Death in the Time of Genocide:

A Reflection on Unfairness and Eternity

There is a particular sharpness to death when it is unjust. And there is nothing so unjust, so utterly violating to the moral intuition, as death by genocide. Not the slow relinquishing of life in old age. Not even death in war. But the targeted erasure of a people—children, women, entire lineages—by the hands of those who see them as less than human. In such a time, to die is not simply to pass, but to be stolen. Not only from life, but from memory, culture, language, the sacred right to exist.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, not to feel the ache of unfairness in such moments. To witness a child’s body in rubble. A grandmother cradled by dust. To know that these deaths were not inevitable, not part of the natural order, but engineered, calculated, performed with cold resolve. The human psyche recoils—there is a sickness that sets in when we know that a life has been extinguished not by chance, but by cruelty.

Yet, humans have long faced death not as an absolute end, but as a passage. For most of our history, and in most of our cultures, death was never final. It was transformation. Return. Reunification.

The ancient Egyptians, whose gods charted the cycles of cosmos and decay, did not fear death as oblivion. To die was to pass into the Duat, the underworld, to meet Osiris and be weighed not for wealth or power, but for the lightness of one’s heart. Even in death, dignity was possible. The Ba, the soul-bird, could fly between worlds. And the name, spoken by the living, could anchor one’s memory in eternity.

In ancient China and Japan, death was never a severing, but a shift in role: the dead became ancestors, honored and consulted, their spirits believed to influence the living world. Through rituals, offerings, and ancestral altars, the living maintained an unbroken thread with those who came before—a relational continuity across dimensions.

Likewise, in Vedic traditions, death was but a station in a long cycle of birth and rebirth, the samsara, where the soul ripened through lifetimes. And among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, death often meant becoming an ancestor, a guiding presence. Life did not end. It shifted.

Even in the Christian tradition—particularly among early Christians—death was not feared, but welcomed, if it meant dying for truth. Martyrdom was a form of immortality. And not just in heaven: in memory, in story, in sacred liturgy. “Death, where is thy sting?” they asked, because their hope was not in the body, but in the eternal spirit.

So what happens to that perspective in a time of genocide?

What happens when death is not welcomed, not timed, not chosen—but arrives as a violation of everything sacred?

It is here that our modern sensibility often breaks down. We are taught to fear death, to deny it, to medicalize it, sanitize it, privatize it. But when death becomes mass and visible, when it is sprayed across our screens in blood and numbers, something ancient stirs in us. That ancestral part which knows: this is not how death is supposed to be.

In the face of genocide, grief transforms. It is no longer personal—it becomes planetary. We weep not only for the victims, but for ourselves, for what it means to be human in a world where this can still happen. We rage. We numb. We dissociate. And then, sometimes, we remember.

We remember that the spirit cannot be killed by bullet or fire.

That even in Auschwitz, the survivors heard the voices of their dead.

That even in Rwanda, the songs of the murdered still echo in the fields.

That even when a people is nearly wiped from the map, their dreams haunt the soil.

The unfairness of it all is real. It should not be minimized. But it should also not have the last word.

Because death, as history shows us, is porous. The dead do not disappear. They whisper. They guide. They refuse to go quietly.

And perhaps in that, there is a deeper justice. Not the kind written in court records or judged by tribunals. But the justice of memory. The justice of presence. The justice of being remembered, named, honored, carried forward in spirit and story.

In this time of genocide, to die is an outrage—but also, somehow, still a transformation. Still a doorway. Still a return.

If we can carry that truth—ancient, almost forgotten—then perhaps the dead are not lost. Perhaps, even in their stolen deaths, they remain.

Not as victims. But as ancestors.