Contextual Reflections: Missing Persons

Missing Persons
The war being the tragedy of human misunderstanding of the world, once over, leaves us, all directly an indirectly involved, with the loss present in our lives to follow. Present in the absence of lives we all had before it all started, present in anything related to this “previous” life. But above all, war in its machine-like senselessness, as a whirlpool, takes from us what’s most precious to us, family members. Its absurdity, as a machine’s inhumanness, devours whatever stands on its way, and continues until the humanity is called back in us. It is difficult to explain to ourselves in other ways the devaluation of human life, loss of human society’s values and belief to the limit of people disappearing and in their physical absence being used as a hostage to the war.

And in every disaster, whether natural or enacted by humans, its traces are more tragic in some of us; the losses are not the same. And in taking care of those with deeper wounds is where we start the remaking of what has been destroyed.

There are people among us still reminded, everyday, by the presence of their loss, by the absence of not only family members, but the absence of their destiny even if that be their death. Hostages to the (im)possibility of the last service for their dead, as our people say. Hostages to the last peace, the grave. Hostages to the prayers, hostages to the talks they might have wanted to have with them as they would be resting in peace. Hostages to the impossibility of getting out of the war created hole we were all in.

Our society through times, has been destructed to its inexistence, in several occasions , and it has been reconstructed any of those times. However, our society, the one of where we stand today, has yet wounds opened, not mended. And a society to stand as strong as it is, particularly with the extraordinary experience we have been through, must satisfy the request of those most wounded, the request of knowing the fate of their loved ones. In fact, it is the basic condition to be accomplished by our society, in supporting them first: out of being hostage to the war we have all come out of; and not less importantly together build a future that does not devour our most loved ones.
B.H.