By Isaac Cudjoe, CEO at Peace First

Yesterday, I learned that a friend of mine, at 31 years old, had passed away.

We hadn’t been close in recent years, not because of one defining rupture, but because oceans and seas have a way of thinning presence, and because a friendship can dim slowly without anyone noticing until the light is gone. That kind of grief feels like a brain freeze, sharp one moment and easing the next, never quite sure when it’s actually going to end. I found myself scrolling through old messages, replaying voice notes, and sitting with photos I didn’t know would one day feel final.

Sitting with that, I’ve been struck by how familiar this feeling is, and how often grief has been the thing that pulls me back into the work I do.

Some of us become pallbearers of justice, not as an abstraction, but as a role we inherit and keep being asked to carry.

We spend our lives witnessing injustice not only in headlines or distant places, but inside our own communities, among people we love, and sometimes within our own families.

Out of respect, I won’t share the details of how my friend died. But I will say this: one of the hardest parts of justice-oriented work is that for many people, the work is inseparable from their lived experience. Not because they lack boundaries or professionalism, but because the work emerged from what they survived.

In other professions, recusal is built in.

A judge won’t preside over a case involving their child. A detective won’t investigate a crime tied to their spouse. Even a pageant judge will acknowledge a conflict of interest if their niece is competing.

But in the fight for equity and justice, recusal is rarely an option.

And I have to sit with that truth as I meet young people who are trying to make a difference in their communities while confronting the very systems that have terrorized their own lives. I meet them knowing they are already pallbearers of justice, even if they haven’t named themselves that yet.

Like when a young woman is fighting femicide and later shares that she herself is a survivor of domestic violence. Or when a young person has built a brilliant education access program, only for you to discover they never received a quality education of their own. Or when someone working on health equity in their community was born in a town with no hospital, just a rundown clinic doing its best with too little.

These are not hypotheticals for me. If anything, they are biographies, lived experiences, the kinds of reminders that show up daily.

I remember realizing this early in my career.

Not long after finishing graduate school, I interviewed at a well-known institution focused on malaria prevention. Toward the end of the interview, a senior leader asked a familiar question about why they should choose me over someone they felt had more experience.

I was 25 at the time, and I remember pausing before asking him something back.

What do you mean by experience?

Do you mean time spent in lecture halls, titles held, or years listed on a résumé? Or do you mean the grief someone has learned to carry, the number of times they’ve had to serve as a pallbearer for an injustice they were already living through?

That question has stayed with me, largely because so much of what we call “experience” in this field ignores the cost of survival. It overlooks what it takes to wake up every day and fight a system that has already taken something from you.

Part of the reason I’m here, in this role at all, began with grief.

In 2019, I paced the floors of a hospital, praying that someone I loved would survive the medical battle they had been forced into, that she would get to live beyond it. In desperation, I made a promise to GOD. If she lived, I would dedicate myself to caring for people like her.

She didn’t.

And I was left grappling with the human hubris of it all, with the instinct to bargain with a higher power, to believe that devotion could secure an outcome, that justice could be negotiated through personal sacrifice.

Eventually, I made a different commitment, one that wasn’t contingent on what I would receive in return. I chose to continue the work anyway, to honor her life without conditions, and to stay even when the promise I wanted wasn’t fulfilled.

So when I say that we need to care for the pallbearers of justice, I mean something very literal.

We ask people to carry their communities, their trauma, their histories, and their hope all at once, often praising their resilience while overlooking their wounds. We celebrate their impact without always sitting with what it costs to lead from lived experience.

If we are serious about justice, we have to be serious about care, not only for the communities we serve, but for the people who carry the work in their bodies and in their lives every day.

Especially them.