Grief After Grief (1)

How can one family’s bereavement be turned into a nation’s memory and conscious anger?

S. Rouzbeh – In the 1980s, a family lived in our neighbourhood whose four children had been executed by the government. After the execution of their last child, the mother could not bear the weight of so much grief, and she died before a year had passed.

The father remained; but he was no longer the man he had been.

He spoke to no one. He looked at people’s faces less often, and he did not shout either. He had pasted his children’s identification photographs onto a piece of paper roughly the size of a palm, and every day he held it in his hand and walked through the streets and market. Whether it was raining, the middle of winter or the heat of summer, he came. When the paper and photographs wore out, he would make new copies of them and continue along the same route.

He did not chant slogans or ask people for anything. He simply walked, mostly at busy times and in the evenings.

But that very act of walking was a question in itself: what happened to my children?

People in the neighbourhood knew his story. If a newcomer asked who the man was and why he walked through the streets with the photographs every day, they would hear the answer: “His children were executed.” In this simple way, the story passed from one person to another.

In those days there were no mobile phones, no internet, no social media and no website where he could publish pictures of his children. His medium was that small piece of paper and the streets of the neighbourhood.

Sometimes officials harassed him, but they could not stop him from carrying on. If we did not see him in the street one day, his absence was felt. The neighbours would ask after him and sometimes go to visit him.

Years passed. Until the end of their lives, whenever my parents spoke among family or friends about the executions of the 1980s and the injustices of those years, they would remember this man. Today, they are gone, that father is gone too, and his children were executed decades ago; but I still remember his story and tell it.

The government had executed his children, but it could not execute or erase their memory too.

Years later, this experience became a question for me: had this man been defeated? Or, with the little strength left to him after so much grief, was he doing something whose full significance perhaps even he did not know? Why does one family collapse under the weight of grief, while another family’s loss is still alive after forty years? And why are repressive governments afraid of a person’s name, photograph and family even after they have killed them? This is the most important point.

What does the government want after killing?

Killing or executing a person is not the end of the work of repressive governments. Another stage begins afterwards: restricting memorials, putting pressure on the family, threatening relatives, preventing the publication of the victim’s name and image, and forcing the survivors into silence.

The government wants the death of the eternally remembered to remain within the four walls of the home. The family may weep, but its voice must not reach outside. A mother may look at her child’s photograph, but must not show it to others. A father may have questions, but must not voice them. The victim’s friends, too, out of fear, gradually repeat their name less often.

This pressure is not only political; it is psychological too. A family that has suddenly lost a loved one is still struggling to comprehend the tragedy itself. Family members may blame themselves: Why didn’t we stop them from going? Why didn’t we pursue it further? Why couldn’t we save them?

In such circumstances, grief can be accompanied by anxiety, depression, guilt, anger and exhaustion. But one point must be clear: the family is not responsible for the death. The responsibility lies with the very apparatus that took a human life and then tries to punish the survivors too, through fear and silence.

For this reason, a family that remains silent must not be accused. Perhaps they have another child in prison. Perhaps they have been threatened. Perhaps they do not have the psychological strength to speak. Silence is not always a sign of consent or indifference; sometimes it is the only way a family can see to protect those who remain.

What does conscious anger mean?

After the January massacre, Prince Reza Pahlavi said in a message in January 2026: “The grief of losing Iran’s finest children is heavy. But we will turn this grief into conscious anger and an unbreakable resolve against Khamenei and all his domestic and foreign agents.”

In my view, the key word in this sentence is “conscious”.

These words do not mean that we should not weep, or that we should bring our mourning to an end by command. No one can set a timetable for their grief. Nor does conscious anger mean personal revenge, attacking people unconnected with the events, or mindless destruction.

Blind anger seeks to discharge itself in the moment. But conscious anger asks: What happened? Who was responsible? How is the truth to be recorded? Who gave the orders, and who carried them out? How can those who ordered and committed these acts be held accountable in a fair trial? And, most importantly, how can the same crime be prevented from happening again?

That father in our neighbourhood had probably never heard the term “conscious anger”. But what he did carried a meaning of much the same kind. He attacked no one, destroyed nothing, and did not even shout. He simply refused to let his children be erased from the memory of the neighbourhood and its people.

Perhaps the government thought that by executing a few young people, the case was closed. But that father reopened the same case every day with the small frames holding their photographs.

That was where the power of what he did lay, too.

He could not bring his children back. He could not hold the apparatus that had executed them to account that same day. But he could make sure they were not forgotten.

And perhaps this is the first stage of conscious anger: refusing to forget.

But how long can a father carry this burden alone? If a family cannot speak, who must preserve the victim’s name? How does a photograph pass from a father’s hands into the memory of a neighbourhood, and then into the memory of a generation?

From this point, the family’s responsibility does not end; but society and the people’s responsibility begins.