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Bereaved Palestinian father Bassam Aramin, whose ten-year-old daughter was killed in 2007, tells the company's Chief Resonance Officer why he refused revenge.

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, August 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Otherside Life is putting a claim on the record that cuts against how most people read violence. Revenge is not first an ideological act. It is a grief response. It is what unbearable loss does when it is handed no other place to go.

The company, which builds coordination and support infrastructure for American families navigating death, is making the argument on the strength of a new interview between Co-Founder and Chief Resonance Officer Victoria Holmes and Bassam Aramin, Head of International Relations at the Parents Circle Families Forum.

Aramin's daughter Abir was ten years old when she was shot outside her school in 2007. He did not seek revenge. He has spent the eighteen years since saying her name to audiences around the world.

"The best way of revenge is none," Aramin told Holmes. "You become a killer, you kill a victim, and you invite the next victim from your side."

At the place where his daughter was killed, Aramin wrote her a promise. Her killer would die and be forgotten. She would outlive him, because her father would carry her name everywhere he went for as long as he was able.

He has kept it.

Holmes, a death doula who has sat with dying people and bereaved families for more than a decade, said the interview confirmed something she has watched play out in far smaller rooms for years.

"There are two roads out of a loss, and both of them keep the person alive," Holmes said. "You can keep them alive through revenge, because revenge is still a form of connection. Or you can keep them alive through love and purpose. Most people never realize they chose. They just find themselves ten years in, still building a life around a wound."

That, she said, is the part American families miss because they assume the pattern belongs to war zones. It does not. It shows up as siblings who stop speaking over an estate. As a decade of litigation over a will. As a parent who converts a death into a case against a hospital and never gets to grieve at all.

Aramin described three paths he has watched bereaved people take. Some stop living without ever dying. Some are consumed by the need to make someone pay. And some take the tragedy and build with it, in the name of the person they lost.

"We are bigger than our sadness," he said. "We are bigger than our pain."

He was direct about the difference between honoring the past and living inside it.

"It is very important to remember the past," Aramin said. "It is very difficult and unhealthy to live in the past. Sometimes we invite the pain back to ourselves. When I talk about Abir now, I smile, because I remember her laughing."

Otherside Life takes no position on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Holmes said the company's interest is narrower and far older than any border, which is what a human being does with a loss that should not be survivable.

"Grief that is met becomes legacy," she said. "Grief that is abandoned becomes damage. That is true in Jericho and it is true in a living room in Ohio. The variable is whether anyone showed up."

Aramin's friendship with Israeli bereaved father Rami Elhanan, whose daughter Smadar was killed in 1997, is the basis of Colum McCann's novel "Apeirogon." Aramin co-founded Combatants for Peace and holds a master's degree in Holocaust Studies from the University of Bradford in England. The Parents Circle Families Forum is a joint organization of more than 800 Israeli and Palestinian families who have each lost an immediate family member to the conflict.

Readers who wish to support that work can do so at theparentscircle.org and through the American Friends of the Parents Circle at parentscirclefriends.org.

The full interview is available at https://www.youtube.com/@thisisotherside.

About Otherside Life
Otherside Life is a technology platform and coordination services provider for families navigating death and its aftermath. The company coordinates end-of-life planning, estate logistics, vendor management and grief support so families can be present for what matters. Otherside Life is currently operating in Los Angeles with planned expansion across major U.S. markets.

Otherside Life provides coordination only, not legal, tax, financial, medical advice or funeral services. Third-party licensed providers deliver all regulated services.

Learn more at othersidelife.com.

Media Contact
Nathan Mallo, Otherside Life
nathan@othersidelife.com
1-833-716-5433

Nathan Mallo
Otherside Life
+1 833-716-5433
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