On Grief

Or All the Things I Cannot Say

Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1630

I’m a pretty private person, all things considered. I keep a lot of my innermost neuroses, fears, quirks, and momentary feelings stuck inside that old ticker of a machine that I call my heart. It’s not something I like to touch upon, not something I like to make text. But this month has changed that paradigm. I feel like I have to say something, make plain my positions and emotions on a conflict that, while it might be thousands of miles away, is only but a crosswalk away in my soul. But I don’t feel like I have the authority to write about Gaza, or Israel, or Hamas, or the IDF, or apartheid, or occupation. It’s not that I haven’t written about it before. If you’ve seen my Twitter, you know that isn’t true. It’s that I feel too many individual pains surrounding this conflict, it’s that I can’t write an essay about the issue and not get the feeling that I forgot something so important, something so crucial, that I might as well be better off having never written anything at all. So I’m going to write about this “flare-up,” that euphemism to end all euphemisms. But I’m going to write about it in a different manner. I’m going to take a few paragraphs to describe the outermost emotion the Israeli/Palestinian conflict spawns in all who, by chance or by choice, have a stake in the matter. I want to write about Grief.

On Thursday, October 12th, I found out that my old friend Laor Abramov had died. He was only around 20 years old, just a tad older than I am now as I write this sentence. I hadn’t known him all that well. We spent one two-week summer session at an old Jewish youth camp in 2019 and had only rarely spoken to each other after that. To be frank, it’s probably stretching the idea of a “friend” far too wide for me even to call him one. But upon reading this news when it came to my attention that afternoon, my heart simply sank. I looked up, and the only thought that could be conjured in my head was a simple “Why?” Laor wasn’t a political person. He wasn’t, to my recollection, operated by any extreme animus towards the Palestinian people. But he was dead. Laor was gone. And it hurt.

Grief has surrounded me all my life. I always like to make a joke when around friends that I’ve been to more funerals than weddings in my entire life, probably to a factor of three. Grandparents, an aunt, family friends, all I’ve experienced passing on before I turned 21. It has come to a point where death doesn’t really haunt me much anymore. Or to put it cogently, death now just feels like a constant, a feature of living as bizarre but normal as sweating, as dreaming. Images of unspeakable horrors can wretch my stomach, but they no longer seem to wretch my soul. I’ve accepted pain and destruction and violence as basic and commonplace. But I couldn’t make this separation of conscience when Laor died.

When Laor died, or rather when I heard Laor died, I felt raw. I was never going to see him again regardless of whether he lived or died, but his premature retirement to eternal sleep felt, maybe by its nature of utter fickleness, even worse than him fading into the crowd. That man in the background of around ten photos in my camera roll. That man is no longer alive. Those events are now officially past. I would have to now deal with the linear progress of time not as an abstract concept of measurement but as a marking point in my life. 

Then, more news sputtered out of the Gaza Strip describing unspeakable horrors. Millions displaced, hospitals running out of electricity, the occupier’s chief military politico referring to Gazans as “human animals.” The West Bank wasn’t spared. I found a video of a teenager telling the cameraman about how he was set on fire by a settler. My heart sank at every juncture, the same emotional pattern as when I had heard that Laor died. Did 1,400 Laors die for 3,000+ more Laors to perish too? Do we have to make a proportionate algorithm for how one Israeli Laor justifies the death of four more Palestinian Laors? I am no pacifist, I believe war can be just despite it being hell. But no just war theorist, no casus belli can logically and ethically condone a murder marathon going on nearly continually for fifty-six years. No one needs to defend Hamas to understand that there is one key variable determining the length of this conflict. The longer the occupation, the longer the dying, the more convoluted our morals become on the simple matters of human life. I’m sick and tired of the cycle where one waits every three years to read a New York Times article about how 100 more Laors, both Israeli and Palestinian, have died in a two-week conflagration between the IDF and Hamas. This isn’t pacifism talking, nor is this moral equivocation talking. It’s humanity talking. Can you listen?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning begins her poem Grief by stating “I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.” In this spirit, I yearn and I search, with the utmost zeal, for a resolution to this most horrifying of conflicts.  We all know how this tragedy can be solved, the answer is as clear as day. When the occupation ends, the violence, while it may persist, will inevitably recede to an uneven, but measurable, tempo. But while the question of when might be resolved, the question of how still remains. To that, I have no answer. Just as Browning begins her poem with a glimmer of hope, she ends it by describing an emotional reality that looks akin to how I now feel. She describes an eternally frozen statue, desperate in its everlasting agony, and proclaims to us one simple line about the melancholia it upholds. She writes, “if it could weep, it could arise and go.”

“Appalled By Her Legacy” by Honoré Daumier, 1871