I woke up Oct. 7 thinking about nothing in particular. It was a Monday and I wasn’t ready to start the week, but the sun shining through my window shades urged me out of bed.
I checked my phone to reveal a text from my mom, realizing what it was before I opened it. My sleepy eyes skimmed over two paragraphs of poetic words and red heart emojis addressing something I dreaded thinking about: my dad. More accurately, his death, 20 years ago to the date.
I turned my phone off and shut my eyes, wishing to disappear back into sleep, feeling the pressure of tears welling behind my eyelids and the shame that held them back.
For as long as I can remember, my dad has existed to me as an uncomfortable facet of my identity. Though I often thought of him as a little kid, for the past decade I have tried to avoid letting thoughts of him seep into my daily life. It’s not that I don’t have questions about who he was, the country he came from or the things he might have taught me. But dwelling on these questions has increasingly felt like standing at the edge of a huge gaping hole in the ground — even as I’m tempted to peer down for a glimpse at what lies inside, the closer I get, the more perilous the operation feels.
So that day, like many days, I held him for a moment in my mind and then reviewed why it wasn’t my place to be sad: how entitled could I be to grieve for someone I can’t even remember, while people around me suffer real losses everyday? Is my life not filled with enough love and caring people to focus on instead?
I let these swirling thoughts ground me back to normality — this arbitrary date was just like any other, now just with a two-decade buffer between me and a loss that wasn’t even mine to claim.
I pulled on clothes and walked to my first class, curiously noting chanting in the distance and a heavy silence hanging over campus. It wasn’t until reaching my seat that my ambivalence dawned on me. Oct. 7 wasn’t just my family’s day of mourning but an international one for the 1200 Israeli people killed a year ago and the 42,000 (and many more uncounted) Palestinians killed since.
I am well practiced in the art of suppressing emotion. I plant grief deep within myself. I grieve for Gaza, even though I feel privileged when I say that aloud. I bury it with excuses, reassuring myself that it’s not my place to mourn lives taken an ocean away. If my grief can’t save anyone or bring back the dead, why even acknowledge it? I push any traces of empathy further and further down, letting lives fade into numbers and ignored headlines — a tragic but almost inevitable feeling.
But as I sat in the aching numbness of my own discomfort on this strange death anniversary, I was struck by the parallels in my emotions towards the destruction in Palestine and my own quietly held loss.
These are lives I will never know, stories I will never fully understand — but people in every way deserving of remembrance.
While my dad’s death 20 years ago has nothing to do with the genocide happening right now, realizing how I’ve denied grief over both has forced me to realize how dangerous my silence has become. Echoes of the sadness I’ve spent a lifetime suppressing have rendered me less empathetic to the world.
Grief is terrifying, painful and imperative to creating change. It holds immense power. But so does its absence.
Right now I see the world, or at least this country, falling into a habit I have grown too familiar with. We slowly turn away from our grief because it hurts less and we feel out of control.
But our sadness has as much power to enact change as anger or moral indignation. Empathy is quintessential to what makes us human, and in denying it, we deny the humanity of millions of people.
Death is a natural part of life, but not on the scale we are witnessing in Gaza. It is horrific, violent and unfathomably big. To grieve the thousands of lives taken this past year is to resist apathy and indifference to injustice. Our grief isn’t selfish or meaningless; it’s generous and vital.
Grief is wild, tragic, beautiful and worth fighting for. It can’t return life, but it should compel us to defend it. If the feelings I keep buried regarding my dad can teach me anything, it is that an intangible loss is not any less real.
In acknowledging my grief, I refuse to let it turn into indifference. I transform it into a commitment to remember and to act. By grieving, I honor those I’ve lost and learn to reclaim my capacity for empathy. Grief is not a burden, but rather, it is a call to recognize the value of every life and to challenge the silence that surrounds tragedy.
Contact Estel Garrido-Spencer at garridospenc@oxy.edu
