A dream: I am on a road in a war zone, maybe Iraq at the beginning of the last invasion. The bombed-out blacktop crumbles. Next to the craters sit women in abayas of black satin that flows sleek as oil. I walk up to a checkpoint guarded by men. “You can pass,” they tell me, “but first we must know if your blood is real.” I hold out my left hand.
A knife slashes my palm. In this nightmare, I feel no pain. The blood is viscous, dark. The men nod. I am ushered through.
Are you real? Do you bleed? No one is allowed to pass through life and not witness it viscerally, in all of its iniquity and beauty, and walk away unscathed: One of the wages of living is grief. Grief, from the Latin gravis, “weighty,” from the Proto-Indo-European gwere, “heavy.” How do you carry what you have seen along the road? The English language gives grief an adjective: unbearable, as does the Russian, nevynosimoe, “impossible to carry” or, more precisely, “impossible to carry outside.” Where to put it, then? The artist Akiko Jackson spent a season making urns in a studio on a former alfalfa farm in New Mexico. She hand-built them from the bottom up: a dozen, two dozen, five dozen hip-high vessels of black clay so thin, it seems improbable that they don’t shatter. (It often seems to me improbable that we don’t shatter. / We shatter.) A phalanx that howls at you soundlessly with its many cavernous mouths, crowds you out, forces you to reckon with it. An emperor’s clay army stripped of pretense and human form, though very much in human proportion, essential, ghastly. You half-expect it to advance.
Those bottomless mouths. It is unbearable to look inside, in the way that confronting death is an “unbearable emotion,” as Philippe Ariès writes about the modern Western practice of banishing death from the public eye. You look anyway—you are supposed to look; this is art—and you discover that each vessel is depthless, that you cannot fathom the bottom or what it holds (they also say, in English, bottomless grief—or bezdonnoye gorye, in Russian), and you come away not knowing, and the not knowing is as terrifying as the grief because we do not have the emotional vocabulary to grapple with either. As terrifying as passing a mirror and glancing at it, only to find it empty, devoid of reflection. A hall of mirrors, one after another, casting back nothing but your failure to once again find purchase. A fun house born of loss.
Here is a vessel with two mouths, like an elongated heart with a vein and an artery, for blood to flow. Here is a vessel with a torn mouth: a ceramic scream, a sentence unfinished. Here an urn sits squat and heavy, like a lung. In my own lungs, a sudden lance of pain.
~
The etiology of pulmonary sarcoidosis is unknown; the American Lung Association says it affects primarily women of African and Scandinavian descent. Modern psychology considers a connection between respiratory disturbance and trauma; traditional Chinese medicine suggests that we stow grief in the lungs.
Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory disease that attacks a body’s organs with nodules—little inflamed vessels—which cause scarification of the organs’ tissue. Pulmonary sarcoidosis causes scar tissue to form on the lungs. To describe to me my scars, the pulmonologist said to picture the stretch marks on a deflated balloon. To maintain the lungs’ elasticity, I run every morning, and generally I feel no pain or discomfort, but when I grieve, my lungs begin to hurt. The pain has become my beacon, my homing device. Sometimes I only know that I am bereft when I notice that ache inside my ribs, just below the shoulder blades.
My lung ache began at the end of October 2002. I was twenty-seven years old, a war correspondent, raising two small children in Moscow, where I returned between work trips. Alphabetically, that year: Abkhazia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Gaza, Gujarat, Kashmir, the West Bank; when I reach for a memory of what that year was like, I feel groundless, inconsequential, even nonexistent, not truly present or not truly present in the way I think I ought to be, maybe because we are not built to embody such things, or maybe because they get consigned to specific parts of our bodies. (“The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes,” writes Michael Herr about the war he witnessed in Vietnam.) Who was I then, even? Who was I to be trusted with such knowing?
A Moscow evening; cold autumn rain. Forty armed men and women take hostage a theater in the middle of a performance and demand the end of Russian occupation of Chechnya. I am married to another journalist—we married that spring; it was practically a shotgun wedding between trips to Afghanistan and Abkhazia—and we rush to the theater, which the police have cordoned off. We stand in the wet beside the barricades with our notebooks, my husband and my other colleagues and I. A night passes, a day, another night, another day, another night, it never stops raining, we cannot see inside the theater, we cannot hear, we cannot do anything, we write words that have no meaning, nothing. Our sodden notebooks weep ink. At the end of the third day, Russian commandos pump poison gas into the building and shoot the hostage takers execution-style. The poison gas kills some of the hostages immediately, while they are still inside; many die with venomous lungs on the way to hospitals or in intensive care units. They are loaded onto buses that take them past the police cordon, past us; they are refugees from a war that for three days bilocated to the center of Moscow. It is dark and the buses are lit up from the inside: luminescent, fragile chrysalises. Rain distorts headlights, smudges the buses’ edges. The trace a cheek of an unconscious woman leaves against the steamed-up glass as it jerks and slides down. Nothing, nothing.
