Is There a Right Way to Grieve?
How a Mother and a Journalist Faced Loss
Eveline Rejwan was born in Bagdad in 1935 to a Jewish family. Jews had peacefully coexisted with their neighbors for more than two millennia since the sixth century B.C. time of Babylon—the time of Daniel in the Bible. This came to a screeching halt on June 1,1941 when Eveline was five. A Nazi-inspired pogrom erupted in Baghdad during which thousands were raped and wounded and Jewish shops and synagogues were plundered and destroyed. Some Jews were rescued by Muslim neighbors who refused to join the mob. The rest were driven by the belief that the world’s Jewry was scheming to ruin the magnificent nation of Iraq and should be banished from public life. The pogrom called the Farhud led to an estimated 180, but possibly 600 deaths. Eveline’s family survived and were finally allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1951. At that point, she wrote, “I was a proud and secure Jew and did not expect anti-Semitism to ever touch my life.” Fifty years later her expectations were viciously destroyed.
In Israel Eveline changed her name to Ruth and met Judea Pearl. They married in 1960 and moved to the U.S, settling in Los Angeles. Fast forward to 2002 when her son Daniel Pearl, the 38-year-old South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, traveled to Pakistan to investigate the alleged links between British citizen Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and al-Qaeda. On January 23 Pearl failed to check in with his editors. Nine days later Ms. Pearl learned that her son was abducted and beheaded by terrorists. His last recorded words included: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.” The execution was videotaped and released on the internet. At the time, his wife, Mariane, was pregnant with their only child, Adam.
Pearl’s death nearly two decades ago came as an unimaginable shock. Ruth needed a way to carry on. She stated that “the killers of Danny didn’t have a sense of the humanity that connects us,” in a 2014 interview with the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. “For them Danny was an object, and that can happen only if you don’t have your own self-respect and respect for other human beings.” This led her to invest in a mission of promoting understanding between cultures, particularly Pakistan and the U.S. The Pearls founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which sponsored fellowships for dozens of journalists from Muslim-majority countries to work at news organizations in the U.S. “She created something out of tragedy in order to spread the values that Danny had lived,” said Asra Nomani, a friend of the Pearls and former Wall Street Journal reporter. Ms. Pearl died last week on July 20 at the age of 85.
Nomani had provided her home in Karachi where he was kidnapped. “Danny thought he’d be back at my house in Karachi from his interview by 10 p.m. At 10, there was no sign of him, so Mariane and I flipped open his laptop to look for clues about his meeting. We found his source immediately. The man had written Danny from nobadmashi@yahoo.com. In Urdu, a native tongue of Pakistan, badmashi means troublemaker. It seemed like an attempt to mock Danny, and I was instantly angry with myself for not having paid more attention to the nuances of the story he was chasing—had I seen that e-mail address, I could have warned him.” This would haunt her for a decade.
Nomani, who is Muslim, memorialized her friend Daniel Pearl by giving her son, Shibli, the middle name Daneel, an Arabic version of Daniel. In 2007, Nomani started a project at Georgetown University called the Pearl Project to investigate Pearl’s murder and released a report in 2011. She worked doggedly—perhaps obsessively—to find answers, immersing herself in the grim details of the case for nearly ten years. In an article in the Washingtonian magazine on trauma and grieving called “This is Danny Pearl’s Final Story” she summarized her decadelong devotion to finding the truth about the kidnapping and murder with this statement: “We all respond to trauma differently. For a decade, I subsisted by dissociating, by putting up a barrier between my emotions and the trauma of the murder. I took an analytical, clinical approach to it, investigating and absorbing every detail of Danny’s case but never grieving him.” Thus, it became clear to Nomani that “the only work left for me was to heal my wound.”
“What is grief?” she recently asked psychologist Steven Stosny, posing the question she had avoided for a long time.
“It’s an expression of love,” he told her. “When you grieve, you allow yourself to love again.”
“How do you grieve?” she asked him.
“You celebrate a person’s life by living your life fully.”
Instead of attending the next court appearance of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the infamous mastermind of 9/11 with links to the Pearl murder, as she had done previously, she declined. It was Shibli’s tenth birthday. She took her son on his dream vacation to Atlantis in the Bahamas where they swam with dolphins. She finally found redemption in living more fully.
People react differently to life disrupters. Some people push away their loss and grief for a while, others are overcome by it, and others find a way to redeem the loss. Is there a correct way to grieve? I don’t think so, but two things stand out to me. Grief is a job that requires our attention sooner or later, and redemption starts with investing in life.
Redemption sits right next to grief like an unwrapped gift waiting to be opened, and the decision to open it belongs to the individual. Once we open it, we discover opportunities to divert our grief into life-giving channels. It doesn’t erase the destruction, but it carves a tributary toward a river that nourishes the land. Ultimately, redemption is a divine act as Joel 2:25 promises: “I [the LORD] will restore to you the years the locust has eaten.” Our small acts carve out a tributary to the river of God’s grace.
Two women dealing with unspeakable grief, they discovered a reality that softened the grim facts of their lives. It’s the reality that redemption is possible. This hope lifts our face out of the ashes of grief.