It was still early in the war. After four days of internet blackout — and, God knows, testing countless VPNs — I finally reached a stable enough connection to check my email. The last one was from a prestigious university in New York, where I was scheduled to begin my Ph.D. in the upcoming academic year. They had asked why I hadn’t confirmed my admission yet, warning that if I delayed any further, I might lose my spot. I responded politely that these nights I can’t sleep from the sounds of Israeli rockets landing right and left across my city, and that during the day, I’m constantly trying to make sure the many people I know across town are still alive. News that someone two oceans away was thinking about my fall plans felt like a comforting distraction. But truthfully — even if I had not been under rocket fire — the new travel restrictions against Iranian citizens would have made it impossible to attend that program anyway. I typed up a version of these sentiments, hit send, and then I stared at my phone screen, watching the VPN wheel spin, waiting for the email to leave “draft” status and finally be sent. The wait, of course, wasn’t short. As with all attempts at action during the days Tehran lost to war, it dragged on. I’m not the only one who, in those black days, stopped thinking about the future or set aside carefully made plans. After the first wave of Israeli attacks on Iran — which mainly targeted western parts of the country and densely populated cities such as Tehran, Isfahan, and Tabriz — many others, too, collapsed under the weight of seeing mangled bodies or even just images of bombed-out homes on TV screens and social media. Naturally, the fears of the future felt very real. They were triaged in a sort of macabre sliding scale. Immediate fears: where will the next missile land? who will it kill or render mourners? Near-future fears: what happens if food and medicine shortages hit? And more distant ones: when will this war end, and under what circumstances? And if it ends, will ordinary people — social, cultural, political actors — have any right to live? And if so, who will protect them? For years, Iranians have feared becoming the next Syria or Afghanistan. In those days, more than ever, that fear breathed down our necks. Still, what most occupied Iranians — day and night — wasn’t what might happen in ten days or ten years. We were most occupied with counting the dead while dreading the next strike. And it was not only the fear of death. It was also the fear of losing the last means of connection, solace, and sanity — the internet, which had become a lifeline during the Covid-19 pandemic’s isolation. In the days we lost to war, it became common to begin sentences with If I die during internet blackout . . . Audio recordings, snapshots of handwritten wills, Telegram notes — these were shared openly online, often with heartbreaking directness. A father told his child to seek out help with funeral arrangements. A mother, in a voice message to her daughter living abroad, said, “If we die, make sure you request reparations — maybe it’ll make your life easier.” Another young woman, addressing the unborn child she was due to deliver in four weeks, wrote: “If I die, I want you to know I never thought I’d be giving birth to you in a war. Had I known this would happen, I might have chosen not to bring you into the world.” Many just didn’t want to be forgotten. For younger left-leaning Iranians, this sentiment was particularly inflected with memory of the mass of faceless fatalities in Gaza, so many of whom were killed by Israeli airstrikes and then forgotten. In the younger generation’s digital pleas to be remembered, they invoked the memory of Fatima Hassouna, a Palestinian photojournalist and artist from Gaza, born in 1999 and tragically killed on April 16, 2025, in an Israeli airstrike that also took the lives of ten of her family members. She achieved international recognition for her powerful documentation of civilian life during the Gaza war, especially after foreign journalists were barred from entering the region. Young Iranians’ online wills began with “Don’t let us become numbers,” referring to how the names and stories of those killed in Gaza have often been lost. Except for a few, most are remembered simply as part of a rising death toll — hundreds more each day — rather than lives, dreams, and human histories. This was the fate that these young Iranians feared. They were right to dread a similar oblivion. In the first ten days of the war that began with Israel’s attack on June 13, at least 400 people were killed. Despite relentless efforts by journalists and citizens, fewer than a hundred of them have been named, and about half as many photos have been made public. The fear of dying and becoming a statistic is painfully real. But there’s another, quieter fear: of leaving lives unfinished. My mother, a woman in her early fifties, who left Tehran at my insistence during the bomb-filled days, told me as she departed, “I hope if someone must die, it’s us old folks. You’re still young. You haven’t lived. You have so much left to do.” I joked: “Out of a population of ninety-two million, around 935 people have been killed in under two weeks. The daily odds of dying are one in several million. You’re more likely to die from cancer than from a missile.” She didn’t find it funny. And she was right. There’s not much to laugh about in war. A few weeks before the sirens started, Nazli, a close friend of mine, had told me she’d been diagnosed with a rare, untreatable cancer. Her doctor had bluntly told her that she likely had two years to live. Even
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