Happy birthday baba, you would have been 73 this year.
I wonder sometimes what you would look like. In my minds eye, you are still 56.
Never aged a day after that.
Funny thing that is, about death.
Freezes you while we all march forward, carrying you with us in this still state.
Facebook showed me a photo at my graduation a few days ago. Me and mama.
16 years ago now.
Also the number of years you’ve been gone.
So much more that I can see in that photo. I can see that you are not there. Saadi took that photo. You were in hospital. It was only a few weeks before you left us.
You couldn’t come to my final year presentation. I remember I was working on it in your hospital room, on my laptop. You told me you would try your best, and you couldn’t. And I remember feeling sad, but thinking at least you will be out in time for my graduation. That also came and went. Saadi filmed it on the camera for you to see. I remember feeling sad you weren’t there, but thinking, at least you will be out of hospital soon, and at least you could watch the video.
And then you weren’t.
You never did see that video, and neither did I. It didn’t really matter anymore.
The other thing I see is Mama.
My real, pre-losing you, Mama. Her face still pink with life, full of life, beaming with life.
Still unbroken.
As I looked at that photo, it was like being reintroduced to you, Mama.
How I’ve missed you.
The closest you came to beaming life like that was 2018, when you set eyes on Laith.
It’s been hard Baba, Mama. not going to lie, not going to sugar coat.
I’ve felt more alone than I ever have I think.
Quite odd for someone who barely is physically alone these days… can’t find a moment to myself with the two boys. But it’s true.
I feel stuck in a world that speaks a different language than me now. Like I have seen things and felt things and gone through things that have woven through me and become a part of me that makes me now so different than so many in my life. It’s alienating.
I feel alien among my own.
And it’s a weird alienation that even when spoken about in efforts to shrink the divide, just expands it.
I am now someone speaking of ghosts and depths to those who cannot see ghosts, and have not fallen.
And the cruel irony is, when I feel at my lowest, the first thing I do is think about calling you. And I remember you’re not there.
A phantom limb? No. Feels more like a phantom heart.
That is where the pain pulses from afterall.
And I find myself being angry at you. Leaving me after time and time again in the past I told you “Mama you know you need to live at least a decade more right? I need help with the kids”, "Mama if you want me to have a second, you need to stick around, yalla, start taking care of yourself" and you replying “inshallah ya 3omri. La ekhir nafas”… - to my last breath -…
But then I see you in that hospital bed. Defeated physically, but never morally, never spiritually.
But the body houses the spirit… and a body with 12 tubes and wires attached to it, unable to take a breath on its own, a nafas, can only hold such a spirit for so long before it has to let go. So how can I blame you. How can I be angry?
So I’m not angry. I meant it when I told you I don’t want you to suffer. I said it to you while you were conscious, and many times when you weren’t. Hoping you would hear me, and hoping you would believe me and not sense the part of me that I was trying to silence, the part that was screaming that I wanted you to stay and please don’t leave me alone.
It hasn’t been two years yet without you and I find myself unable to visualise a tomorrow where I cannot speak to you or hold you or confide in you or argue with you.
I can only try and imagine you and baba together. And carry you both with my like sea glass in my pocket so I can hold it in silence and in secret. Smooth, softened by time and sea water that caresses and caresses. Letting light through, diffused and illuminating, ridding it of its blinding harshness.
I find myself needing to reach out to you both more than ever these days.
As someone dealing with what my therapist so aptly referred to as the “immigrant struggle”.
Who knew that was something I was dealing with. God knows I didn’t.
I find myself thinking of you all those years ago, doing the same as I am now with my family. Leaving for something better. Starting from the ground up. And in doing so, facing all the challenges and fears and anxieties that come with it. All these “struggles” and no reference to learn from, no refuge to draw comfort from.
With you gone, all your experiences, you knowledge, your accumulated wisdom, gone with you.
I’m always in doubt of myself, of my ability, and without my greatest supporters, my greatest believers. I try hard to pull together your words into sentences that will help. It can be tiring.
I stop myself from thinking too much about how you always said you wanted to write to me, mama. Write things you wanted me to know.
Because you never did, and if I linger too much on it, it will break my heart.
All that time ahead of you that we took for granted. All that time that was within our grasp, that just fell away in an instant.
So many things I wanted to ask, needed to ask. So many things I didn’t know that I need to know.
And probably so many more things I will find out I needed to know about too, as time moves forward.
I want you to soothe my fears of history repeating itself. I need to do better for Laith and Zayn. I need to not find myself wondering if my struggles will parallel yours, and in doing so bind myself in knots of uncertainty and anxiety and self pity.
Is it that history repeats itself, or do we make the same mistakes?
So many questions to yell into the void with nothing but photos of life, frozen at points in time to stare back at me. Warm, loving, but fixed and unchanging, unresponsive.
I miss you both so much.
Words fail me, stuck and choked in my chest. Sometimes escaping as a tear or two here or there.
I live two lives now. The one here, in the present, with all its moving parts and its life. And the other with you, stuck in a place where time has stopped, and life has left.
And the dichotomy could not be more harsh. I feel stuck and paralysed at times, living a life on the outside, but inside struggling to sync up.
Please stay with me, wherever you are.
I will keep writing, I will keep speaking. I will keep feeling, even if a lot of it is pain.
Maybe one day you will speak back, maybe one day I will feel the embrace again.
But till then, I can only say happy birthday baba. And I love you mama.
Celebrate together. I wish I could make you a cake. I know that mama would recommend the lemon poppyseed loaf. It's her favourite.
Sorry this letter has been all over the place.
I will strive to find firmer footing by next year.
I love you. I love you. Bhibkon bhibkon bhibkon la ekhir nafas.
Bintkon Karma
P.s. Laith and Zayn… what can I say. Wish you could see them. I can only believe that you do.
