Their war is different

Today, my father is 92. He is mentally sharp and loving life. Still working in some way or another.

I appealed to him a year ago to clean out the years and years of stored boxes of stuff and memories, one box a month. Steady and slow. Please don’t leave the cleaning to me. For I will likely just send it all to the tip, my personality is neither a collector nor sentimental.

Thinking about those we leave behind and how they get to manage our memories is an act of love. 

In the age of the internet it becomes harder. Who has access to the photo library? Or the Social Media feed. What about the passwords?

I am reading a book of poetry by Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise. It is about life in Gaza, where death is everywhere and possessions are what you can carry. 

I still dream about my grandfather, how much

I want to pick oranges

With him in Yaffa.

But my grandfather died, 

Yaffa is occupied, and oranges 

no longer grow

in his weeping groves.

I was talking with a young person this week after the shattering of their dreams by love deceived. 

Her dream,

she threw them onto the closest sea wave

and that wave

never returned

Writes Abu Toha. So many dreams shattered in the rubble, along with limbs and bones.

Life is the crucible. 

My father was only just too young for war. 

The young people in my world know only the distant noise of horror. 

Their war is different. One crafted by late-stage neoliberalism, techno feudalism, and Empire. It is a war of spirit and soul. An erosion of the good, the true, and the beautiful, where cruelty and greed win.

I am a sea of confusion. The daily roiling between my beautiful life and a world of so much grief.

I suspect I am not alone.

Photo Taken August 29th 2022, Article published August 29th 2025