By Yasmin Chaudhary
There is a difference between remembering and consuming. Between honoring a life and turning a death into something digestible.
As I move deeper into writing about violence, loss, and injustice, I’ve had to sit with an uncomfortable question: How do we tell these stories without taking something from the people who lived them?
True crime has a way of pulling us in. It asks us to solve, to speculate, to fill in gaps that were never meant for public hands. Sometimes that curiosity comes from a genuine desire for justice. Other times, it slips quietly into something else — a kind of consumption that prioritizes answers over humanity.
I don’t want to write that way.
Behind every case is a person who laughed, loved, annoyed someone, made plans they never got to finish. Behind every headline is a family forced to grieve under fluorescent lights, court transcripts, and internet commentary. Long after public attention moves on, they are still living inside the absence.
Holding space means remembering that we are visitors to these stories — not owners of them.
It means resisting the urge to turn pain into spectacle. It means understanding that not every question has an answer we’re entitled to. And it means recognizing that doubt and curiosity do not give us permission to forget compassion.
Some cases haunt us because they remain unresolved. Others because the resolution feels incomplete. In both situations, the discomfort is real — but so is the responsibility to tread carefully. Justice is not always clean. Truth is not always fully accessible. And closure, when it comes at all, rarely arrives neatly wrapped.
As a writer, I believe storytelling can be an act of care. It can preserve memory, challenge systems, and insist that the lives lost mattered beyond the worst thing that happened to them. But that only works when the story centers humanity — not our hunger for certainty.
So this is my quiet commitment moving forward:
To tell these stories without stripping them of dignity.
To question systems more than individuals.
To leave room for grief, ambiguity, and unanswered questions.
And to remember that behind every name is a silence that someone else has to wake up to every morning.
We can remember the dead without consuming their pain.
We can seek justice without feeding on suffering.
And we can choose care — even when the truth is complicated.
Sometimes, that choice matters more than the answer.
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