Tigers Above, Tigers Below

Holding Humanity in the Midst of Sorrow

"Are all humans human, or are some more human than others?"

– Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil

Note: This is a longer reflection. Some stories ask not to be rushed. This piece holds stories of grief, war, trauma, racialization, racism, memory, and survival — and for those who know these realities intimately, who carry personal, inherited, or collective experience, I want to offer transparency. There are no graphic details in this written piece, but only you can know what you have the capacity to hold today and every reader arrives carrying a different story. Each of these themes is approached with tenderness; still, I want to honour the truth that even gentle language can stir something within us — especially when we’re not given space to prepare. This reflection isn’t for everyone and it may not be the right day to hold it well. But if you find yourself still reading after the first few lines, maybe — just maybe — it was written for you.

Please read with care and know it was written with love.

In a time when grief feels especially close to the surface for many, I offer this not as a commentary but as a reflection, along with questions and practices drawn from research on trauma, resilience, post-traumatic growth, and healing-centred practice to help guide students, staff, and communities in tending to one another with care. There are seasons when sorrow moves through our lives like a tide — slow, relentless, reshaping everything it touches without asking permission. We emerge from these seasons carrying not only the memories of what was lost, but also the threads of what endured: tenderness, witness, the fierce will to remain human when it would be easier to harden and turn away.

This piece is stitched together from the remnants left behind.

It is not a linear story.

Nothing ever is.

The Weight and the Wonder: Learning to Live While Carrying Loss

There are some conversations that do not end when the words fall away. 

These conversations continue in the air around you, subtle but insistent, reshaping the way you move through the world without your conscious consent. 

One afternoon, a friend and I found ourselves speaking about the strange and terrible inheritance of our time: what it means to love people whose lives are caught in the machinery of wars they did not choose, whose futures are made fragile not by accident or disease or the slow erasure of years, but by the decisions of those who will never have to carry the weight of the choices they make.

It is a particular kind of sorrow to lose someone not to the organic mystery of nature but to the designs of human hands, minds, and weaponized machinery. Somewhere, far from the worn kitchen table where your coffee cools and the sun slants lazily through the curtains, someone is deciding who will live and who will not — and somehow, still, you are expected to carry on.

The brutal ordinariness of life demands your participation: the weather report updates on the radio, the bread rises, the laughter of children from the playground as you walk by. Meanwhile, the news seeps in, steady as groundwater, carrying its catalogues of devastation. Each week arrived like a stone hurled into the pond of our lives, sending ripples we tried to absorb in silence, even as the water never quite stilled.

I told myself it would do no good to remain motionless. Stillness, I feared, would pull me under, into a mourning so vast and uncharted that I might never find my way out again. And so I did what so many of us do when we are confronted with the despair and pain that is so deeply attached to the senseless and existential…

I worked. 

I anchored myself to the rituals of support — building spaces, creating offerings, reaching out across the silence to families, students, and staff whose own grief threatened to undo them. I told myself that action was a kind of love, that building even the smallest of rafts against the onrushing tide of despair was better than surrendering to it altogether.

The choreography of productivity made this response feel almost natural. The calendar didn’t pause for mourning. The inbox did not offer condolences. The systems around me moved with the same practiced rhythm — emails, deadlines, deliverables — as though nothing had changed. There were still meetings to attend, reports to submit, plans to finalize.

Grief, it seemed, was permissible as long as it didn’t spill over the edges — allowed in silence but never in stillness, allowed to exist but not to disrupt. The machinery of the day-to-day kept humming, indifferent to the horrific unfolding of every minute, of every hour, of every long day and every sleepless night.

If it were not for those brief, tender moments — a colleague pausing just a beat longer than expected, an honest question that wasn’t asked out of obligation but out of care, the flicker of recognition in someone’s eyes that said, I see that you’re holding more than you’re saying — I might have unraveled entirely. I still remember those moments. They were rare, sincere, and deeply human.

But even tenderness lives within a rhythm that rarely slows. The choreography of productivity gently resumed and we all fell back into step — not out of coldness but out of custom, momentum, and necessity.

As long as I smiled, as long as I replied, as long as I delivered — what it was costing was mine to carry.

Somewhere, deep in the marrow of my bones, I knew what I was doing: lighting candles in a storm, offering matchsticks to a hurricane. I knew it would never be enough to close the chasm between what had been lost and what might have been.

I knew all of this.

I kept going anyway.

In those suspended days, when everything ordinary seemed absurd and everything absurd seemed inevitable, the words of James Baldwin returned to me with the clarity of a drumbeat in the fog:

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

To live through the aftermath of violence is to be handed a terrible choice: to look away, to allow the wounds to become invisible in order to protect your own comfort, or to turn toward them — to face them without flinching, even when you know that no amount of facing will erase the loss.

It is to choose, again and again, to inhabit a world whose brokenness is real, without allowing that brokenness to unmake your own humanity.

