Alzheimer's made my grandfather's PTSD uncontrollable at the end of his life. I'd run upstairs when I could hear him repeatedly smashing his head on a table or wall, cursing God for not letting him kill himself, because he'd caught news footage of Palestinian or Iraqi or Syrian homes in a pile of boulders and bent metal with a bloodied, shell-shocked child standing outside. As triggering as it was, asking him to stop watching news was an offensive request. It was his duty to connect to children suffering war, occupation, and displacement by reliving the pain of his own childhood. While I'm wiping the blood off his forehead or putting a compress on his bruises he'd say something about how every home looks the same once it's been bombed, if it's in Greece, Palestine, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, etc. dust and rubble everywhere looks the same. When you're walking through the remains of your village, you can only imagine whose blood has been spilled in front of the ruins of your home because blood all looks the same, he says.

Then he might have a panic attack. I would have to slow his breathing and pick him up off the floor before breaking the news to him that it's not a heart attack, he wouldn't get to go to the hospital and be relieved by a DNR. Because a man in his mid 80's can't suppress learning, at 10 years old, what a decomposing body smells like. It's hard to convince him he's not dying yet.

I'm glad he's not alive to see this. It's really hard to think about how many of the children who will survive Israel's violence might have to spend the end of their lives in this state.