Forest of Grief

The Middle East death toll is not a mere body count.

Mourners dig graves during the funeral for children killed in a reported strike on a primary school in Iran's Hormozgan province on March 3, 2026.

My father died at the age of 51. I was a teenager. It was horrible. My poor mom. My brothers. Our extended family. Our neighbors. His colleagues and friends. The ripples of shock and pain spread far and wide. I still dream of him. I still shudder at that day 53 years ago.

It was the same when my mother died. It was horrible. She was sick for a long time and her death was a mercy, the end of her pain, but I sobbed like a fountain of disconsolation.

My brother died 10 years ago, leaving behind a wife and two sons. It was horrible. The ripples of shock and pain spread far and wide. My uncles and aunts. All of them are dead. Every one. Eight of them, and eight spouses. Gone. The grief spilt down through three generations.

My friends. A car crash. A skiing accident. Cancer. Cancer. Cancer. Heart disease. Heart disease. Suicide. Each with a family tree, buffeted in the storm. Stripped of leaves. Broken boughs. All but uprooted altogether.

The children. I can barely speak of those lives, barely lived. For their parents, the heartbreak is fresh every morning when they open their eyes. The loss and grief never, ever end. And the young children of dead parents, scarred for life. And the adult children of lost loved ones for years afterwards reach for the phone to share a thought or a funny episode with someone long ago buried.

That is death. It’s the only certainty in life, and the only universal experience. Life is finite, but death is forever and the grief, though fading over time, endures. Inevitable or not, it defies acceptance. One person dies — one — and pain, shame, fear, fright, guilt, regret and deep emotional injury rise like flood waters from a burst dam.

In the Middle East, since Saturday, 1,331 humans have died. Among them 165 pupils in an Iranian girls school. That’s one grief tree, as described above, times 1,331. Soon the death toll will double. Then increase 10 fold. Or more. The front-page reporting will gravitate inside the newspaper and off the broadcast news. It will be buried like the dead themselves, because the world will become inured. The survivors will not. Many thousands or tens of thousands of individual deaths, or many more, will exponentially wreak havoc on their lives. They will dwell, indefinitely, in a vast, dense grief forest.

In the two U.S. wars on Iraq, the multiplier was 1 million, a death toll that ISIS adds to with constant attacks on three continents. That’s grief hell arithmetic times 1 million.

The stated purposes of the Iran war are regime change and destroying the country’s nuclear ambitions. The U.S. has called for an uprising. Against 1.1 million Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who cannot be wiped out either by bombs or angry citizens. The death of the Ayatollah has simply created a new Ayatollah, and the dead senior military and political officials have been replaced as well.

Trump wanted to be a hero. And he wanted his Epstein Files exposure usurped by a wag-the-dog war. He has already failed. He will succeed only in death and incalculable misery, which he will not think twice about.

During countless funerals, he will be reaching for his 5-iron.