When I was little, my grandfather used to sing the chorus of an old song to me — “K-K-K-Katy” — with a teasing smile and a twinkle in his eye, his voice full of warmth. “K-K-K-Katy, my beautiful Katy, you’re the only girl that I adore,” he’d sing, drawing out the notes with a kind of joy I didn’t yet know was laced with something deeper. I only knew that I liked the way he sang my name and that no one has sung it to me since he passed away on September 2nd, 2001 — a quiet, personal loss that came just days before the world was ruptured by the events of September 11th, then irrevocably steered by their aftermath. What followed unfolded over weeks, months, years, and decades — unrelenting, all-encompassing waves of geo-political consequence whose full, horrific scope we are still struggling to understand, even now. In the space of mere weeks, I went from being “K-K-K-Katy” to being the Other, as the world plunged into a new era shaped by fear, surveillance, and war. The touchstone of my life was gone — always there with a cup of tea, a card game ready to play, and a Fudgsicle with my name on it in the freezer — just as the ground beneath all of us began to shift.

In the days that followed, we packed up the house in hushed tones with the television murmuring in the background — live coverage of dust-covered streets and collapsing towers playing on repeat as boxes were sealed, picture frames wrapped, memories tucked into cardboard. I remember many of us speaking aloud what grandpa would have thought about it all — as if invoking his name might anchor us, might somehow slow the unraveling that was taking place both within and beyond those walls.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the history of the song “K-K-K-Katy” — a World War I-era marching tune sung by soldiers far from home. What I had received as love — pure and uncomplicated — was, in its origin, a love stretched across war, distance, and the looming spectre of loss. Maybe this is what it means to inherit memory: to receive something soft without knowing it was once surrounded by sorrow, for all those who waited at the kitchen door. To be held in a song that carries what the heart remembers long after the world forgets — where sorrow lived quietly beneath the melody, and still, somehow, felt like love.

There is a courage in living fully in a world you know is wounded beyond repair. A courage in carrying forward not only the burden of sorrow but the stubborn insistence on tenderness, the fragile but vital belief that love still matters, that memory still matters, that to bear witness and choose integrity without shrinking back is a form of resistance in a culture that worships forgetting. To mourn openly, when the easier path is numbness. To build, when the tides of indifference pull so heavily toward collapse. To remain, not untouched — but still reaching for the light.

And so we live, not despite the sorrow, but through it — stitching our days together with fragile threads of care, memory, and unfinished hope. We live by refusing to forget what the world would prefer we leave behind. We live by carrying not only the weight of what was broken, but the persistent, aching belief that it matters that we remember, that we create and transform, that we become more than the violences in our world and resist complicity against those we love and those whose names we will never know. Even when the work feels small against the vast machinery of forgetting, even when the storms rise again and again, we choose — not once, but every day — to stay human.

We live by refusing to turn away, even when the weight of what we know threatens to undo us. We live by carrying the responsibility to remember, to repair in the ways still available to us. We live even when we are consumed with the extent of all that has been lost, even when we remain tender in a world that would prefer we grow numb — not once, but again and again.

To remember what was broken and still choose to love is how we begin the slow, necessary work of becoming whole.

The River Remembers: Bearing Witness to the Cost of Forgetting

There are wounds that do not bleed outward, but inward, folding into the body in ways no one else can see.

Years ago, a friend of mine came home; though to call it "home" would be an act of generosity the country had not earned. His service had not unfolded under waving flags or clean ceremonies; it had taken place in the unspoken margins, in missions no one wanted to claim when the cost became too high. He had served not through the traditional channels of honour and recognition, but in the shadows, in ways that left him carrying burdens the public would rather not see — or were barred from knowing at all. When trauma surfaced, when survival became complicated, the same systems that had called on his loyalty abandoned him without ceremony. He returned to suspicion, smallness, and the staggering loneliness of realizing that the countries he had "so-called fought for" — as he said — could no longer recognize him, if they ever truly had.

He called me one night from a small-town bar, his voice tight and low, filled with the barely-contained rage of someone trying not to shatter. Someone, he told me, had called him a slur because his hair had grown long, the small rebellion of someone who had finally escaped the machine that demanded he wear his body to regulation. In that moment, surrounded by strangers who would never understand what he had given — or lost — he nearly broke apart.

Not because of the slur itself, but the shameless bigotry it revealed.

"I don’t even know what the point of any of it was, Kaitie. People are more ignorant now than before. None of it means anything anymore, if it ever did…" he said, and there was no bravado in it, no political analysis, no bitterness — only the raw bewilderment of a young man who had risked everything and came back to a country that did not know how to carry what he had seen or the ideals they claimed to protect and stand for.

Ideals they demanded he believe in when he was young, searching for purpose in a country gripped by fear.

A country filled with people who never intended to carry anything at all.

A country that had asked everything of him — and prepared itself to remember nothing.

I listened as he spoke, the silence between his sentences weighted with everything he could not yet name. I did not offer platitudes. I did not rush to fill the ache with easy comforts. Some kinds of pain deserve the dignity of being heard without interruption, without solutions. I understood, even then, that sometimes the most important thing you can offer another human being is not an answer, but a place where their sorrow is allowed to exist.

What struck me most, though, was not the anger in his voice, nor even the depth of his disillusionment. It was the loneliness — the realization that, in the end, it was not the battlefield that would undo him, but the ordinary streets of his own hometown.

It was not the war alone, but the forgetting that followed.

And though I could not undo what he had endured, though I could not heal the breach between what he gave and what he received, I could stand with him in the wreckage. I could bear witness to the fact that he was not invisible.

