MOSAIC

It is just past daybreak on a Sunday when you go to see him for the first time. The car ride is tense as your uncle drives you and your mother through empty streets. It is February. The morning is frigid and silent. 

When you enter the hospital, the sharp, metallic stench assaults your senses. You hold onto your mother’s arm as a front that you are supporting her, when in reality you need to hold on because your legs have started shaking. You can’t recall the last time you were in a hospital. In the ICU, you walk past rooms with glass walls, full of COVID patients, and avert your eyes to afford them their privacy. When you come to his unit, you keep your gaze averted, if only to tell yourself a different story for just a little longer. 

In the room, you take inventory of everything in your line of sight except the bed and its occupant. You swallow hard, the n95 mask digging painfully into your cheeks. Your mother grips your arm as the doctor speaks. Bile gathers in your mouth and you gag at the stench of antiseptic, your palms sweating inside the latex gloves. Your ears are ringing but you try to focus on what the doctor says, his words delivered like a report and lacking in sympathy. This is only the first visit of many, and you want to run as far away as possible. You want to give up this guise of strength and find a place where you can just be small and scared and oblivious. 

Despite your fear, you continue accompanying your mother to the hospital. At first, you can only sit in a chair in the corner of the room and pray silently. You keep your head down as the nurses come in and prod at the patient’s still body. He is the patient and not your father because this is easier to absorb. Your mother sits beside the bed, her right hand

hovering over his head as she reads Surah Ya-Sin. On the third visit, she brings Zamzam and wipes it over his chest, along his head. She urges you to read Quran out loud, sure that he can hear it. You read a different surah each time, your voice trembling as you try to ward off thoughts of death. 

Eventually, on the fourth visit, you are able to leave the chair and stand at his side. You reach out to touch his arm, swollen with fluid and unfamiliar. The man in the hospital bed resembles your father, but your father has never been this still. Your father moved endlessly. You were eating breakfast with him only a month before, watching him gulp down his tea so he could make it to work on time. You only remember him in motion, stopping only for a few seconds at a time to exchange morning greetings or to tell you to have a good day. Even your phone calls had been hurried. So the man lying so still, breathing with the aid of a machine, could not be your father. But you do as your mother says and call him Baba. The two of you take turns talking to him. Sometimes his fingers twitch, and you start to believe that he can, in fact, hear you. You massage his legs and arms, touch the beard that has grown wild on his face. Another unfamiliar sight that makes you uneasy. 

Each visit fills you with the urge to escape. Each update the nurses give grates until you want to crawl out of your own skin. You experience sadness, then relief, then trepidation, then anger. At some point, resignation begins to set in. The visits become a practice in holding: holding your mother when she looks like she might collapse, holding your father’s cold, swollen hand. Holding your breath. You are not sure when it happens, but you begin to grieve long before the conversation turns to the possibility of death.

When you are not at the hospital, you are in the house that has become a tomb. The rooms are suffocating, so everyone stays downstairs. You and your siblings move without speaking, phantom versions of yourselves. You don’t remember eating anything during this time, though of course you do eat. You eat and manage to brush your teeth, even though the task takes up too much energy. Before going to bed, you kneel with your siblings in the den, your heads bowed, imploring God for a miracle. 

When the silence becomes unbearable, you take walks around the neighborhood to clear your head. The sudden purpling of the crepe myrtle trees surprises you. You detest the bluebonnets for their audacity to be so vibrant. Even the sky is bright and cloudless. It makes you nauseous, the sight of so much blooming, so much blue. So much life. 

One night, your mother sends you out on an errand, and you are grateful for the chance to get out of the house. In the store, you fill the cart without thinking. The lady ringing you up says something to you, and you smile without responding. You have long since stopped hearing anything except your own thoughts. This is inconvenient, because your thoughts are terrifying. In the parking lot, you load the bags into the trunk and return the cart, again without thinking. Once you’re in the car, your hand begins to tremble. You try to fit the key into the ignition, but on the third failed attempt, you throw it down in frustration. You are startled but not surprised when your body suddenly curves over the steering wheel and the tears come down, torrential. 

* 

It has been a little over three weeks since your father was admitted to the ICU. You sit with your mother and sister in a different room, watching over him. When your mother

says she wants to go home, to take a break and sleep, the nurses say: you should stay with him. He’s in his final moments. You want to scream at them, to ask how they could possibly know. Your mother holds her mushaf in one hand and prayer beads in the other. You take turns praying in the empty cafeteria next door. 

You keep an eye on the monitor, watch as the numbers fall then rise, fall then rise. In this moment, you would give anything to rip your healthy lungs from your chest so your father could breathe on his own again. If you had a way to do so, you would claw out your heart and hand it to the doctors yourself. 

The nurses start coming in more frequently to check his vitals. The atmosphere in the room is heavy. Your mother’s head is bowed. Your sister stands in the corner. You wonder if the angel of death is somewhere at your father’s side, waiting. 

You walk back and forth in a line that gradually becomes less straight, your nerves on fire. 

A nurse comes in again; her presence does nothing to calm you down. You read Ya-sin under your breath a total of seven times. 

There is no window in the room, so it is impossible to tell what time of day it is. In your head, you are having a conversation with your father, whose voice you have not heard in so long. You beg him to tell you if he is in pain, if he needs anything. You are too afraid to touch his hand, as if this small action will trigger the thing you are afraid will happen. Your eyes are still fixated on the monitor when he flatlines. 

