I have only ever seen one shroud before.
My father's.
I touched it. Stark white. A little stiff the way new fabric is when it has never been worn before. And I stood there realising this was the first piece of clothing I had ever seen on my father without a patch in it. Without a mended hole. Without the evidence of someone making something last another year and then another because that was what was necessary and that was who he was.
He wore patched clothes his whole life.
His shroud was the first new thing.
I thought about that for a long time afterward. About what it means to arrive in the world and spend a whole life becoming someone and then leave it. The full journey. From the very first moment of existing to the last. How marvellous that journey is when you let yourself stop and witness it properly.
A person arrives completely new and then becomes themselves so gradually you can almost see it happening. Small opinions first. Throwing a tantrum over not wanting to wear pants. Crying because their sandwich was cut into squares instead of triangles. Those small preferences deepening over years into something much larger. Into a person with thoughts about justice and love and what the world owes people. The child who threw themselves on the floor over the pants becomes the adult who cannot look away from suffering.
I saw a video recently of a father at an ultrasound leaning close to his wife's belly, talking to their baby. The baby on the screen was smiling. Still weeks from the world and already responding to the voice that loved them. Already becoming someone. Already on their way to their first tantrum, their first heartbreak over the wrong colour cup, their first stubborn declaration that they will only wear the dinosaur shirt.
The whole journey ahead of them, waiting.
I came across photographs from Gaza this week of fetuses in shrouds.
Some of them were the size of my palm.
I held my hand up afterward and looked at it for a long time.
That is how small a person can be and still be a person. Still have fingerprints forming. Still have the beginning of a face. Still have a heartbeat that was there and then was not. Still leave a mother behind. Still deserve a shroud.
Someone in Gaza made those shrouds.
Someone learned the size. Someone's hands folded that fabric around something that small with the same care every burial deserves. I cannot leave those hands alone in my mind. The knowledge they had to acquire. The specific grief of becoming the person who knows how to do that now.
These babies never cried over a sandwich cut the wrong way. Never smiled at a voice through the wall of a womb. Never had a single opinion about anything at all.
The whole journey, every magnificent stubborn specific stage of it, was taken from them before they could take a single step into it.
The bomb arrived before they did.
I used to believe death was the cruellest thing in the world.
I believed that because death took my father. Because I know exactly what it leaves behind. The silence where a person used to be.
But standing here now, holding the image of shrouds the size of my palm, something shifted in me I never expected.
My father's shroud was the first new thing he ever wore. No patches. No mended holes. Just clean white fabric, immaculate, the way he deserved to be dressed his whole life and was not. Death gave him that. One new thing. Finally.
And these babies. These tiny babies who never got to become anyone. The mercy is that they did not feel it. That whatever came for them came quickly. That their mothers were spared watching them suffer. That the one thing Gaza could not take from them was the pain of knowing.
Sometimes death is the only gentle thing left in a place that has run out of gentle things.
There are mothers in Gaza right now who are still pregnant.
Still talking to their babies through the wall of a womb. Still on their way to the first bedtime negotiation and the crayon that has to be the exact right shade of red and the inexplicable hatred of socks.
The whole journey still ahead of them.
I hold that in one hand.
And in the other, the image of a shroud the size of my palm.
If that sits in your chest the way it sits in mine, do not let it fade today.
For my father in his first new thing. For the babies who went from the womb to the shroud. For every life that deserved the tantrum and never got there,
Hafsa