I could help hold the thread of his humanity, even when the world around him seemed determined to sever it.

In the years that followed, I carried his story into the spaces where I taught, refusing to let it be forgotten. In my Social Studies classes, I would show my students The Tillman Story — the documentary about Pat Tillman, another young man searching for meaning who discovered too late that the ideals he was called to defend were riddled with betrayal. My friend would sometimes visit my classroom over video conference call, speaking on screen before the students, not as a polished hero but as someone still trying to make sense of the cost.

He spoke of what it meant to realize — while still in uniform — that the war you were fighting was never about protecting freedom, but about serving power: oil, profit, control, chaos disguised as cause. He spoke of the slow, sickening dissonance that set in when you understood you were not defending the innocent, but being used to uphold systems that would discard you the moment you were no longer useful. He spoke, not to glorify or to shock, but to give language to the silent reckonings so few are prepared for. Some of the students recognized pieces of their own families' histories in his voice — uncles, aunties, cousins, parents, older siblings whose lives bore the same deep and hidden fractures. As the room breathed with the weight of what was shared, we spoke together — not about politics, not about patriotism, but about the human cost of militarism.

We spoke about the ways loyalty is demanded before understanding, how bodies are sent forward without the truth ever fully being given, and how grief is so often left to those who had the least power to shape the circumstances responsible for it in the first place. My students, perceptive and present for nuance, met these truths not with judgment, but with a kind of quiet reverence — a willingness to hold the complexity without rushing to resolve it.

And I watched my students — young, hopeful, alive to the world’s possibilities — sit with that complexity.

Not turning away.

Not looking for easy heroes.

But listening, fully, to what survival demands — and what it refuses to let us forget.

In those moments, I saw something rare: the seeds of a generation who might remember differently.

A generation who might build differently.

A generation who, faced with the machinery of forgetting, might still choose to remember.

There is a violence that does not announce itself with weapons, but with silence. With the way a room shifts when a soldier walks into it. With the way a nation turns its face toward ceremonies and slogans, but away from the living person who comes home wearing a face they no longer recognize.

It is easy to glorify sacrifice when you are not the one tasked with living through its consequences.

It is easy to thank someone for their service without ever asking what they had to sever from themselves in order to survive.

It is easy to build monuments, far harder to build a society worthy of those it sends into harm’s way.

All of us, pawns on their boards.

All of us, pieces in games designed by those who would never stand where they send others to fall.

All of us, inheritors of debts we never agreed to owe.

All of us, asked to carry the cost while others rewrite the story.

All of us, shaped by storms we did not summon, but still expected to weather.

All of us, carrying the unfinished stories of those who could not return.

That night years ago, as I sat on the phone listening to a voice fraying under the weight of all that could not be unsaid, I realized something I have carried with me ever since: to truly stand with someone who has seen the underside of the world is not to fix them, not to sanitize their sorrow into something palatable — but to sit with them at the threshold where their old life has ended and their new life, raw and unrecognizable, has yet to begin.

To stay when there are no easy answers.

To remember when it would be easier to forget.

To refuse to turn away.

In the years since, I have come to understand that the deeper violence of war is more than what it destroys, but in what it hollows. It teaches us to celebrate sacrifice but silences the voices of those who return carrying truths too heavy for our national myths to hold. It teaches us to erect monuments to the fallen while abandoning the living. It teaches us to treat grief like an inconvenience — something to be tidied up, tucked away, so the machinery of normal life can grind on undisturbed.

Grief is not an interruption of life; it is life, in one of its most honest forms. It asks of us what few are willing to give: the courage to remain tender in the presence of things we cannot fix, the integrity to carry truths that will never be convenient, the love to build a world where no one’s suffering is treated as invisible.

I could not bring back what my friend had lost. I could not unmake the past, give meaning to the disillusionment he felt, or restore the simple belief that home would feel like home. 

All I could do was stand beside him, with him, in the ruins. 

I could love him not despite the sorrow he carried, but because of it.

That sorrow named him as someone who had touched the darkest depths of what it means to be human…

…and had not turned to stone.

The Seeds We Carry: Small Moments, Vast Histories, Shared Survival

It was an ordinary afternoon, the kind that disappears unnoticed into the weave of a thousand other days.

I was in my backyard, wrestling the garbage into the bin, when I saw him: a man in a worn army green jacket, sorting through bottles and cans along the alleyway. There was something about the way he moved — steady, unhurried, carrying himself with the quiet dignity of someone who had long since stopped expecting the world to make room for him.

I called out a greeting and, when he turned toward me, something wordless passed between us and we both knew in an instant that we would be talking for a while, nowhere else to be except in the company of a stranger. We began to talk, cautious at first, two people feeling for the edges of each other's lives.

He told me he was Cheyenne and carefully pronounced it, letting the name carry its full weight and joking that many people pronounced it improperly outside of his community. He asked me if I had heard about the Cheyenne people, to which I responded, "The Cheyenne are warriors!" He then proceeded to nod his head, the weight of that word — warrior — carried in the set of his shoulders, the way he spoke of his family with a love that filled the spaces between his words, how it was love that brought him to this side of the colonial border.

