I’ve seen a lot. Written a lot.
I’ve written about grief before.
About children dying from fear.
About mothers holding their babies through dust and blood.
About entire families turned into statistics.
But I’ve never written about a woman who painted her own death.
Her name was Frans Amina Al Salmi.
She was 29. A Gazan artist.
A woman who saw too much and chose to turn her ache into colour.
Her hands were soft, steady — the kind that didn’t shake even when the bombs did.
She once said, “In every painting, I leave behind a piece of myself.”
And in her last painting… she left it all.
It was a self-portrait.
Even if no one knew it at the time.
A woman wrapped in white.
Eyes closed. Face bloodied.
Brushstrokes of red—everywhere.
At first glance, I thought: this is what war feels like.
But then I saw the photo.
The one taken after the café was hit.
After the airstrike buried her beneath rubble.
And I realised — it wasn’t just a painting.
It was a premonition.
The woman in the canvas…
was her.
Down to the tilt of the face.
The closed eyes. The crimson.
She painted her ending. And then became it.
I can’t stop picturing her.
Sitting in that café.
Maybe sketching. Maybe sipping coffee. Maybe catching her breath between sirens.
And I wonder — did she know?
Did she feel it in her bones, in the silence between bombings, in the way the sky never quite looked blue anymore?
Was the painting a cry for help?
A warning?
A surrender?
We’ll never know, because we lost her.
Not just a woman or an artist.
We lost the stories she hadn’t painted yet.
The canvases still blank in the corner of her room.
The dreams still trapped in her fingertips.
Painted by Amina Al Salmi
And the world — our world — moved on.
But I can’t.
Because if we don’t hold on to her, if we don’t scream her name, if we don’t make room for her brushstrokes in our memory…
then what hope is there for the ones still creating?
For the children still drawing with charcoal on tents.
For the mothers still stitching beauty into torn fabric.
For the girls still scribbling poems on the backs of ration boxes.
Frans’s death isn’t just a tragedy.
It’s an indictment.
Because when a woman paints her own death…
…and the world calls it just another headline —
we don’t just lose an artist.
We lose everything she could have healed.
We lose colour. We lose protest.
We lose the proof that even in war, beauty still tried to survive.
And the worst part?
Her painting saw what the world refused to.
It begged for someone to stop it.
And no one did.
So now, she’s not just a woman wrapped in red on a canvas.
She’s buried beneath it.
Please — don’t scroll past her.
Don’t let her story dry with the paint.
Let this be the moment we choose not to be silent.
Make it matter that she lived — and devastating that she died like this.
Because if this doesn’t break us,
what will?
With rage, reverence,
and a grief I refuse to dilute,
Mariam
