Priya writes

Today, I found out that a colleague from Médecins Sans Frontières was killed in Gaza.

He was trying to collect food for his family.

Food.

Not at a front line. Not on a battlefield. Just trying to get food.

And in that moment, something inside me stopped.

But life didn’t.

Within the hour, I was chatting with a friend about weekend plans. Responding to work messages. Laughing at something my partner said. Texting a colleague back. Making dinner plans. Talking about normal things in a day that suddenly felt anything but normal.

That’s the dissonance that’s been gnawing at me all day, every day for the past few months: our surreal ability to keep functioning, to stay afloat in this current of everyday life, while knowing that somewhere else, it has all come undone.

How do we live in a world where such grief and such ordinariness can sit side by side?

How do we carry the weight of this loss while also moving through meetings, grocery runs, text threads, and to-do lists?

There is something deeply unsettling—maybe even violent—about the way our lives ask us to carry on. The news of his death didn’t come with a pause button. It didn’t ask me to stop and feel. It arrived, and then expected me to return to “business as usual.”

And I did.

I didn’t want to. But I did.

This isn’t about my pain. It’s about his life—and the injustice of its loss.

It’s about the cruelty of systems that make people risk death to feed their children. It’s about the world’s indifference, and the unbearable silence of those with power.

But still, I find myself sitting in this strange place: safe, distracted, functioning—while someone I shared this work with is no longer alive.

And that haunts me.

Because it reveals a fracture. A space between what I know is happening and what I’m expected to carry on with. A split reality. One filled with grief, outrage, helplessness. The other filled with polite conversation and afternoon sun.

I want to scream in rooms that carry on as if nothing happened.

I want to shout: “A person I worked with was killed today for simply trying to eat.”

But I don’t. I keep talking. Smiling. Planning. Living.

And I hate how easily I can.

To my colleague in Gaza—

You should be alive.

You should be with your family.

You should be able to collect food without risking death.

I don’t want your death to pass unnoticed in my world of relative peace. I don’t want to look away just because I can.

So today, I sit with this grief. I let it burn a little. I name it. I write it. Because even when the world keeps spinning, I want to remember you. I want to honour you with my discomfort, my awareness, my refusal to let this be just another tragic headline.

Your life mattered.

And today, I will not pretend otherwise