Death, Silence and Vicarious Grief

By Patrick Sam-Lazarov 

As long as I’ve known, loss has loomed over me in a peculiar way. 

For most of my life, I lived within walking distance from Tuol Sleng, a secondary school-turned-prison where as many as 20,000 were killed. On the roads of Phnom Penh, many tuk-tuks have signs offering to take tourists to the Killing Fields, with pictures of human skulls placed on top of one another. Every January 7, the Cambodian government commemorates Victory over Genocide Day, but as a child, this meant little more to me than an extra day off of school. Surrounded by these sights, the genocide of the 1970s was everpresent in my life. Despite being visually apparent across the city, it is markedly absent in personal conversations. Even to this day, there are things that my family and I are learning about the ones we lost under Khmer Rouge rule. 

I can’t help but feel that all the reminders of genocide around the city are depersonalised. Practically every Cambodian acknowledges the rule of Democratic Kampuchea as a national catastrophe, but it is out of the ordinary for survivors to openly talk about their individual experiences and pass down memories to their descendants. It’s a given that everyone has lost someone. When I was younger, my grandmother did tell stories of life under Pol Pot, but it was usually with the intent of entertainment. Whether they were about trying to catch frogs to eat or being startled by snakes, their tellings were full of laughter. Only once (as far as I can remember) has a story explicitly about grief come up. My memory has since clouded whose death it was. In other families, these topics may be completely shut off for discussion. 

Violence has created a generational silence. Death lives on as emptiness, as blank spots in the family tree and history. Everyone knows, but hardly any ever speak of it. Generational trauma is a complicated matter; How do you heal from it if it’s never discussed? How do you grieve for people you never knew, whose personalities you’ve never seen come to life, but who meant the world to those who raised you? What do you do when their biggest impact on your life has been through their absence? Do I have what it takes to hear what really happened? 

I don’t have any answers to these questions yet, apart from that the first step is probably allowing myself to feel the emotions inside me. I often associate different emotions with

particular spaces—physical places or social contexts where I am comfortable feeling and expressing them. Back in Cambodia, I didn’t feel any grief over family members who died under Khmer Rouge rule. The silence is daunting—I would have to fight my spirit to attempt anything different. 

However, once I came to Amsterdam, I started finding such spaces dedicated to personal experiences and memories of loss. The Holocaust Names Memorial on Weesperstraat, protests in support of Palestine along Rokin, and vigils for Gaza at the Dominicuskerk to name a few. These are spaces, both fixed and moving, where people gather, pay respects to the dead, and listen to stories told by the living. For the first time in my life, I found spaces where such painful loss was seen, and I allowed myself to feel. Intertwined in memorials for genocides far from home was my own sorrow at the blank spots in my family tree—tears for all the times the world already ended, though I could never tell you how. 

There are times when I feel shame for grieving vicariously. It feels inappropriate because these are not spaces of ‘my own’, but I find it important to share because I don’t want to continue the silence in which I was raised. In that vein, this has been a short piece on my experience growing up in the aftermath of genocide. Discussing the pain and how to cope has always been difficult, and these thoughts have become all the more present watching the destruction of Gaza. The past haunts me through absence, and the present provides me only vicarious solace. And I doubt that I am the first to feel this way, nor do I think I will be the last. 

Postscript: Shortly after writing the bulk of this piece, I had a call with my mom and found out that my grandma had two half-brothers who died under Khmer Rouge rule. She hadn’t known either, until the day before our call.