jagged grief

I woke up early on Thursday morning, way before my first alarm. My body was stiff and aching, my chest tight under a weight that felt suspiciously like anxiety. When I cracked my eyes open and looked at my watch I merely confirmed what I already instinctively knew: it was 6:30am. Syed was likely gone.

Syed Suhail bin Syed Zin was a Singaporean death row prisoner who’d spent years fighting for not just his own life but also that of other condemned prisoners in Changi Prison. People on death row live in severe isolation, their daily lives surveilled and controlled by the Singapore Prison Service. The odds could not be any more stacked against them. The authorities refer to them as PACP, which stands for “Prisoners Awaiting Capital Punishment”. In the eyes of the state, people like Syed have no other purpose but to wait for the day the decision-makers send them to the gallows.

Executions in Singapore are usually carried out at dawn, around 6am. When I first started working on the death penalty issue fifteen years ago the protocol was dawn on Fridays, but in recent years there have been executions on other days of the week, such that it’s become increasingly difficult to predict when an execution might be scheduled. Last year, we learnt that the Ministry of Home Affairs had reviewed the policy of giving seven days’ notice of an execution; for prisoners who’d received more than one executive notice, subsequent notification periods could be reduced. Syed, who’d received execution notices twice in 2020, was only given four days’ notice this time.

Syed and I have never met or spoken to each other. But I know that he, like me, wished we had. During one court hearing involving multiple death row prisoners in 2022, Syed addressed the judges via Zoom and protested the fact that the prison didn’t allow him to meet the activists working on his case. He named a few of us; despite the barriers to communication, most of the death row prisoners I know earnestly keep track of what’s going on outside prison and make sure to remember the names, and sometimes faces, of those fighting for them. Over time, a fragile connection forms. It’s a jagged little thing, an unusual relationship that develops without direct contact but holds emotional weight nevertheless. Last year, after one execution, a family member texted to say that, during their final visit, her brother had asked her to convey to me his gratitude for my having been there for the past ten years, even though I don’t think we’d ever even been in the same room for a single moment of that decade.

How does it feel, then, when that connection is severed? I’ve been struggling to describe the response I have to losses inflicted by the capital punishment regime. Most of the time it doesn’t feel like it should be a priority; when there are family members and friends whose losses are so much more direct and palpable, why should I be going on about how I feel?

Still, I’ve learnt in recent years that there’s no use in pretending that things like executions, state cruelty and harassment don’t affect me when they very obviously do. And there’s been such an awful lot of these things in recent months—and likely in the months to come. Which probably makes it even more important that I kick the old habit of suppressing feelings in favour of work, of making myself busy busy busy until I flame out in spectacular fashion.

It’s been a week since Syed was killed. I started writing this the morning of his execution but didn’t manage to get enough time to myself to slow down and work through how I feel. I went to therapy, which was helpful in carving out a slot within the week where I didn’t have to do anything other than put my emotions into words, but it was nowhere near enough time to get even the tip of the iceberg out of my system. I guess it was a start.

Last month, as the difficult year that was 2024 was about to draw to a close, a friend died suddenly. We weren’t very close—he was much older than me, in his seventies—but we were part of the same civil society organisation and had just been on a group retreat to Ipoh in August. The loss came as a shock, but there were things I told myself to ease the blow: he’d been loved by so many, and at the time of his death he’d been at the end of a long overseas trip he’d very much enjoyed. He lived a full life in which he’d cultivated his many talents and hobbies, and so many people looked up to him. The memorial I attended at his wake was as much a celebration of all he had achieved, all he had meant to family and friends, as it was a space to mourn his passing. When I think of him, I will always remember his calm, his intelligence, his gentle kindness, and feel grateful for having had the chance to know him.

It’s not like that when it’s a death row case. I’m convinced that there’s nothing else like it in this world. You know exactly when an execution will take place and, barring a miracle, there’s nothing you can do to stop it. The person is fine and healthy one day—they might even be laughing and joking with their families, as many do in an attempt to leave loved ones with happy memories—and dead the next. It’s a murder you can see coming. A murder your government says you’re wrong to want to stop. A murder you’re not allowed to object to, a murder they will punish you for protesting.

How is anyone supposed to accept this?

I’ve said before that the hardest part of campaigning for a death row prisoner is the day after the execution, when everything has been said and done and there is nothing left but to acknowledge the gaping emptiness of failure. That’s still true for me, but there are so many other ways the death penalty can fuck you up.