His wife, his children, his parents, and the generations of service that had marked their lineage. His father in Korea, his grandfather on the shores of D-Day, his brothers — all had served. His brothers, he told me, served during the Vietnam War and were laid to rest in Arlington. He was surprised that I knew what this meant as we spoke more, shaking his head with a small, amused smile, and said he hadn’t expected "some girl in the alley" to know all this. I smiled back and said, "I just try to pay attention." He laughed, and in that laughter there was something unguarded — a brief easing of the heavy history he carried — before he went on to tell me that he had served in Iraq and was a Marine. He shared his scars and their stories, not for pity but as offerings, fragments of a long, complicated inheritance carried forward in flesh and memory.

There was no bitterness in his telling, only the kind of sorrow that has been worn smooth by time — the sorrow of someone who knows that the forces that shape our lives are often too vast to name, let alone resist. The complexity of his stories are too deep to share and it would not be my place to share them here, but I was taken with how he expressed the humanity of the Iraqi people who were categorized as “the enemy” at the time (and, in many ways, since). When I told him that my father was Iraqi, Akkadian-Assyrian to be specific, he grew still for a moment with compassion in his eyes telling me how he had a good friend who was his interpreter during his time overseas who had been targeted by Daesh (ISIS).

And then, with a humility that caught me off guard, he apologized.

He apologized for the war and his role in it, breaking eye contact and looking downwards.

I shook my head and put my hand on his shoulder. "I know enough about war to know that it wounds everyone it touches," I said. "We are both two people who have been changed by powers that encompass us but can never consume us."

”We share a story, just different chapters.”

He raised his head and then went to shake my hand before moving past my palm and towards my left arm. He told me to grip his forearm as he gripped mine. As we held each other’s arms, we shared another laugh as he joked about how I could be “Saddam Hussein’s cousin,” with teary eyes we could not define as joy or sorrow, but some beautiful blending of both worlds together.

We stood there for a long while, two lives briefly intersecting in the soft light of a late afternoon, the sound of the city fading to a hum around us. I made him lunch and, over multiple cups of Arabic coffee, he shared more stories — not as confessions, not as performances, but as offerings. I listened without judgment, without haste, without the need to draw conclusions.

Before he left, I remembered the small pin I had been given once — a pin designed to honour Indigenous veterans, entrusted to me by someone who had said, simply, "You'll know who to give it to."

Until that moment, I hadn’t.

But standing there, I knew.

I ran into my home and came out before he continued on his way, pressing the pin into his hand without ceremony and, for a moment, the air between us felt heavy with all the things that did not need to be spoken aloud. 

We embraced and he carried on.

He visited a few more times after that and each time we fell into conversation as easily as if we had known each other for years. Early on, I offered to help in a more tangible way — an instinct born not of pity, but of care — but he waved it off, explaining that he was out looking for bottles and cans simply to pass the time productively. I respected him and took him at his word, honouring the story he told me about his life, not pressing the offer. When I eventually had to move away from that house, it was a quiet parting, the kind that does not require promises or grand gestures — just the shared knowledge that for a time, we had been a refuge to one another in a world that so often forgets how much refuge we all need.

His name is still saved in my phone, alongside a small note to remind me of the afternoons we shared.

I like to believe there’s another conversation waiting for us, when the time is right.

Somewhere between the clatter of garbage bins and the slow cooling of coffee, we built a kind of bridge — not across ideology or politics, but across the deeper currents of loss and love and memory that make us human. In a world so quick to divide, so quick to flatten complexity into caricature, we had recognized in each other something the world often overlooks: the simple, sacred fact of each other's survival.

It struck me then — and strikes me still — how easy it would have been to miss it.

To close the door, to avoid eye contact, to have not wished him a friendly greeting that started it all, to hurry past, to see only the surface of things.

How often, I thought, have we been taught to value speed over presence, certainty over listening, comfort over truth?

The most important moments of my life have rarely come cloaked in grandeur. 

They have come like this: quiet, unexpected, asking nothing but a willingness to stop and stay.

In a world fraying at the edges from all that it refuses to face, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to meet one another not as symbols, not as strangers, not as burdens — but as living, breathing testaments to everything that still deserves to be remembered, cherished, and carried forward.

Perhaps memory, when it is held with tenderness and courage, does not only connect us to the past…

It calls us to become more faithful stewards of the future.

Where Grief and Beauty Meet: The Courage to Bear Witness

There are wounds the world does not ask us to see.

They do not declare themselves with spectacle or sound; they do not clamour for acknowledgment.

Instead, they move quietly through the fabric of daily life — stitched into the muscle memory of a body, in the way someone hesitates before speaking, in the way a hand tightens just slightly around a coffee cup, in the way the eyes scan a room not for beauty but for the exits.

Most of the grief that shapes the human spirit is not housed in grand, cinematic moments; it presses inward, folding into the silent architecture of survival, carried forward like breath, unseen by those who have never had to live inside its weight.

And yet, we find ourselves living in a time that rewards insulation — a time when strength is measured not by our capacity to remain open to one another’s pain, but by how well we can wall ourselves off from it. We have been taught to call it resilience, self-care, preservation — and at times, it is. There is wisdom in stepping back, in knowing when to protect the tenderest parts of ourselves.

