Palestine Letter: Love, grief, and the stories that stay with us

Yesterday was Valentine’s day, also my mother’s birthday. 

She asked- as she does every year, almost like a ritual- “how old am I this year, hun?” I did the math, 2023 minus 1957. “You are 66,” I said with a smile. “Oh my, may I be graced with more years,” she said as we both burst into laughter.

That same day I was reading the note that Palestinian political prisoner Zakaria Zubeidi wrote after his brother, Daoud Zubeidi, 43, was killed last May. 

“All that I have lost, I was neither able to say goodbye, nor was I able to bury them. My father was killed when I was in the Jenin prison, my mother during the Battle for Jenin- she was buried by the Red Cross because we were unable to reach her due to the intensity of the assault. My brother Taha was buried as I was under the rubble of the homes destroyed in Jenin refugee camp, and today Daoud.” The letter went on to confess, “I never practiced the rituals of grief, I never knew or experienced them.”

In covering developments in Palestine, as reporters on the field, we are inevitably exposed to the more intimate details of an incident, event, person. We enter the homes of killed fighters, and stand outside the courts of families waiting to see their teenage child in handcuffs. We learn the stories of entire families, sometimes we notice a similar echo across cities and towns, we cluster information into numbers and infographics. We take what can be ugly and vast, and are tasked with making it easy to consume.

In trying to categorize what is relevant or important for our readers and audiences to know, we inevitably and necessarily leave out much of the information we gain. We try to simplify for clarity. Then we report in brevity, because who has the attention span and patience to read essays, just to understand what’s happening across the world?

Yet amid these considerations taken between learning ourselves, and then sharing the information we learn, all these untold stories, bits and pieces of people’s lives and histories, remain with us. When I read a letter from a man who lost his brother, like an involuntary reflex, I conjure back all the times I heard the word “execution” last year. 

The same word, uttered by so many voices. I realize that some were younger than others, and some more angry. Then there are all those that said it in grief. 

I love my mother. I was horrified at the idea of losing her, but what immobilized me was the attempt at imagining not being able to grieve that love. In journalism, we learn a lot about loss only because we get to know the value and weight of what was lost.