The Necessity of Murder
My Grandmother is a murderer. No, really.
Once, when I was 16, I perched myself on the kitchen counter, watching my grandmother nibble on a piece of pisang goreng—fried banana, golden and crisp. She nudged the plate toward me, her eyes narrowing slightly when I declined.
She scoffed. “When I was your age, I would never have turned down pisang goreng.”
I smiled, expecting another story of her youth, a tale filled with the warm simplicity of living in an Indonesian fishing village; mornings splashing in the crystal water, or afternoons fishing with her siblings. But this story was not one I was prepared for.
She set her fork down, staring into the afternoon “When I was 18, Indonesia was under Japanese occupation. One day, as I watched your great-uncle playing in the yard, Japanese soldiers stormed into Manado. They came for him, oblivious to me standing in the shadows.”
Her voice, usually gentle and soft, turned sharp and brittle: “I acted before I thought. I found a gun, aimed, and shot. I grabbed my brother and ran.”
The silence in the kitchen thickened.
“The accuracy of my shot left him there, lifeless.”
Under the Japanese occupation, thousands of young Indonesian men were seized from their families to work in romusha, forced labor programs notorious for their brutality, with inadequate food, no medical care, and little rest—a sentence that often led to death (Melber, 2016). Her brother’s survival meant confronting an impossible choice—committing an unthinkable vice.
As I listened, I struggled with the duality in her story. My grandmother—whom I knew as the embodiment of compassion, who raised five children alone after her husband died, who took in and cared for over forty children, lent soldiers food and beds, founded schools, cradled all her grandchildren with endless warmth, attending every sports match and award show without fail—had committed an act that some would consider to be the world’s most vicious vices.
We often talk of virtues as if they are untouchable, pristine ideals—kindness, sacrifice, compassion. But my grandmother’s story denied what it meant to be virtuous. In that split second, when she squeezed the trigger, she had committed violence. The soldier's life was taken. What about his family? His mother would be waiting at the door only to receive the message that her son would never return home. Civil systems have a way of softening the weight of murder with degrees and legal definitions. Yet, in the end, a life is taken regardless of any classification or justification. But without this act–this vice– my mother would never have met her great-uncle Harry, whom she adored so deeply. My Grandmother would have no one to fall back on when her husband passed. There was no good option. A vice for a vice.
This tension returned to me months later when I stood in a hospital hallway hours before my grandmother’s death. The world around me was an unbearable stretch of hospital blue, the floors gleaming sterile under fluorescent lights. Nurses swept past in blurs, their voices distant, muffled. I looked around, my eyes failing to focus, unable to process the scene before me. When my mother first told me, I didn't believe it. The doctors had laid out the facts: 0% chance of recovery, 0% quality of life, and 100% certainty of suffering. These numbers eluded me. 0 and 100 were too absolute of numbers to comprehend; they seemed almost fictional. I refused to reduce my grandmother's life to these clinical statistics.
My grief prompted my reflection on all the moments and tales she shared with me at that very kitchen counter, and the memory of her confession returned. I never got the chance to ask her if she lost sleep over what happened or if the memory haunted her the way it haunted me now. Perhaps she made peace with it long before I even knew it was a story worth telling. Or perhaps, in some quiet part of herself, she whispered forgiveness for the weight she carried up until the last minutes of her life.
As I watched her breathe, the boundaries of virtue and vice blurred once again. Sixty years ago, someone’s life had been in her hands. Now, her life lay in the hands of others. Perhaps the greatest virtue she had left me was not in her compassion or sacrifice, but the courage to live with the fullness of her humanity with all its contradictions—the ability to live with both her acts of virtue and vice.
References
Melber, Takuma. 2016. “The Labour Recruitment of Local Inhabitants as Rōmusha in Japanese-Occupied South East Asia.” International Review of Social History 61, no. S24 :165–85. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020859016000390