What happens next is a confounding series of events. The doctor shines a light into your father’s eyes. Someone calls out the time: 15:55. The nurses hug you and rub your

back. They give condolences, then offer to turn the bed toward Mecca. Somewhere at the back of your mind, you think: that’s nice, but you don’t have the strength to thank them. The doctor, who happens to be Muslim, comforts your mother when she asks him if your father is gone. He says: he is a martyr, God willing. He is with His Lord now. 

Your mother begins receiving phone calls, but you can only register your father’s still body in the hospital bed and feel only the traitorous beating of your own heart. The phone passes from person to person like a hot stone. You respond to relatives in the way you know you’re supposed to: To God we belong and to Him we return. Ameen. God willing, we will be patient. To God we belong and to Him we return. Ameen. God willing, we will be patient. To God we belong and to Him we return. Ameen. God willing, we will be patient. 

You don’t know if you are patient at that moment. You are, however, composed. You hold your brother, both of you sitting on the cold tile floor, until your legs are numb. In the periphery of your vision, the nurses pull tubes and unplug machines. This is the final declaration that there is no going back. You try to internalize that your father is now a body covered with a thin, white hospital sheet. He is three feet away from you and no longer within reach. 

* 

The funeral service is an out of body experience. The congregation prays together for the deceased, and you struggle to remember that the deceased is your father. The drive to the cemetery is a memory you no longer have. You do, however, recall standing over his grave and praying in the crucial moments. You recall the group of men who lowered him into the ground, their faces twisted with sadness. After the burial, you learn that birth and

decay can occur simultaneously. The proof: a single pink wildflower jutting out from the earth near his grave. To you, its defiance is both infuriating and reassuring. In the weeks following his death, you learn quickly that there is no blueprint for how to grieve, and no measurement for how to grieve well. You discover that what follows after death is an infinite coil. There is no letting go, no way of unraveling the spiral. You come across lines in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking that resonate: “Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailyness of life.” 

In grieving, you are angered by inconsequential things, like the hairline fracture on the side of the coffee mug that was still new, the price tag stubbornly attached to the bottom. Because you don’t want to cut your lip, you decide not to drink the cafe con leche, so it goes cold. This angers you, too, because you took your time making it: scalding the milk on the stovetop, pouring it over a single shot of espresso, then topping it off with condensed milk. Preparing the coffee reminds you of how much your father loved milk tea, how he drank it extra sweet. You are aware that you have been actively avoiding making tea, that coffee is a coping mechanism. 

But even in the midst of anger, happiness often tries to claw its way through. A scene plays in your mind: a much younger version of you at the beach, enjoying the feeling of sand between her fingers, stamping grainy clumps in the heart of her palm. She watches the sand fall in dismay, gathering more, making futile new attempts. She delights in the way her 

father comes to the rescue, helping her form small hills out of buckets of wet sand. A sandcastle takes shape as the little girl follows her father’s instructions, happy to build something she doesn’t yet know is destined to crumble.

The thing about grief is that your memory becomes impeccable. You remember his laugh, the echo of it more vivid in your mind than it was in life. You remember how he used to mumble under his breath, talking to himself about the countless things he had to do in a single day. You recall how his snaggle tooth would make an appearance every time he smiled, and how he would play a beat with his hands on the steering wheel to match the click of the turn signal. You listen frequently to Mohamed Wardi’s Al-Mursal because he used to play it in the car. You hold onto anything that tethers you to him. In an act of desperation, you begin making conscious efforts to say what you know he would say, to laugh and sit and walk like him. You save his poems and read them aloud to yourself. You have no interest in the news but listen to it in Arabic like he did because it soothes you. You make jokes like his, listen to his favorite Quran reciter, chew the Wrigley’s double mint gum he favored. You do all this so that when your memory finally fails you, you will have taken the necessary measures to never forget him. 

As you become more acquainted with grief, you have qualms with the notion of processing. As far as you are concerned, to process something is to churn it until it becomes palatable, to cut it up into pieces until it becomes easy to swallow. Nothing about your father’s death makes you want to process. The logical, adult side of your brain fights a constant battle with your inner child, the little girl who had built sand castles with her father at the beach and expected him to always be there, helping her rebuild what would inevitably fall apart. The adult version of you had seen and touched her father’s still body, had witnessed the moment his soul had departed earth. The child, who had no understanding of life or death — only presence and absence — was convinced that her

father was simply taking his time coming home. Maybe he’d gotten lost on the way, but he would come back. 

* 

He does not come back. This is unfathomable, as is the notion that time simply continues to pass, as though the world is normal. When you venture outside, there is no evidence of a war, but you feel the impact of the explosion. Buried beneath the weight of a thousand invisible boulders, you manage to survive. It is inconceivable, but at some point you stop crying yourself to sleep. You dream of him less. You stop looking at pictures of him so that the image of his face, which was constantly imprinted behind your closed lids, begins to fade. Miraculously, life dares to go on. 

A century passes, each day more agonzing than the one before. In reality, it has been two years. In these two years, you experience milestones, life-changing events, none of which seem to matter as much as they should. So much happens, and it feels like nothing has happened at all. 

The last time you went to visit his grave, it was after the Eid prayer. You stood in the shade of a tree and greeted him, offering du’a. Silently, you told him about all the things that he had missed as the breeze carried the scent of burning incense. You stood there as your father’s daughter, hoping that he had passed away without any disappointments or pain or regrets. You placed your hand on your chest to calm your traitorous heart, which was beating loudly, and pictured him laughing that snaggle-toothed laugh in his grave, his eyes set on a view of a house made just for him in heaven.