Dispatch #10: No Room for Everyday Grief

GAZIANTEP, Turkey—“I was 13 when we got married. We didn’t know anything about life. My husband was five years older than me. He’s very handsome, my husband….God have mercy on his soul.” Hala’s eyes fill but she does not cry.

She types “hahaha” in Arabic on Whatsapp to her mother-in-law, who has just made a dark joke about not having money to get to Turkey from their hometown outside Aleppo.

“It’s what we write when we laugh from outside of our hearts. Inside is dead. My husband was everything in my life. And I lost him. And now I’m afraid I’m going to lose my children too.” Hala’s husband, a fighter, was killed in shelling by Russian planes seven months ago, leaving behind his 28-year-old wife and six children. “There was shelling 24 hours a day, the Russian planes have no mercy on anyone.”

With six mouths to feed, Hala rarely has time for her own grief.

“Before he died, I used to imagine what it would be like to lose him, and I thought I wouldn’t be able to go on. But before God takes someone, he puts patience in our hearts.”

Hala’s youngest child, Maria, the only girl, was born with a severe heart problem and developmental difficulties. Her condition requires ongoing care for which her mother had brought her across the border to Kilis. When the fighting intensified in February, the border closed behind her, leaving Hala and her baby daughter on one side of it and her five older children, the youngest of whom is seven years old, on the other. Baby Maria’s condition is chronic and taking her back to Syria would mean choosing the lives of the other children over hers. So Hala waits. She hears from her other children, who are staying with their uncle and aunt in Aleppo, about once a week on Whatsapp—just a few words letting her know they’re alive.

The doctors in Turkey have been less than understanding about her situation. Often she is only able to get an appointment three months in advance. When she asked if they could give her an earlier appointment, she was told by a doctor, “we aren’t a hotel here.”

“You feel like you’re living, but you’re not living; you have everything here—water, electricity, food—but your children are not here.” In Syria, Hala and her family have been living without water and electricity for more than two years.

After allowing herself a rare moment of sadness for her husband, Hala wipes her eyes. Apologizing for her tears, she sits up straighter, turns her baby to face her and begins to coo and play with her. A person alive and in the present needs her.

Hala’s reaction is fairly normal, says Rosa Moisidou, a psychologist with for Doctors Without Borders, who works with refugees at Idomeni camp in Greece.

“If something comes up, it will be after they are in a stable environment and safe. This is when usually the reactions come out.”

Two years ago, in Alexandria I met a Syrian man. He had lost his adult son. In the course of an evening in which we spoke with other fathers who had lost much younger children he would periodically burst into tears. The men present seemed almost embarrassed for him. Men were not supposed to show grief, and certainly not those who had lost adult children, when others, by some definitions, had lost so much more: babies or sometimes even whole families. What is in peacetime the worst thing to happen to a human being—the loss of a child—had become commonplace, not worth speaking about.

For others, the conflict has brought unexpected emotional toughness.

“We were nine children, eight boys and one girl. When we were young, my mother wouldn’t sleep until we were all in the house,” says Ahmed Taha from the Syrian city of Douma and a member of the local council there. When his brother was killed in shelling recently, he was afraid to break the news to her.

“When my brother Mohamed died, I had to tell her,” says Taha, “I thought she would die that very moment. She used to panic if we were five minutes late and would send someone out looking for us. She was so sensitive.” But to his surprise, she asked him, “Didn’t he die a martyr? Didn’t he die fighting for what was right? Come, let’s go to his children.”

After five years of war and unimaginable violence and suffering—children killed by chemical attacks, torture, starvation, the threshold for what is considered news in Syria, has grown ever higher. Readers around the world have become, to some extent, inured to it all. Syria has become a place where suffering and injustice are expected and trauma is absorbed and repressed to make way for the demands of the present.

But now Syria is coming to the rest of the world. And as Moisidou, the psychologist, worries, it’s in the stable and safe environment in which “the reactions come out.”

Those making resettlement policy, she says, should thus be cognizant of the mental health and psychosocial needs of the refugee populations they take in.

“There should be centers for psychological support because… all the ones that are going to present some symptoms; they are going to present them when they are in a stable situation, so it's going to be in the country that is going to accept them, of course with translators, cultural mediators. It's very important to have people that know the culture and the way people are thinking… there should be places for psychiatric cases with cultural mediators, because putting psychiatric cases in hospitals and leaving them there is no use. They are a vulnerable population.”

Not everyone who has experienced trauma will present symptoms, of course. “The range is big,” says Moisidou. A lot of refugees will need a lot of care. On the other hand, “there are people who experience trauma but manage very well and are dealing with it. They never forget, but are able to move on. Finally what we understand here is that people are very strong.”