On April 6, 2026, four members of my family were killed in a U.S.-Israeli missile strike.
Each time I write that sentence, a strange distance opens up between me and the words on the page. It feels as though I am writing about someone else’s family. Not because I still cannot believe it, but because language, when confronted with certain experiences, is too small for what it is asked to carry.
The sentence is grammatically complete. It has a subject, a verb, and a clear meaning. Yet something is missing. “Four members of the family were killed” cannot contain my Aunt Fatemeh—a woman with a life of her own, with habits, memories, and relationships that mattered only to us. It cannot contain her laughter, which belonged only to her; the way she spoke; her small acts of kindness; or the place she held in our family.
It cannot capture my aunt’s husband, Amoo Abbas, who was more than a name to his family. He had shared their lives for years, made memories with them, loved football, and was known for his distinctive sense of humor. It cannot contain my cousin Mohammadreza, who was still full of dreams and ambitions, who carried love in his heart, and who was supposed to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday just a month after he was killed. It cannot contain four-year-old Mehrsa, a child whose world still consisted of a few familiar faces, a handful of toys, and a few square meters of home. A child whose nail polish color remains a marker for me—the very polish I had painted on her nails just a week before that catastrophe.
It is not that words have lost their meaning; they are simply no longer enough. Official language, the language of news reports, the language of statistics—all of them try to make intelligible an event that, in lived experience, lies beyond ordinary understanding.
When official language confronts mass death, it is compelled to turn it into something that can be counted and reported. People become numbers. Families become statistics. Lives that were each made up of relationships, memories, and possibilities are reduced to a single figure. Numbers are, of course, necessary; without statistics, the scale of a catastrophe cannot be seen. But as Judith Butler argues in her work on war and grievability 1, the question is not only who dies. It is which lives are recognized as visible lives before death, and whose loss is regarded as grievable afterward. Something of that question exists in the distance between “eighteen dead” and eighteen human beings, each of whom carried an entire world of relationships within them. My aunt’s family were among the eighteen people killed in the attack on their neighborhood that night. Eighteen people in a report. Eighteen people in a statistic. But for eighteen families, they were eighteen different worlds that suddenly came to an end.
Numbers are necessary; without statistics, the scale of a catastrophe cannot be seen. Without counting, we cannot speak about war, political violence, forced displacement, or mass killing. But numbers always conceal something: the life that each number represents. They can tell us how many people were killed, but they cannot tell us what world disappeared with each of them.
When one person dies, it is not only a body that is lost. A role is lost. A relationship is lost. A place within a family is lost. A part of a family’s collective memory disappears. One less person sits at the dinner table. One more phone number goes unanswered.
After that day, the meaning of certain ordinary things changed. Some ordinary scenes were no longer ordinary. The dinner table. Family photographs. Phone calls. Even looking at a child. Things that had once been part of everyday life now carried absence within them. When we set the plates on the table, we had to count them again. Not only the people who were there, but the people who would never be there again.
For years, I had studied these very distances. I was a sociology student, and later I studied cultural studies. I knew war through books, articles, and the stories of other people. I had learned that to understand a phenomenon, you must keep some distance from it. You must be able to move beyond personal experience in order to see larger structures. You must be able to connect an individual life to the historical, political, and social forces that shape it.
For years, I believed that this distance was a sign of intellectual maturity—that you could turn pain into an object of understanding without being consumed by it. I never imagined that I would one day find myself inside the very question I had spent years studying.
Then a missile struck my aunt’s house.
From that moment on, it was no longer only about loss; it was a change in my relationship to something I had studied for years. War was no longer a concept. Before that, it had been an object of study, something to be understood. After that, it became part of my life, something I had to live with.
Perhaps this is one of the most difficult experiences for anyone trained in the social sciences: the moment when what was once an object of knowledge becomes part of your own life. For years, I had learned to connect individual experience to broader social structures. I never imagined that I would experience that relationship not from behind a desk, but from within my own life.
All the concepts I had worked with were necessary for understanding the world, but none of them could explain the moment when someone learns that four of their loved ones are gone. No theory could explain the absence of a four-year-old child from a family home. No analytical framework could explain why seeing an old photograph, hearing a name, or even noticing something as small as the color of a child’s nail polish could suddenly return you to that moment.
Perhaps that is the difference between knowing and experiencing. Before that, I knew about war. I read about its victims, looked at their photographs, wrote about them, and, like many people, felt sorrow in response. But the personal experience of violence changes something. Not because we were indifferent before, but because the distance between “the other” and “the self” suddenly disappears. You can no longer see a victim merely as a news item, because you now know that behind that word was an ordinary life—someone who woke up in the morning, made plans, joked with others, imagined the future, and had people waiting for them to come home.
