How to survive escaping a bullet?

In one of his nineteenth century novels, Balzac complains that doctors have come up with so many new specialised terms for illnesses that on hearing them you have no clue as to their origin and cause. As if these names live a life of their own, alienated from an individual and the possible complexities of his of her life. In the old days, people would say that one suffers from unrequited love, envy, worry or disappointment and today you have technical terms like irritable bowels, dementia, cancer, stroke. They used one of these to explain my grandfather’s death when he collapsed on a cold winter day in front of the house while collecting some wood for the fire.

I don’t remember what was the exact word except that it sounded irrelevant and even misleading. If anybody had bothered to know why his big generous heart failed I would have told them that after four agonising years of living in the exile it received its final blow just a month earlier when his wife died and was overwhelmed with immense grief. And even though many people concluded that living up to your seventies is not that bad, it didn’t comfort me much. I was sure both he and my grandmother would have lived to see many more sunrises if life hadn’t been so hard on them at the very end. During those four long years there was not even the slightest glimpse of a chance that they would ever get away from the dirty ugly urban suburb of a big city where they lived entrapped between four gray walls and return to their home that was miles away in the countryside. With their family and friends being scattered to different corners of the world and the busy locals keeping at a safe distance, there was not much comfort for the aching hearts and weary minds. And even though my grandpa was a man of strong constitution and even stronger will, I had seen him crushed.  

© UNHCR/Zalmaï

Only four years earlier, we were all relieved when after a couple of days of waiting by the phone we finally got the news that they had escaped the cruel death that befell some of their neighbours who stubbornly refused to leave their homes. Little did we know at the time that this immediate death was only to be replaced with slow dying.

However, my grandpa wasn’t the last victim. Four months later, their eldest son, my uncle, followed the same road, again exhausted with disappointment, disorientation, hopelessness, desolation and quiet suffering. They were like falling dominoes, yet nobody considered them casualties of war because they did not fall by the bullet or knife. Nobody keeps a record of these slow deaths in the exile. Perhaps because it would be terrifying to hear the number. Rarely anyone acknowledges them and takes them for what they really are. It is much easier to tag them as cancer, heart failure and diabetes. As if they weren’t ignored enough at the end of their lives.

I wish the society as a whole had paid more attention. I wish people close to them had shown more understanding. I wish they had had somebody to talk to. I wish they could have made themselves talk. I wish they could have accepted the injustice as one of the life’s tricky ways to challenge us. I wish they had been just a little stronger to live to return only a couple of years later. 

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