"I grieve for myself...

...and for the life I used to have.”

The words appeared beneath a photograph in The New York Times, telling of a woman in Gaza who had lost her parents to war and now carried a scar etched across her face—a permanent reminder of an explosion that rewrote her life. That single sentence spoke of a world shattered beyond recognition, a life that might once have known the quiet grace of sitting beneath a hundred-year-old olive tree, reading a book of verse. But that scene will never be painted.

Those words traveled across oceans and found their way to the gates of our quiet 55+ community, where we do our best to shield ourselves from the cruelties of war, from hunger, from the harsh edges of humanity. We manicure gardens, play cards, and cling to the illusion that life, here, will remain untouched.

For a few moments, we will grieve for her and the countless others whose lives were dismantled simply because they were born in the wrong fragment of space and time. Yet, if we are honest, our grief is weightless. It offers no consolation. Our thoughts cannot cross the seas to become the balm their wounds cry out for.

And so, we continue to live in our cocoons. We seek shelter. But what walls can keep out the quiet inevitability that shadows us all—aging, frailty, mortality? Perhaps the greater tragedy is not that cruelty stalks the earth, but that we might arrive at life’s final threshold burdened by the same haunting refrain:

“I grieve for myself and for the life I had.”

Not because war or famine stole it from us, but because we lived as if time were infinite. Because we mistook comfort for meaning. Because, in the end, our lives were small, they were inconsequential when they could have been vast, expansive, and perhaps, alive.