What I had long studied in sociology as the relationship between individual experience and social structures had now become something far more tangible. It is close to what C. Wright Mills describes as the relationship between “private troubles” and “public issues” 2: the idea that what happens in the most intimate parts of our lives is sometimes the result of forces and decisions made far beyond those lives. War reveals that relationship with brutal clarity. A decision made at the level of governments, armies, and power relations may ultimately land in a place that is profoundly small: a house, a family, a body, an ordinary life.
A political decision made far away may take the form of an empty chair at the dinner table. A phone number that no one answers anymore. A child whom no one will watch grow up. A young man whose family will never see him in a wedding suit.
After that, every time I read the words “several civilians were killed” in the news, I could no longer read them as a simple news statement. Not because I had not known that there were human beings behind the statistics, but because I had now experienced the distance between a number and a person in the deepest possible way.
Perhaps that is what numbers cannot carry. My aunt was not simply a woman who was killed; she was part of a family. Amoo Abbas was not simply a victim; he was someone whose presence gave meaning to family gatherings. Mohammadreza was not simply another number among the dead; he was a young man who was still imagining his future. Mehrsa was not simply a child who was killed; she was a child whose small world was filled with people who loved her.
For many of us who grew up in this part of the world, war has always been present in the background. Even when we did not experience it directly, it shaped our world through television images, our parents’ anxieties, the news, canceled trips, and the conversations of adults. We may not have lived through war, but we grew up with the possibility of it.
We have to study, work, fall in love, build a future, and make plans for tomorrow, all while knowing that somewhere in the back of our minds there is always the possibility that everything could change in an instant. Perhaps that is one of the defining features of life in societies where war and crisis have become part of the collective memory: you learn to live with uncertainty.
Perhaps that is why war does not change people’s lives only when it happens; even the possibility of war can change the way people live. A generation that grows up under the shadow of war, sanctions, insecurity, or political crisis inherits more than the memory of historical events; it also carries a particular relationship to safety, the future, and the possibility of predictability.
Before this happened, I too lived with distant suffering, like many other people. I grieved for the children of Gaza, worried about the war in Lebanon, followed the news from Afghanistan, and felt anger when I saw images of destruction. I raged againat Israel and the United States, and then I returned to my ordinary life. I went to work, studied, talked with friends, went to cafés, and made plans for the future.
Today I think that return to ordinary life was not necessarily a sign of indifference. Perhaps it was one of the ways human beings find to keep going. No one can experience all the suffering in the world with the same intensity or the same closeness. Distance is not always a form of cruelty; sometimes it is a mechanism of survival.
But the personal experience of violence changes that distance. Not because we can now fully understand the suffering of others—no one can completely live another person’s experience—but because we come to know that behind every broad narrative are particular lives. Behind every “child killed” is a child with a name, a family, habits, and memories.
After the attack, I found myself thinking above all about language—the words I had worked with for years: “civilian casualties,” “collateral damage,” “military targets,” “deterrence.” They are words that are necessary for explaining war, but they inevitably leave something out. The language of politics works with abstractions, the language of the media with news and numbers, and the language of academia with theory and analysis. But the language of grief works with names. In grief, no one says “four civilian casualties.” They say my aunt, my aunt’s husband, my cousin, Mehrsa. Perhaps the problem is not that one of these languages is inadequate, but that there is a distance between them—the distance between what we need to understand a war and what we need to remember the people it has taken.
Perhaps one of the hardest parts of living after war is the attempt to restore the human being to narratives that have erased them. Because war does not end with the destruction of houses and bodies. It continues in memory. In the stories families tell their children. In photographs that can no longer be looked at in the same way. In dates that are no longer just days on a calendar.
April 6 is no longer just a date for me. It is a border—a border between before and after. The day when the world still seemed to be the same world, and yet was no longer the same. The day when four members of my family were suddenly removed from life, but not from our memory.
After this experience, I think more than ever about the limits of language—about the language of politics, the media, academia, and even my own language. We need concepts to understand the world, but sometimes, in order to preserve human beings, we have to move beyond those concepts and return to the particulars. To names. To faces. To the lives hidden behind the statistics.
Writing may not be an attempt to change the past; the past cannot be changed. It may not even be an attempt to fully explain a catastrophe; some experiences cannot be fully explained. Perhaps writing is simply an act of resistance against forgetting. To keep people from becoming numbers before they are forgotten.
In a report, four members of my family might be nothing more than four numbers. But to us, they were four people—with names, voices, laughter, memories, and a distinct place in our lives. Perhaps that is why numbers, however precise they may be, never have names3.
Zahra Sabbaghi is an Iranian social researcher whose work explores everyday life, collective memory, migration, and the lived experiences of war and loss. Her writing often moves between personal narrative and social inquiry.