Photo by Liana S

A recent death in my family underscored for me the devastating impact of personal grief, illuminating the deep loss and constant state of mortality that Palestinian families endure every day.

To be Palestinian is to carry an inherited archive of loss. After nearly a century of forced displacement, military occupation and relentless aggression at the hands of a brutal colonizer, death in Palestine has not been a quiet end at the close of life. It is an ever-present shadow woven into the tapestry of daily existence.

Across generations, grief has been more than individual sorrow, an occasional isolated tragedy; it is an ongoing shared reality written into the collective memory of an entire people.  For Palestinians, Israeli colonization has stolen more than land; it has robbed them of their sovereignty over mourning, honoring and burying their loved ones in peace.

For most of the world, dying young is an unbearable disruption of the natural life cycle; for Palestinians, living under systemic hardship, surviving into old age is a rare exception rather than the norm.

From the traumatic dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1948, to the........

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