Her husband’s birthday too

(Originally written October 19, 2023)

I lie awake at 2am.

It’s my husband’s 50th birthday today.

I love him so much yet it hurts to think of celebrating when thousands of innocent people are dying preventable violent deaths.

I’m not even living through it, yet I want to wake up from this nightmare.

As I lie here, I can’t stop thinking.

Is it someone’s husband’s birthday in Gaza too, and will he live to see another day, week, month?

Who will look for the survivors in the rubble?

Who will pull the dead bodies from the rubble, and bury them, or will the rubble be their grave? The babies, the mamas, the uncles, grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends, and husbands.

When will the mother be able to mourn the loss of her child?

Or the doctor the loss of his family? Can he mourn them while he continues caring for the bloodied bodies?

Will the orphaned child remember her parents, her siblings?

Who will care for the wounded when everyone is wounded or dead?

This is hell on earth.

I want us to wake ourselves up from this nightmare

That we created long ago

That we are fueling with arms and funding with taxes

That we voted for with our own unprocessed pain and trauma, our deeply seated racism, our too-busy-to-do-something lives, our need to know it all before we speak up, our willful ignorance

Our unwillingness to look, listen, learn, question, rage, and act.

We are letting it happen again. But we said never again, didn’t we? Have we forgotten that promise?

We always say never again. Again and again.

Yet here we are again.

Their blood is on our hands.

Never again was yesterday, but never again is now too.

To honor the dead and hope for the living, we must renew our vow to never again and act on in with urgency and unrelenting clamor.

We must dissent in any and every way we can wherever we are whoever we are.

We must go deeper wider higher than what we have known or believed.

We must interrogate our beliefs and assumptions and break through our own hard held convictions and affiliations.

Look at who has the power and the might and the resources. Then look at who is dying by the thousands with little or no defenses. More than 1,000 children already and many more of their loved ones. 

For the oppressed who are trapped under the rubble and can’t cry out, for the oppressed who have been crying out for decades to no avail, we must amplify their calls. Never again must be now.

Today as I celebrate my husband’s birthday, I will be present with the joy and the pain and the anger, and I will pray. I will pray that she and her husband will live another day, another week, another 50 years too.

I will celebrate her husband’s birthday too.

End the genocide. End the occupation. Free Palestine