On Thursday morning, June 4, I woke to the tragic and shocking news of Marjane Satrapi’s death. It was not the first time I had learned of a loved one’s loss in exile in the most mundane, alienating way: half-awake in bed, phone in hand, scrolling through messages and headlines, confronted by yet another immeasurable catastrophe. The news of my father’s passing reached me in a similar way seven months ago. Suddenly, everything felt darker, more fragile than it had the day before.Article continues after advertisement
I sat in my Philadelphia apartment, still in pajamas, as grief arrived in waves: first numbness, then denial, and finally tears that blurred every word and memory at once. I scrolled through news feeds, searching for answers I knew would not compensate for her loss. On Narges Mohamadi’s foundation page, I read her family’s note: “she died of sorrow.” Four devastating words echoed the Persian compound we use for this kind of death: degh kardan: to die of sadness so deep it shatters your whole being. In English, they call it “Broken Heart Syndrome,” a phrase too clinical, too far removed from the untranslatable ache that sorrow leaves in the body in its wake.
Marjane’s husband, Mattias Ripa, the Swedish actor and filmmaker, had died just fourteen months earlier. Afterward, no matter how hard she tried, she could never quite return to herself. On the day of Mattias’s funeral, she told a close friend, “I think I’m dead already. I will not be able to live after this.” A phrase she repeated often until she, too, left this world. The fierce woman who always wore black, who could light up a room with her sly jokes and smoky laughter, grew quieter and more fragile after losing her lover. Her sadness sometimes showed at the edges, in the way she looked away or stubbed out a cigarette a little too hard. When she lost Mattias, followed so quickly by a massacre and a war in the homeland she loved so fiercely, something in her seemed to give way. It wasn’t only the loss of her partner; it was the darkness creeping over Iran and the pain of watching her country suffer that finally shattered her heart.
