Both Joyful and Killjoy - From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy

Losing my brother when he was 26 and I was 30 taught me, irrevocably, the lesson that life goes on despite our pain. As bombs fell upon Gaza last October, around the seventh anniversary of his passing, it compounded my unending personal grief. It made the grief so powerful again that anxiety befell me, exhausted me, the way it did in the aftermath of his passing. Every mother holding a dead child was my mother’s gut-wrenching pain, bringing me back to the worst weeks of my life, when the hurt made everything foggy but there were shrieks that broke through. Shrieks that broke through and now follow me through life. Every loss shatters lives, and here was loss and its companion, the shattered life, multiplied by the thousands. I could not put myself amid the bombing, the horror; I could put myself in their grief, their rage. I think many people could, and that is why the outcry has been so loud. The grief, my burnout, the need for life to go on despite everything culminated in a weeklong

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• Michelle Gan