relative stations in life.
Earlier this year, we also lost my other uncle, to whom we were much closer. And a few years ago, we lost my mom’s younger brother who was only 68 years old, and her sister who taught her how to paint, which is what my mother spends much of her free time doing.
She only has one remaining sibling out of eight. And I cannot bear to think the level of grief ringing through her, especially at this moment when I am about to join her in India for the holidays.
I want to know what grieving looks like for her. And to support her in her process. It’s been hard for me to reach out to my mother, to really understand what’s she’s feeling and thinking because I haven’t put in the work to build that kind of connection.
That kind of loss, where a generation is near gone, is not something anyone wants to imagine.
But in Palestine, that imagining is cracking towards reality on a massive scale. Right now, Israel is murdering the old, the young, and the babies. According to the UN, 97% of men and 98% of women feared for their safety before October 7, 2023. As a result of the offensive in Gaza, the “most dangerous place to be a child in the world today is Gaza.”
Despite the hope I felt during the temporary ceasefire, Israel resumed the bombing. Stacking horror atop horror, Israel began training its missiles onto the southern part of Gaza, which is precisely the area where northern Gazans fled to, while continuing to bomb the North.
Against this U.S. backed genocide that has no end in sight, I have trouble understanding how to act and how to grieve. As if they could be combined into a single act.
I have gone to protests. I have donated funds to organizations and individuals. I have heard stories of friends knowing their friends in Gaza died, of friends whose workplaces became even more hostile after October 7, 2023.
I got encouraged by a twitter thread by Professor Eman Abdelhadi entitled We Need You Functioning. I especially liked this tweet:
This reminds me that it is okay to feel a bit helpless, to feel like sometimes I just need to lie in sadness, sit in the grief, and ignore the world for a second, or more.
In my life prior to October 7, I have taken this advice to heart - to find your people and build in real time to see them, to laugh with them and love them. Now, it becomes much more pressing.
I hope to keep learning how to grieve and to act, how to feel and to live. I will stay functioning and engaged until then.
Free Palestine. Always. 🍉