Last year, in the middle of a very busy period, I heard from a relative of another prisoner that someone on death row had received an execution notice. He wasn’t someone I was very familiar with and it didn’t seem like he or his family wanted any publicity or campaigning, so there was nothing I could really do. A copy of the execution notice eventually made its way to me; I looked at it briefly and filed it away. Then one morning, two days before I was expecting his execution, I received a text asking if I was attending his funeral that morning. With a jolt I realised that I’d got the date of his execution wrong; the person who’d first told me about it had only got the news partially right, and I hadn’t read his execution notice closely enough to clock that the date was different.

For all intents and purposes he was a stranger to me. Yet I spent that day feeling deeply guilty—a man had been killed and I hadn’t realised because I’d been too busy to even read a letter properly. This is capital punishment: killing made so administrative that the difference between life and death is a schedule, a schedule that can be misread, forgotten, noted incorrectly on a calendar.

Is this how little life is worth? What makes any of our lives worth more than theirs?

Back to Syed. Him, I did know, at least from a distance. Unlike the friend I’d lost, I can’t say Syed lived a full and fulfilled life. From what I’ve heard from those who love him, he’d been through so much, struggled so much, been let down so much. There was so much unfulfilled potential; he’d been such an avid reader, such a deep thinker, so hungry for knowledge and learning. He’d been able to watch some TV on death row and watched some Korean dramas, so much so that he’d asked his family to bring him some language books because he figured he could use his time to learn Korean. I brought this up half-jokingly to his sister the evening after his execution, thinking that perhaps that’d just been a phase, a random idea that Syed had thrown out with little intention of following up. “No, he learnt, he did!” his sister said. He never got to leave prison alive, much less go to Korea or speak to a Korean person, but Syed had taught himself a bit of Korean just because he could. He was someone who could have been so much more than Singapore had ever let him be.

Syed made such a difference. He’d been so determined to fight the death penalty and to empower other prisoners to do the same. He’d been a big part of the motivation for the Transformative Justice Collective to come together, and he’d been central to multiple legal applications that led to stays of execution and more time for more than one prisoner. It broke my heart to hear, with this final execution notice, that he’d decided to stop fighting against his execution. He had persevered, fought to the best of his ability, but now he was ready to go. As an activist, I usually wish to keep going and hope that everyone will persist until the very end. But that’s a selfish position. Seeing someone like Syed choose to stop was a reminder of how horrifically traumatic and exhausting it is for people condemned by the state to live through the torment inflicted on them.

“How does that make you feel?” It was like I’d made it to therapy, through the traffic on the expressway in a surge-pricing Gojek, just to start crying the moment I sat down. I struggled to put it into words: there was too much and I didn’t know where to start. How to properly explain a loss, a grief, for a person I’d never actually met? How do I make someone else understand the disappointment, the sense of injustice, the deep rage that felt like something inside of me was being emptied out? “It’s just not fair,” I ended up saying, “that the final exercise of agency left to them is to choose to accept.”

I can’t imagine how painful it must be to try to make peace with something like an execution. To sit with your family and know exactly how much time you have left to see their faces and hear their voices. To see them leave the room and have to go back to a cell where you’re expected to just wait for the end. To have that final visit, to have to say goodbye and know that you’ll really never see these people that you love ever again. If I can’t even accept this just thinking about it, how much worse must it be to actually go through it?

And to know that it doesn’t have to be this way, that it, in fact, isn’t this way in so many other parts of the world. Syed did not have to die. So many of them, all of them, all the people whose legal documents I’ve read, whose families’ clemency pleas I’ve helped draft, whose photos I have saved and whose loved ones I have stood by—none of them had to die. None of them should have died. We lost them not because of justice; they were murdered because some powerful people thought that should be the way. Because some powerful people have dedicated huge amounts of resources—resources that could have actually been used to help instead of harm—to making it so, manipulating public opinion and the media and suppressing dissenting views. This is law, but this isn’t justice. It makes me so angry, but angry in a way that feels like heartbreak.

Two thousand words later, I’m still not sure if I’ve really managed to articulate everything I feel. Perhaps this is something that I, a professional writer, will never succeed at putting into words. Maybe that’s just how it is; this is just one of those things that can never be fully explained, and I don’t have to explain it to process it. Writing this has been helpful (which is, in part, what this personal newsletter is for) but it’s not everything. I guess nothing can be everything—there will be no one-and-done healing for something like this, and I can only keep doing the best I can to work things through.