A Bereavement Without Death

The American Psychiatric Association officially recognises moral injury as a mental health condition.

Moral Injury: Persistent distress that arises from a personal experience that disrupts or threatens: (a) one’s sense of the goodness of oneself, of others, of institutions, or of what are understood to be higher powers, or (b) one’s beliefs or intuitions about right and wrong, or good and evil.

– Frontiers in Psychology study, VanderWeele et al.

Until I came across this term, I kept wondering if I needed a higher dose of my SSRI. My throat would frequently tighten and I would cry. It took me a while to realise that I was grieving and hadn’t found a way to mourn properly.

I was grieving losses in my family even though no one had died.

“They are termites.”

“I stand by my statement. They are all termites.”

A relative wrote the first sentence in the extended family WhatsApp group. She followed it with the second when I objected to her statement. Several relatives my age defended her.

I grew up with casual religious bigotry. As I grew older, I began to confront my own sexism, casteism, racism, and religious bigotry. I still carry prejudices. There are apologies I am yet to make, including some I do not yet know I owe.

Did this relative think that I would support her when she called two billion people termites? I kept thinking about the number of times I had laughed at or remained silent after hearing slurs and dog whistles. I had justified my own prejudice by making the distinction between an ideology and its followers.

Had my own prejudices blinded me to the hate in my own family?

Perhaps I was an enabler.

I called and wrote messages only to be met with excuses or personal attacks. Many family members told me to let it go, saying that people don’t really change. Some insinuated that I was narrow-minded. Others said that she wasn’t eloquent, ignoring that she repeated herself.

I left the group.

However, leaving the group worsened my emotional distress and it took me a few days to realise that I was grief-stricken.

A week later, students protesting the NEET exam paper leaks at Jantar Mantar in Delhi were brutally beaten by the police. An uncle cautioned me against standing with the protestors. When I shared a video of a boy who claimed to be 15 years old being beaten up by multiple policemen, he replied, “What was the boy doing there?”

I was told to learn my “own history” as if further reading about the persecution of my community, Kashmiri Pandits, would render me incapable of feeling disgust and anger at the violence I was seeing.

In a matter of a few weeks, I was losing a large part of my family. When a loved one dies, social norms allow for and encourage a mourning period. You attend a funeral, receive condolences, and share the same reality of loss. I was lonely in my grief.

Many people argue that breaking ties over political differences is immature. I would agree with them. But dehumanising a group or blaming victims is not a political difference.

A UN commission found that Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children. “They are termites” can easily be used to justify the murder of twenty thousand children.

After the protest in Delhi ended, many people shared personal details of the protestors, including those of women and minors, who received death and rape threats. “What were they doing there?” blames the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence.

I did not leave and sever ties with family members to coerce them into changing their views. I left because staying would have been a tacit nod that spewing vile, vicious venom was socially acceptable.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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Photo by Shubham Sharma on Unsplash