On Anniversaries
In the summer of 2014, my world changed. A tweet announcing the murder of James Foley, forever altered my understanding of good and evil. An unyielding season of misery and loss began, as ISIS murdered one friend or colleague after another in front of the world.
Anniversaries form an integral part of grief's unusual typography. When I finally got myself into therapy in 2015, the first anniversaries of the worst summer of my life were passing. The second anniversaries, my therapist explained, tended to be worse. This year is the fifth anniversaries, and they're hitting harder than I expected.
Memory works in strange ways. When it comes to trauma, it's like the enormous flash of an old fashioned photograph—split seconds are illuminated with such shocking intensity it leaves you startled and blinded, and for just a moment in time, everything is illuminated with an intensity that's difficult to replicate or forget.
This phenomenon is why I can recount in excruciating detail every death—where I was, who was there, what was said. During the early anniversaries, I wrote: "I want, more than anything, to erase those moments from my mind. To replace my blood with that of someone who does not carry those deaths in every cell, in the hopes that I would no longer recount, sometimes at random, the minutes after each video. I want to exorcise the dark ball of guilt and anguish that sits in my chest and sometimes chokes me."
Five years on, these words seem out-sized. The memories no longer engulf me at random, and in some ways they seem unbelievable, but this summer is reminding me they remain just below the surface.
About a week after Jame Foley's death, I made it home to Turkey. On the last night of a training course in Istanbul, news of Steven Sotloff's murder at the hands of ISIS broke. "Stay where you are, I'm coming over," a friend messaged me. When she arrived at the door, we collapsed into each other's arms. Later that night, around thirty of us freelancers gathered and drank in Steven's name. I woke up in a hotel room, fully clothed, and still drunk—something had popped in my brain, an emotional aneurysm that took over a year to mend.
I was in bad shape and took up residence on the couch in a friend's one-bedroom flat—as close to catatonic as a walking talking person can be. Each morning, when my friend left for work, I'd wander to the local greengrocer and butcher at the end of the block. There, I'd invent some convoluted multi-course meal and spend the day preparing it. I'm not a tidy cook at the best of times, but the chaos entered new territories—there was chilli jam on the roof and homemade dim-sum dough between the floorboards.
On the night David died, I'd made blue cheese quinoa grits with slow-braised beef short-rib (in hindsight, it probably needed the acidic pop of a gremolata, but with the benefit of hindsight there isn't much about that summer I wouldn't rewrite). Tiring of my overfeeding him and desperate to break up the monotony of our evenings, my friend had invited a couple of people over for dinner. Somewhere between mains and dessert, news of David's death broke.
After forcing our guests out the door, our next task was to call the families of the remaining hostages. Alan Henning, the British aid worker, was threatened at the end of the video of David's murder—we'd had to watch to find out—meaning there was a 50/50 chance it would be my friend Pete at the end of the next one. This was news I had to break to his mother.
Pete's dwindling chances propelled us to do everything we could think of to save him. When we realized there was nothing else to be done but wait, I traveled to Iraq on assignment and spent my days filming. By night I called Pete's parents, worked on our 'plans', and hit refresh on Twitter where we would find out about a threat to Pete's life at the same time as the rest of the world.
Five years and two days ago, the night after we finished filming, it came—Alan's murder, in a video that showed Pete at the end. It was the first time we'd seen him in over a year. War is loud, but the hours after Pete's life was threatened, alone in the dark in a hotel room in Erbil, I was suspended in violent silence.
James Foley's family and friends run the James W Foley Legacy Foundation: https://jamesfoleyfoundation.org/
Steven Sotloff is remembered through the work of the 2 Lives Foundation: https://www.2livesfoundation.org/
David Haines' brother Mike runs 'Global Acts of Unity' to honor his brother, David: https://mikehaines.globalactsofunity.com/
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Revolutionary Ghosts is a newsletter of personal writing by Emma Beals. It’s about how Syria changed the world and how reporting on it changed me, the idea of moral injury and the practice of moral repair, and the mess we're in and what we do about it. There will also be recipes.