Yet somewhere along the way, something else has taken root: the convenience of detachment masked as health, the worship of curated lives where grief is an unwelcome guest, and where memory — real memory — has become too heavy to hold in a world obsessed with the lightness of moving on.

We tell ourselves we “do not watch the news” to protect our peace, as if peace were something that could ever be fully separated from the blood that waters its soil.

Suffering remains a distant backdrop rather than a living inheritance.

We become fluent in slogans and soundbites, quick to post moments of curated hope but slow to sit with the truths that demand something of us beyond applause or a brief public disclaimer before uploading the next selfie to the void.

We have learned, almost unconsciously, how to turn the page before the story becomes inconvenient.

But, like most superficial salves, there is a cost.

A cost to this forgetting.

There always is.

There is a violence in our refusal to witness the full measure of what has been endured in our names.

There is a wound not just in the bodies of those who return or survive, but in the soul of a society that asks for sacrifice without remembering the faces of the sacrificed.

Each time we choose adjacency over entanglement, consumption over relationship, spectacle over solidarity, we widen the quiet fracture running beneath the surface of our lives.

It is not enough to brush against suffering at a safe distance — to parade resilience like a badge worn lightly, without ever touching the places where survival has carved itself into bone.

True witness is something else entirely.

It is the willingness to be changed by what we see.

It is the understanding that memory, when held properly, is not a relic or a burden, but a covenant: a living promise not to turn away, not to move on as if the wound were never opened, not to allow forgetting to become the soil where future violence takes root.

The world is still full of small ceremonies of survival, invisible to those moving too quickly or too carefully to see them: a man in a green jacket he was given when another veteran gifted it to him during a Remembrance Day ceremony out of respect since he did not have his own anymore, walking with the dignity of someone whose story had been worn into silence and could not be diminished; a young veteran carrying memories heavier than the medals pinned to his chest, reaching for a friend to share his pain in the fire of a profound rage burning in a small-town bar; a teacher wrenched with despair awaiting news about loved ones overseas before the horror of the headlines, silenced as their personal pain is categorized as political by others on the outside looking in who could never know, lighting candles against a darkness that presses at the edges of every ordinary day.

None of these lives demand pity.

None of them require performance.

They ask for something far harder: memory, presence, love that is fierce enough to face the truth without flinching.

It is not wrong to seek beauty.

It is not wrong to find moments of wonder in the midst of sorrow.

However, if the price of our joy is the erasure of those still caught in the wreckage…

…then it is not joy we are practicing.

It is abandonment disguised as hope.

Real beauty, if it is to mean anything at all, does not require the erasure of grief to exist. It asks us to hold both: the broken and the blooming, the blood and the blossom, the sorrow and the fierce, aching love that persists anyway. It asks us to remember that tenderness is not the opposite of strength, but its highest form.

It asks us to stay human in a world that forgets too easily how sacred, and how fragile, being human truly is.

The Sweetness and the Storm: Giving Shape to the Unspeakable

The more time I spent sitting with grief — my own, my students', my friends', strangers' — the more I came to understand that language often fails where pain runs deepest. There are things the mouth cannot hold without trembling. There are memories so weighted, so tangled in sorrow and survival, that to speak them plainly would be to unmake something essential inside the one who carries them.

When I volunteered to support veterans, I never pretended that I could fully understand their pain or what they had endured. I volunteered because, in the quiet way that only experience can teach, I knew sometimes the most loving thing we can do is offer a space where the unspeakable can take form.

A place where survival does not have to translate itself into palatable words to be held, only witnessed.

And perhaps that was why, in a way I could not have predicted, I felt at home in that room and a kind of kinship I did not find anywhere else at the time.

I was just a teenager when the war began, but I still remember the way the air shifted — how suddenly I was not only Canadian, but "half-Iraqi," a half-known, half-claimed identity thrust into the spotlight by forces far beyond me.

But after 2003, it didn't matter.

It didn’t matter if you were in the United States or Canada — the propaganda leaked across the border like smoke under a door.

The hate was suffocating.

One day I was a kid.

The next, I was a threat.

I went from being a “who are you” (Kaitlin) to a “what are you” (terrorist) overnight.

I think many people forget how blatant the racism was at that time, how even so-called “leftist” publications and shows leaned into stereotypes and harmful tropes that we all thought we were somehow “too sophisticated” to fall for at the time. It was all a little history repeating and, as Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

I would defend myself to others telling me to “go back” to “my country” (Iraq) that I had been born in Canada and was of mixed heritage, as if these protestations would prove to their bigotry that I was fully of this place. As if logic could make the racism more reasonable. As if making myself smaller could make it stop. Still, I could not hide the deeper feeling after these confrontations that I did not belong and would always be perceived as the Other. I had never felt this so acutely in my life until the war taught me otherwise. Until the headlines, the talk radio, the whispered slurs in hallways, classrooms, and airports made it clear that my heritage, my father's country of birth, had been marked as Other, as enemy.

I remember the stares. The jokes. The sudden chill when teachers said the word "Iraq" and their eyes flicked toward me. I remember how the war flattened everything it touched: people, countries, stories, histories. How it turned a place full of grandparents and farmers and dreamers into a single, monstrous image.