~
Five months later, two hundred miles north of where American tanks push into Baghdad and rechart the desert in their wake, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq, war feels stagnant and ancient. Old howitzers and snipers’ nests and tank berms push out of the terraced ground with the same timeless proprietorship as the emerald stubble of winter wheat, the cardinal smear of poppies. They are full of children, these trenches, boys with smooth chins and hand-me-down rifles and proud broad knives tucked into the folds of flower-patterned cummerbunds, boys so full of future that they pick up shell fragments for keepsakes because it still is something they will want to remember later, because time still stretches ahead of them vast and magical, like the valleys of their Kurdistan, not yet locked in by war. This boy in the trench with me is named Hakar. His father, a Peshmerga commander, has brought Hakar to the front line so that his youngest son can study war the way he himself knows it. All of Hakar’s older brothers already are Peshmerga fighters, and now he is old enough: He is already seven, the same age as my stepson, who is in Moscow, studying numbers in first grade. Now he has a war and a trench, Hakar. I am in Hakar’s trench to document his war for an American newspaper.
I watch the boy watch the war. He catalogs what he sees the way, I imagine, my stepson catalogs the drawings of rabbits and drums and sheep on his arithmetic worksheets, the sheep in the worksheets as round and shaggy as the sheep on the battle hills of Kurdistan. The boy sees the sheep. The boy sees the plumes of singed dirt where an American F-16 fighter plane drops bombs on Iraqi fortifications two miles away, sees its glintless raptor shadow carve the dazzling sky. He sees the focused look on the faces of his older brothers and their teenage friends as they train their guns on hills across the valley and watch their childhood disappear. Then he starts noticing smaller things, closer: my rollerball pen, a piece of shrapnel shaped like a dinosaur tooth on top of the berm. With his right toe, Hakar dislodges the jagged bit and kicks it off the dirt wall, and the two of us listen to the sound of metal scraping against rock as it falls into the valley below, and his face blossoms with the intense satisfaction of a seven-year-old who has just made a discovery: children are forever testing earth. Then, suddenly fearful that he has done something untoward, he looks at his father and grabs his big hand. He sticks the thumb of his free hand in his mouth.
In the Zagros foothills of Kurdistan, the lung ache will begin to settle into a continuous legato bass line, like a hum. From Hakar’s trench, I will carry it around the world. At its worst, it feels like something catches against the ribs, tissue hooked and pulled, like when you hit the funny bone, or something hard accidentally plucks a guitar string, or the way fabric catches on a helix of concertina wire. It is irreversible. It returns more often these days. It can be sharp and very strong at times, but over time I have grown to see it more as an inconvenience, superficial compared to the ways of the world, just as much of my pain is superficial compared to the ways of the world.
~
In the middle of the twentieth century, when cities in the Global North were evicting poor people by the neighborhood to make room for highways and business centers and airports and luxury housing, psychologists identified the emotional experience of the communities so uprooted as “communal bereavement.” The social anthropologist George N. Appell, who studied such things, wrote that in a state of communal bereavement, “populations can lose their capacities to cope, becoming apathetic, depressed, or, alternatively, angry.”
Among the physical manifestations of grief, Appell listed an increase in mortality rates, especially from heart disease; an increase in the incidence of cervical cancer; psychological impairment; coronary thrombosis and other arteriosclerotic and degenerative diseases; and “general health impairment.”
“There can be,” he wrote, “additional health implications.”
~
In the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of human lungs failed across the world. The planet was grieving. Appell died that May, at the age of ninety-three.
~
During a break between making clay lungs, Akiko tells me about a funeral ceremony she attended as a child. Her grandfather had passed away. After cremation mostly reduced his body to ash, his relatives picked out the unburned fragments of bone and passed them on from one to another with chopsticks, to put in an urn. This meant that, for an instance, two people held a bone with their chopsticks at the same time. So, too, with grief: Here, let me tell you mine, and, if only for an instance, we can both hold it.
To be in touch: “to remain connected,” “to continue to feel tangibly.” That you are reading this means my fingers are touching your eyes, gently, gently, tap-tap-tap through my keyboard; it means that you are holding what was once in mine. In war, or in a refugee camp, or on the road, if you are lucky, a stranger will place in your hand her loss for you to hold and safeguard, the charred bone fragment of it like some protective charm.
In touch: The Russian word svyaz’ means “connection” but also means “something tied together, trussed.” Are you two still in touch? Are you still tied together with her? We lost touch. We have come untied.
Hakar, where are you now?
~
I read somewhere that in 1907, residents of my native city of St. Petersburg received more than 44 million letters and mailed more than 139 million letters: From a sinking city that was at the time only two hundred years old, a city of recent immigrants and settlers, of islanders, such a yearning to be in touch with or tied to the rest of the world.
This book is a letter, a kite flown, a line cast. Grab your end and don’t let go.
Excerpt from To See Beyond by Anna Badkhen. Copyright © 2026 by Anna Badkhen. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
