Grief, Privilege, and the Right to Mourn in a World at War

There is a phone call that most of us fear above all others. It comes without warning, usually in the quiet hours before dawn, and it carries news that reshapes the entire architecture of your life. For Shada Islam, a Brussels-based policy analyst and writer, that call came in the early morning — her mother, in Karachi, had been rushed to the emergency ward, struggling to breathe. Islam booked the next available flight, passport in hand, heart already broken.

Only hours before, they had spoken on the phone. It had been Islam's birthday. Her mother was, by all accounts, her characteristically vibrant self — laughing, telling stories, asking about her great-granddaughter, inquiring about her daughter's work and travel plans. The sudden shift from celebration to crisis is a disorientation that anyone who has lost a parent will recognize viscerally. And yet, Islam's essay does something that many personal meditations on grief do not: it turns outward, toward the world, and asks a question both simple and devastating.

The Privilege of Mourning

What does it mean to be able to grieve properly? In most societies, mourning is treated as a universal human experience — something that binds us regardless of culture, religion, nationality, or circumstance. We all lose people we love. We all carry that weight. And yet, as Islam's reflection makes clear, the ability to mourn — to bury the dead, to gather with family, to observe the rituals and rites that give sorrow its shape and meaning — is not universal at all. It is, in fact, a form of privilege.

For millions of people living through active conflict zones, death is not followed by a dignified burial or a communal farewell. There is no shroud carefully wrapped around the body. There is no grave marker bearing a name. There is no funeral gathering where stories are shared and tears are shed in safety. In Gaza, where Israeli military operations have killed tens of thousands of civilians over the past two years, families have been forced to bury their loved ones in backyards, in the rubble of destroyed buildings, or not at all. In Sudan, where a brutal civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has generated one of the world's most catastrophic humanitarian crises, the dead are frequently uncounted and unmourned.

Gaza: Where the Dead Cannot Rest

The conflict in Gaza has produced scenes of grief that defy ordinary comprehension. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli military campaign, Palestinian health authorities have reported the deaths of over 45,000 people, though independent analysts believe the true toll may be far higher when accounting for those buried under rubble and those who died from disease, starvation, and lack of medical care.

In this context, the act of mourning has become physically dangerous. Families who gather to mourn have themselves become targets. Funeral processions have been struck by airstrikes. Cemeteries have been bulldozed. In northern Gaza, where bombardment has been most intense, there are credible reports of bodies left unrecovered for days or weeks, decomposing in the streets because it was too dangerous for anyone to retrieve them. The psychological toll of this — of being unable to perform the most basic human ritual of farewell — compounds the trauma of loss in ways that will echo through generations.

International humanitarian law requires warring parties to allow for the collection and burial of the dead. That obligation is frequently violated in modern conflicts, and Gaza is a stark example of this failure. The inability to mourn is not merely a personal tragedy in these contexts; it is a form of dehumanization, a denial of the dignity that every human being is owed even in death.

Sudan: A Crisis Hidden From the World

If Gaza has drawn significant international media attention, the crisis in Sudan has unfolded in relative darkness. Since April 2023, fighting between the SAF and the RSF has killed an estimated 150,000 people, displaced over 10 million, and pushed large parts of the country toward famine. The RSF has been accused of mass atrocities in Darfur, including targeted killings of civilians from specific ethnic communities — violence that many analysts and human rights organizations have characterized as genocide.

In this environment, mourning is a luxury that most Sudanese cannot afford. Families are scattered across displacement camps in Chad, Egypt, and South Sudan, often unsure whether their relatives are alive or dead. The infrastructure for death registration has collapsed. Many of those killed are buried in unmarked mass graves, their identities unknown, their families left in a limbo of grief without confirmation, without closure, without the rituals that transform raw loss into something bearable.

The Anthropology of Grief

Across human cultures, the rituals surrounding death serve a profound psychological and social function. They mark the transition of the deceased from the world of the living, they provide a structured space for collective sorrow, and they affirm the value of the life that has been lost. From the elaborate funeral rites of ancient Egypt to the sitting shiva of Jewish tradition, from the Day of the Dead in Mexico to the jazz funerals of New Orleans, from Islamic Janazah prayers to Hindu cremation ceremonies — human beings have always understood that the dead deserve to be honored, and that the living need rituals to process their grief.

When those rituals are impossible — when the bombs keep falling, when the roads are blocked, when the body cannot be found — the psychological damage is immense. Mental health researchers who work with survivors of mass violence consistently find that the inability to mourn properly is one of the most significant contributors to prolonged grief disorder, complex PTSD, and intergenerational trauma. Communities that cannot bury their dead carry that wound for decades.

A Personal Loss, A Global Reflection

Islam's essay works because it does not exploit her personal grief for rhetorical purposes, but instead uses it as a lens through which to see more clearly what is being taken from others. She is able to fly to Karachi. She is able to be with her mother in her final hours. She is able to observe whatever rituals and prayers provide comfort. She is able to mourn. And she is honest enough, and generous enough, to recognize that this is not guaranteed — that it is a form of luck and privilege that hundreds of millions of people across the world's conflict zones are being systematically denied.

This is a form of moral reckoning that geopolitics often lacks. Policy discussions about Gaza and Sudan tend to focus on ceasefire negotiations, arms embargoes, humanitarian aid corridors, and diplomatic frameworks. These things matter enormously. But they can also obscure the human reality underneath: that every day these conflicts continue, families are being denied the right to grieve. Children are losing parents whose bodies they cannot find. Parents are losing children they cannot properly bury. And the grief that cannot be processed does not disappear — it transforms, often into something darker and more enduring.

What the World Owes the Grieving

There is growing recognition among human rights scholars and humanitarian organizations that the right to mourn — the right to recover the bodies of the dead, to identify them, to bury them with dignity, and to observe culturally appropriate mourning practices — constitutes a fundamental human right. International humanitarian law, as codified in the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, provides a legal framework for this, but enforcement remains deeply inadequate.

Advocacy groups are increasingly calling for greater international accountability mechanisms to ensure that warring parties respect the rights of the dead and the grieving. The work of organizations like the International Commission on Missing Persons, which uses DNA identification techniques to help families find their loved ones in conflict zones, represents one model for what this can look like in practice. But such efforts require political will, international cooperation, and sustained funding — all of which are in short supply.

Islam's essay, rooted in the intimate particulars of one woman's loss, ultimately makes an argument that is both timeless and urgently contemporary: that the capacity to grieve with dignity is something every human being deserves, and that when we measure the costs of war, we must count not only the dead, but the living who are denied the right to mourn them.