Yaba,
I’m trying to replace the image of you on your deathbed. The oxygen mask fogging up your glasses. The fluorescent lighting casting a white shadow upon your once-tan skin. Your gray hair curling up at the ends by your ears.
How your chest rose and fell with each labored breath you took. How you held my hand so gingerly, like when I was little, lost inside of a store.
I want to remember you as I saw you back then. Tall and sturdy like the mulberry tree in our front yard. All dark, unruly eyebrows, and large, rimmed glasses. I wonder, did you wear them to have a clearer view of the world, or to hide from it?
I close my eyes and transport myself. A pin dropped on Google Maps, plucked from one place to another. I picture the little boy you once were. Diving off the cliffs of Akka. Fishing off those same cliffs for dinner. Smoking too soon. Acting in plays. Playing soccer with other shabab. High, chiseled cheekbones that would make any actress jealous. You, probably up to no good with a girl somewhere. Devilishly handsome with an easy smile. With a wanderlust that would take you across continents, always searching for home.
I fear that, if you were alive today, you’d die twice. Once, when the images from 1948 are replaying live and in color in 2023 and 2024 and 2025…and again, when you see the global inaction and cowardice among world leaders.
Your home is Palestine. It was everything to you, your greatest love and biggest heartbreak, the longest relationship you ever had. So deeply bound in your DNA, it became the lens through which you viewed the world and its bittersweet lessons.
“That’s life,” you’d always say. I used to think those words came from a place of bitterness, but with more years on my side, I now know they came from a place of resignation. A mantra for moving on, because staying still was never an option.
I am here again, by your deathbed. I have the Quran playing by your ear. I pray it heals you. My delusions—or my faith, I can’t tell which one—tell me you’ll recognize your favorite verse, crack open both eyes and spring out of bed. That you will be filled with life again. I see your chest rise and fall, rapidly now. Almost like you are connected to a machine, but the machine is you and God and no one else.
The light shines in from the crack in the blinds and it’s just after Duhr. I plead silently, with you, with God, with the voices inside my head, for you to stay just one more day. Is even that long enough? It will never be.
Kefaya, you’d say. Kefaya.
And it was.
Carmel Delshad
Carmel Delshad is a writer and communications professional based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked as a reporter, editor and producer in TV and radio/podcasting for many years. She is of Palestinian and Egyptian descent.