Happy birthday Baba, hi Mama.
Another year, another letter.
You would have been 76 today.
This year I've struggled, to be honest. It's the first time that I feel completely untethered and floating in a vacuum. I feel like I can't untangle the knots that form along the passage of time, and I'm gathering them up in my arms as they pile up. It's the time first I feel completely cut off from support.
It sounds dramatic, I know. And it also sounds like a lie. I have support from those who love me, my family, friends. Your friends. But at the same time it feels it is something they cannot help me with.
This year is the first year I feel I've failed. Actually failed. And I feel the panic inch up my throat, the despair tickle the back of my eyeballs, and the fear form into hot waves emanating from my temples.
I have always tried to remain positive, always believed in the light that is at the end of the tunnel. This time it felt extinguished.
The war ongoing back home is part of it, I'm sure. The helplessness of being far, the guilt of not having to fear for Laith and Zayn's safety and mental wellbeing, the thirst to be among the familiar places and faces. It's homesickness on a different wavelength.
And all the time, I am seeing things through your eyes. The irony of finally understanding things you expressed or experienced without actually being able to speak to you about it, to commiserate, to compare notes. To ask the questions I need to ask.
I've tried to hold it together when all those things circle and start to cloud the way forward. I've tried to push through, and hold onto the forever Baba motto, that I hear in my head in your voice : "هونيها بتهون" - "simplify it and it will be simple..." How I wish I could talk to you more baba. We really never got the chance. I wonder how you would see me, what you would think of me.
I know that I always try to hold myself to account based on how I know you to be, but it isn't the same as having you do it yourself.
And mama. Ahh ya mama. I wonder if when in the haze of an argument, when you used to say bring up your death as a plea for us communicating better, you had any idea of how soon it would be, and how raw things would be. And how true, it would be that we wasted so much time of the little we ended up having.
But I'm really trying not to thing of those dark things, of the regrets and the what-ifs. Of the things my sons have missed on, the wisdom and love and joy they were due, and deserved that is out of reach, beyond the veil, out there in an alternate timeline that rolls on somewhere, in a dream I have. Stars bright enough to see, too far to reach.
The words to describe the longing fail. I feel sometimes like I have become a connoisseur of grief. Like I've earned the stripes, walked the path barefoot, gone through the tunnel and emerged, not less sad, but able to balance the weight.
And when I have friends that grieve a loss, I feel there is an unspoken understanding now, that only those who have lost so much can decipher. Of course everyone has their own crosses to bear, their own specifics that are unique to them. But there is still that undertone of understanding.
The membership to the club. The one no one wants to be a part of but ends up there anyway.
I've been thinking actually, that in lieu of straightforward letters, I might include vignettes..
I've been finding myself getting flashbacks on many occasions, very vivid moments that play like home videos taped onto VHS in my mind.
I get them suddenly, out of nowhere. I'll be on an escalator in the supermarket and I will remember how mama came home one day, with a black bin bag that was suspiciously hovering off the floor. And how she spun a story about how she was driving home, past Londis and the Costas fish and chip place when she saw a very sad balloon clown who just wanted a friend, and how she told him she has a daughter who would make an excellent one. And out of the black bag came a clown shaped helium balloon, that had pleated strips of paper for arms and legs that ended with cardboard shoes and hands that kept him hovering at my height. I still remember how the story of this encounter filled the room, how captivated I was, and how I walked around the house for days after holding my new "clown friend's" hand talking to him as he hovered silently behind me.
These moments that keep you close to me. The real memories from our every day, our mundane.
Like the memory of Baba, standing at my bedroom door, saying "Shou ya Ghandoura? How was your day hayati?". Just that, no context, no before, or after. Just that little slither of you Baba, on loop, as clear and real as the tears that I find rolling down my face right now.
It's getting close to bedtime for the boys. The beautiful boys that I will make sure know you without knowing you. So I have to go. This letter was going a bit all over the place too.
Who knew motherhood would be so full on?
You mama, probably. But I have two! You only had me. I wonder if it was easier or harder.
There they are again, all those conversations that we didn't and don't have.
Stars blinking in an ever expanding sky.
I love you more and more, miss you deeper and harder.
Bintkon
Karma