And so I did what many of us do when the world turns us into a punchline. I learned to make the joke before anyone else could — leaning into ironic racism as a form of preemptive control, mocking my own “half-Iraqi” identity so that the world’s contempt might feel like something I still had a say in.

I internalized the message so deeply I still catch myself doing this today — when I feel exoticized, misunderstood, or Othered, I feel the old reflex return. The one that says: If I laugh first, it won’t hurt as much. If I diminish myself, maybe they won’t. I had never seen Iraq except through family stories, but still, it lived in me — and still, it was enough to make me suspect in the only country I had ever called home.

My father's country, which he had left as a boy, was reduced overnight to a caricature of terror and savagery. My own skin, my own name, became suspect. The war was happening "over there,” but the hate burned here, too. And what was happening here wasn’t just adjacent to the war “over there” — it was complicit in its making and callous in its forgetting.

And through it all, the propaganda machine roared, drowning out the human cost — not only for Iraqis, but for the young people sent to fight, to kill, to be broken in body and spirit, all for the illusion of freedom and the reality of oil, profit, and power.

The war shaped all of us without our consent.

And so, sitting beside the veterans, shaping clay into the stories we could not speak aloud, I found something I had not realized I was searching for: a community of people who understood, in ways most could not, that the Iraq War was not a clean story of good and evil. It was a story of grief — of grief carried by the ones who lost everything and the ones who returned to find everything they had believed hollowed out.

In those small rooms, with the paint and the silence and the heavy-laden masks, we built something the world had refused us:

The right to grieve together what the world insisted on forgetting.

I realized that in a world eager to move on, they were some of the only ones who remembered the cost — not the televised cost, but the human cost.

They did not need me to explain why and how the war had fractured meaning, memory, and trust.

And I did not need them to explain why the deepest damage is often the hardest to name and carries on in the loss of clarity, of conviction, of who we thought we were.

We understood each other — not because we had lived the same story, but because we all knew what it meant to be marked by a story the world no longer wanted to tell.

And so, we turned to art.

Not as a way to fix the broken, but as a way to let it be seen without forcing pain or lived experience into coherence. 

We worked with masks — clay, paper, paint — allowing stories to emerge in the tilt of an eyebrow, the sharpness of a cheekbone, the shadows around the eyes. We learned what a recent study affirmed: that even when language fails, the body finds ways to speak. 

Researchers have found that the creation of masks by military personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress symptoms revealed emotional truths that their words could not — sorrow hidden behind the shape of a scar, anger buried in the deep furrows of a forehead, hope stitched delicately into the curve of a mouth left unfinished.

The later masks, layered in complexity and symbolism, told the stories that could not be told aloud. They bore witness to experiences that language alone could never have carried.

They did not ask for pity.

They did not ask for admiration.

They asked, simply, to exist — unpolished, unhidden, whole in their complexity.

It was there, in those small rooms cluttered with paint and plaster and unspoken grief, that I saw the difference between witnessing and consuming.

To witness is to stand beside another human being as they lower the armour it has taken them a lifetime to fasten and not flinch.

To witness is to recognize that true strength is not forged in curated moments of aestheticized “grit-core,” but in the long, unseen labour of learning how to live again with wounds that will never fully close.

In a world so eager to adorn itself with the appearance of toughness — shirts stamped with slogans about resilience, events that co-opt the language of war and violence to imply the intensity of the curated pay-to-play recreational experience, social media posts about "pushing through the pain" — it is easy to forget that real survival is not photogenic.

It is not a brand.

It is not something that fits neatly into a before-and-after story we can admire from a distance without getting our hands dirty.

It is the slow, halting work of stitching a life back together from the frayed edges of memory, a life that may never look seamless again, but is no less sacred for its seams.

The masks taught me something that no textbook,

no lecture,

no social media post,

no polished public tribute could have taught:

Healing is not a return to the self that existed before the wound.

It is the long becoming of a new self.

One that carries the scar

not as a badge of honour,

but as a living record…

Of what was survived,

what was endured,

and what was

never surrendered.

To bear witness to that becoming is not to mine it for inspiration or to parade it as proof of human endurance; it is to sit, quietly and fully, with the holy, terrible knowledge that some things break and are never put back the same way again.

And that this, too, is a kind of life.

When we turn suffering into spectacle, when we strip resilience down to aesthetics we can wear without cost, we betray not only those who have endured, but the deeper parts of ourselves that still know how to kneel before the mystery of another’s pain without trying to conquer, sanitize, or sell it through adjacency.

True healing, true strength, true memory — they are not tidy.

They are not for consumption.

They are not for sale.

They live in the long, slow choosing to remain human when it would be easier, faster, safer to harden and move on.

In the quiet spaces of creation, amid the cracked paint and trembling hands, I learned that sometimes love is not in the fixing, or even in the understanding.

Sometimes love is simply in the staying.

Even After Everything: Choosing the Sweetness of Living

In times of great sorrow, there is a powerful, almost instinctive temptation to reach for the light too quickly — to declare ourselves healed before the wound has even closed, to frame our survival as triumph, to insist that every pain must yield something redemptive, something polished enough to share, something that reassures the world that all wounds are temporary and all griefs productive.

