There are tragedies that make headlines and then there are those that decay in silence. The recent discovery of a Humaira’s lifeless body, months after her passing, is not just a tale of abandonment by an industry but also a painful reminder of the erosion of something even more fundamental: family.
She didn’t die in a remote village. She died in a city teeming with people, in an apartment surrounded by noise, yet no one noticed. Not a neighbour. Not a friend. Not even her own blood. For months, her phone must have stayed silent. No one checked in. No one knocked. The people who once shared her home, her childhood and her surname were absent in the most final way.
Much is being said about the entertainment industry and rightly so. But how did her family forget her? How does someone vanish from life without a single relative asking where she went?
We are quick to blame society, but family is the first society we belong to. And when that breaks down, when the people who are supposed to care stop caring, the consequences are devastating. It’s one thing to be overlooked by colleagues or fans. It’s another to be erased by those who once held your hand as a child.
Now that she’s gone, there’s a performance of sorrow. Tributes flow. Pictures surface. Words of regret fill the silence that should have been filled with love while she was alive. But it’s too late. What she needed was presence, not performance.
Let her rest. Not with press releases or pity, but with truth. Let this be a moment of reckoning for families who cut ties over pride, for siblings who go silent, for parents who measure worth by success or honour and for all of us who forget that the deepest neglect often begins at home.
Grief doesn’t need framing. And dignity doesn’t require likes. She was a person. Not a cautionary tale. Not a trending name. Just someone who deserved to be cared and respected not just remember.
Dr Intikhab Ulfat
Karachi
