From Spitak to Iran: When People Born on Different Days Meet in a Shared Death

A Reflection on Collective Death, the Collapse of the Lifeworld, and the Responsibility of Human Conscience

Highlights

• Death is not always an individual event. At times it occurs collectively, on such a vast and devastating scale that individual identities disappear within the catastrophe. Names fade, faces merge in memory, and what remains is a number—one that, as it grows larger, can make the depth of the tragedy even harder to comprehend.
• When a person dies in an earthquake, we confront humanity’s powerlessness before nature. But when a person is killed by a bullet, we face a far more bitter truth: one human being has become a catastrophe for another.
• From this perspective, the 18th and 19th of Dey 1405 were not merely two days on a calendar. They became a mirror reflecting one of humanity’s darkest capacities: the ability to normalize the death of another person.
• A society in which blood is shed does not only leave the victims’ families in mourning; it wounds people’s relationship with shared reality. People no longer fear death alone—they fear abandonment. And abandonment can be more painful than death itself.
• When thousands of people, born on different days, are buried on the same day, the central question is no longer how they died. The central question is whether we will allow them to become nothing more than a number.

In this world, death is not always an individual event.

At times it occurs collectively, on such a vast and devastating scale that individual identities disappear within the catastrophe. Names fade, faces merge in memory, and what remains is a number—one that, as it grows larger, can make the depth of the tragedy even harder to comprehend.

Twenty-five thousand people.

This number is not merely a statistic.

It means twenty-five thousand hearts that stopped beating. Twenty-five thousand homes that fell silent. Twenty-five thousand lives, each of which was a complete world: a child who had not yet learned to read, a mother preparing that evening’s meal, an old man who believed he would wake again the next morning.

The 1988 Armenian earthquake was such a catastrophe.

The earth shook, buildings collapsed, and within seconds a city became a graveyard. Before nature, human beings can become so small that civilization and pride both collapse. The earth has no anger, no desire for revenge, and no ideology. A fault line holds no personal hostility toward anyone. Perhaps it is this neutrality of nature that makes death caused by it, despite all its pain, more comprehensible to the human mind.

But history also knows another kind of death:

A death that does not emerge from nature, but rises from within humanity.

It is here that tragedy assumes a deeper form.

When a person dies in an earthquake, we confront humanity’s powerlessness before nature. But when a person is killed by a bullet, we face a far more bitter truth: one human being has become a catastrophe for another.

From this perspective, the 18th and 19th of Dey 1405 were not merely two days on a calendar.

They became a mirror reflecting one of humanity’s darkest capacities: the ability to normalize the death of another person.

This may be the most terrifying stage in a society’s moral collapse:

Not simply the moment when blood is shed, but the moment when the shedding of blood becomes justifiable to part of the structure of power.

Mass killing occurs in language before it occurs in the street.

First, a human being is stripped of humanity.

That person becomes a “threat,” a “security problem,” or merely a “number.”

Once language has deprived the individual of a human face, physical elimination becomes easier.

Every massacre begins with the collapse of language before the first shot is fired.

It is here that we must distinguish between death and killing.

Death is the end of life.

Killing is the denial of the right to live.

Death may be natural.

Killing is always moral and political.

From here, a deeper analysis can be developed through the philosophy of Edmund Husserl.

Husserl believed that human beings experience the world not merely as a collection of objects, but as a “lifeworld”—a world formed through relationships, meanings, trust, and shared horizons. A home is not merely walls; it is the feeling of safety. A street is not merely a path; it is the possibility of social presence. Another person is not merely a body; that person is a bearer of consciousness and meaning.

Collective catastrophe, whether natural or political, shatters this lifeworld before it destroys bodies.

In an earthquake, the familiar world suddenly becomes alien.

The home that once offered shelter becomes rubble.

But in political killing, the rupture is deeper.

What collapses is not only a building or a body, but a person’s foundational trust in the social world. The individual suddenly discovers that the very institutions meant to provide protection can become sources of danger.

From a phenomenological perspective, this moment is not merely fear; it is the collapse of a horizon of meaning.

Husserl understood this condition as a crisis of intersubjectivity—a crisis in which the fundamental bond between the “self” and the “other” is damaged. The individual can no longer experience the world with the same prior sense of certainty. Every gaze becomes suspicious, every sound produces anxiety, and every presence may carry a threat.

For this reason, mass killing is something more than taking human lives.

Mass killing destroys the shared world.

A society in which blood is shed does not only leave the victims’ families in mourning; it wounds people’s relationship with shared reality. People no longer fear death alone—they fear abandonment.

And abandonment can be more painful than death itself.

A person may die only once at the moment of death,

but in a condition of abandonment, that person collapses inwardly again and again.

The world also plays an important role in this process.

The silence of the world is not always genuine silence.

Sometimes silence is the official form of interest.

When global powers must choose between ethics and interest, history has repeatedly shown that ethics is the first victim. Human catastrophes often remain unanswered not because of a lack of awareness, but because of an excess of calculation.

This too is a form of violence.

First, the bullet is fired.

Then silence arrives.

The bullet tears through the body.

Silence targets memory.

But memory does not always surrender.

When thousands of people, born on different days, are buried on the same day, the central question is no longer how they died.

The central question is:

Will we allow them to become nothing more than a number?

From Spitak to Iran, the cause of death may differ, but the grief of those left behind does not.

A mother who lost her child beneath the rubble,

and a mother who lost her child to a bullet,

meet at the same point: an emptiness that can never be filled.

Collective grief may ultimately be precisely this:

The permanent presence of absence.

Perhaps the true tragedy begins not at the moment of death, but in the life that follows—for those who remain, for those who awaken every morning beside the empty place of someone they loved.

And perhaps this is the deeper meaning of shared death:

Although people are born separately,

history sometimes binds them together in a single ending.

At that moment, death is no longer merely the end of life.

It becomes a test of the conscience of those who survive.

A test with only one question:

Are we still human?