We are creatures aching for resolution, desperate for the illusion that everything hard can be softened if only we are brave enough, disciplined enough, faithful enough to find the silver lining.

But real life — real healing, real transformation — does not move in straight lines.

It does not conform to the neat arcs of redemption we have been taught to expect; it does not package itself into narratives clean enough for consumption. True healing is rarely cinematic. It unfolds slowly, often invisibly, in the quiet spaces we would rather not look — in the grief that remains long after the funeral, in the hollow ache that lingers after the applause has faded, in the silent, private reckonings that cannot be witnessed by an audience or a follower count.

There are moments when the body, knowing before the mind can comprehend, moves through the motions of survival without asking for permission or understanding. I remember, in the spring of last year, receiving news of another death — another loved one, an entire family lost in an instant among countless others, another fracture across a heart already worn thin by grief.

I did not cry.

I did not scream.

I simply stood up from my desk, silent and mechanical, and quietly left my office without a word.

I had no destination in mind, only the need to move, to exist somewhere beyond the unbearable stillness of that room.

Somehow, without conscious decision, I found myself in a grocery store — surrounded by fluorescent lights, canned music, and the ordinary rituals of life that felt, in that moment, both obscene and necessary.

I wandered the aisles blankly, grateful that I could stare into the abyss of endless variations of cereal boxes without anyone noticing the hollow in my chest.

In the produce section, I picked up a fresh strawberry — small, bright, perfectly imperfect in its ripeness — and for a moment, everything else fell away.

I remembered the old Buddhist parable my sister and brother-in-law shared with me when I was a teenager: the woman chased by tigers, clinging to a vine between two cliffs, tigers above and tigers below, certain of her impending death, who nevertheless notices a wild strawberry growing beside her and, before the end comes, takes it and eats it — savouring its sweetness fully, utterly, without reservation.

Tigers above. Tigers below.

And still, the strawberry.

And still, the sweetness.

In that ordinary aisle, holding that ordinary fruit, I understood something I had always known but never lived so bodily:

That sometimes, all we can do is be alive.

All we can do is taste the sweetness while it is still within reach.

Not to deny the sorrow.

Not to erase the terror.

But because life, even in its shattering, still offers itself to us. 

I ate the strawberry.

Because there are strawberries that will never be eaten. 

Because to choose to be fully alive, even for one small, trembling moment, is to honour all life.

To seek beauty in the midst of darkness is not a betrayal of those who suffer; it is a necessary act of survival. However, to seek beauty at the expense of remembering, to turn away from the weight of the world in favour of curated serenity or negligent peace, is a different thing entirely. There is a line — often a thin one, often hard to see — between tending to our own spirits and abandoning the work of bearing witness altogether.

Somewhere inside each of us, if we are willing to listen closely enough, there is a voice that knows the difference.

Hope is not the same as denial.

Hope is the muscle that allows us to face the full measure of grief without losing the capacity to imagine something better.

Hope, if it is real, does not bypass the brokenness; it kneels beside it, bears it, builds with it.

Hope is not a blinding light that erases the dark; it is the small candle that continues burning even when the darkness presses close.

The world does not need more curated optimism, more hollow declarations that "everything happens for a reason," more demands that survivors hurry toward gratitude before they have even been allowed the grace to grieve.

The world needs people who can hold sorrow and wonder at the same time.

The world needs people who can sit with what is unbearable without demanding that it justify itself by producing something beautiful.

The world needs people who understand that joy, if it is honest, is not the absence of grief, but the luminous thread that winds through it, refusing to let it have the final word.

If we are to become such people — if we are to build a world capable of holding both the broken and the blooming — we must begin by refusing the easy path of bypass.

We must learn to stay.

We must learn to bear the complexity of being human — not as a burden to be overcome, but as a calling to be answered.

Sometimes I think the work of being human is not to chase away sorrow, but to learn how to sit with it — to cup it gently in our hands without trying to force it into something it was never meant to become. Sometimes it is enough, more than enough, to stand trembling in a grocery store with a strawberry in your hand, knowing that the tigers are above and the tigers are below, and still to taste the sweetness anyway.

In the end, it is not the absence of sorrow that saves us.

It is the willingness to love the world while it is breaking.

It is the courage to carry beauty forward even when it feels unbearably fragile.

It is the quiet, stubborn act of choosing life

— messy, aching, luminous life —

again and again,

without needing it to be perfect,

or fair,

or everlasting…

Only real.

The Shoreline We Build Together: Small Acts That Hold the World Open

"The impact of a single human being who cares enough can ignite a network of courage around the world."

– Roméo Dallaire

Grief and memory are not only personal; they are communal.

They ripple through classrooms, hallways, offices, and streets, shaping the ways we learn, work, and live together.

If we are to honour what we have witnessed — if we are to build spaces capable of holding the broken and the blooming — we must move beyond survival into intentional, compassionate presence.

The following questions and practices are offered not as prescriptions, but as invitations — drawn from research on trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth, and from the quiet wisdom of lived experience — to help guide students, staff, and communities in tending to memory with care.

Reflective Questions:

• How can we create spaces where grief is allowed to exist without being rushed, explained away, or turned into performance — as research shows is crucial for emotional resilience?

• What rituals of remembering — large or small — can we weave into our classrooms, meetings, and gatherings to honour loss, knowing that rituals can ease grief and restore agency?

• In what ways can we practice "companioning" rather than "treating" grief — sitting beside sorrow, as bereavement research suggests, rather than trying to move it along?

• How can we support the emergence of post-traumatic growth — not by forcing optimism, but by fostering spaces where meaning-making can unfold slowly and authentically?

• What beauty do we notice even in the midst of sorrow — and how might naming that beauty act as an anchor, as trauma recovery research suggests, rather than an erasure?

Supporting Practices:

Create Structured Rituals of Remembrance

Small, intentional acts — lighting a candle, creating art, speaking a name aloud — can help communities hold grief without forcing it toward closure. Ritual does not erase loss; it gives it somewhere to belong.

Hold Space Without Demanding Solutions

Allow students and staff to name their grief without rushing toward resolutions or silver linings. Sometimes, the greatest gift is presence without expectation — the quiet courage to simply stay.

Normalize Complex Emotional Responses

Grief is not a straight road. Laughter, anger, numbness, joy — they do not cancel each other out; they coexist, each carrying a truth of its own. Honouring the wholeness of emotional life is part of healing.

Centre Autonomy

Healing is not a timeline to be managed or a destination to be reached. It is an unfolding, unique to each person. Offer invitations, not requirements. Trust others to know the pace and path they need.

Root Resilience in Community, Not Isolation

Resilience is not an act of solitary willpower. It grows in the soil of relationships — in trust, in tenderness, in the shared work of remembering and carrying one another through what cannot be carried alone.

In the end, it is not expertise or certainty that allows us to tend to memory with care; it is humility, presence, and the willingness to keep showing up even when there are no easy answers. When we build spaces where grief can breathe, where stories can unfurl without demand, where sorrow and sweetness are held side by side, we do more than survive the losses we have inherited — we begin to transform them into foundations for a different kind of future.

A future where no one has to carry the weight alone.

The Future We Call In: Grief and Wonder

There is no going back to who we were before.

Grief reshapes the landscape, memory redraws the map, and what we once called home becomes a place that exists only in memory, altered by everything we can never again un-know.

Loss is not an interruption of life, but one of its truest expressions; it does not ask us to pretend it never happened, or to find our way back to the selves we once were, but to step forward into a new becoming — one marked by tenderness, by integrity, by the quiet, relentless work of carrying what we have lost with care.

To carry memory with honour is not to turn it into performance, nor to wear our wounds as credentials. It is to allow the knowledge of suffering — our own and others' — to deepen the way we move through the world, the way we listen, the way we build, the way we choose to live even when the tigers are circling and the future feels unbearably fragile.

It is to refuse the invitation to numbness, to silence, to the shallow gratifications of forgetting, and instead to cultivate a life attentive to the small, holy things that persist even in the wreckage: the sweetness of a strawberry, the weight of an offered story, the miracle of a hand reaching for another in the dark.

The work ahead of us is not to create a world scrubbed clean of sorrow.

That was never the promise and it was never ours to keep.

The work is to create a world where sorrow is not carried alone, where grief is not a private exile but a shared remembering, where survival is honoured not as spectacle but as testament to the staggering, relentless beauty of lives lived fully, even when — especially when — the ground beneath them ruptures.

We are not called to become invulnerable.

We are called to become more faithful to what binds us to one another.

To the small ceremonies of presence, to the fierce tenderness that refuses to look away, to the daily, unglamorous choosing to stay soft in a world that rewards hardness.

If there is a way forward, it is this: not in abandoning the pain, not in fetishizing it, but in weaving it into a wider fabric — one strong enough to hold both the wounds we bear and the wonders we dare to create in their wake.

It is in becoming not perfect, not invincible, but more deeply, attentively, courageously alive.

In the end, it is not the absence of sorrow that makes life beautiful.

It is the way we choose, even after everything, to keep reaching for the sweetness.

Not in ignorance of the tigers above and the tigers below…

But precisely because of them.

It is the way we learn to move through a world that breaks our hearts again and again, not by hardening against it, but by letting the breaking carve us into something larger, something capable of holding more: more sorrow, yes, but also more wonder, more tenderness, more defiant, trembling love.

It is the way we recognize that even the smallest acts of remembering — the lighting of a candle, the offering of a meal, the listening without judgment to another's grief — are not small at all, but are the slow, patient work of remaking the world into something less lonely, less brutal, more worthy of the lives we are entrusted to honour.

It is the way, even after everything, we find ourselves still here — still reaching for one another across the dark, still tasting the sweetness when it finds us, still choosing to carry forward what mattered, what matters still, into whatever future we have the courage to keep building with our hands, our memory, and our love.

We are not meant to survive whole.

We are meant to survive together.

For the ones still standing at the shoreline, who require a little more light for the path ahead, I leave you with the words of Audre Lorde, whose poem A Litany for Survival (1978) reminds us what it means to speak, to survive, and to carry one another forward.

And so, we remember.

And so, we carry each other forward.

A Litany for Survival

By Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours;

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid

it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive. 

- Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn (1978)

May we be soft where the world has hardened us, remember aloud what others were taught to forget, and keep choosing each other.

Even here.

Even now.

For the broken and the blooming,

Ms. K