🌸Throughout the past week, thoughts about our mortality and how our life is flimsy have been darting back and forth across my mind. I am sure you are all blasé about descriptions of life being ephemeral and having to carpe diem… but that was not what was nagging at me.
I realized early during childhood that we are mortal. I must have been 9 or 10 when this happened. I don’t know what brought it on, that kind of digging might need a therapist or some hypnosis. But I do know that I had awoken from a nightmare where I was entombed alive and woke up being incapable to push the walls of the earth that was surrounding me. I knew I was screaming but that at some point, I had to accept that no one was going to save me from this dark place. I knew I was unable to fight the cockroaches and worms that will soon enter my crevices against my will and I knew that no matter how much I held my breath it was not going to change the inevitable. DEATH – La Mort as I thought about it in French at that time.
So when I woke up screaming with these horrible images of insects, serpents, worms and other things engulfing me while I felt every bit of pain they would inflict, I knew that I had to surrender and find some way to make peace with the concept of my mortality. That somehow of all the things on earth and in life, this was the ONLY truth. Believing in God was a choice but DEATH was never a choice. At some point, we never know when it will be our time to go, even if that time was suicide, it still will be our time if we die from it.
That was a terrible, terrible feeling for a child to accept, it coloured all my perception of life and what was important. I embraced my mortality but I could not accept that one day those I love will be gone, somehow they would be immortal as long as I was ready to leave life. I am not sure what was happening in my head but that’s the gist of it. A lot to unpack. The tradeoff was my life for those I loved. I did not realize that I had no power whatsoever to make that kind of commerce.
Anyway, all this intro just to say that the specter of death and its imminence never left my side so it was strange somehow to feel like these thoughts were crossing my head more aggressively, that there was like someone revisiting spaces in my memories and feelings. I kept wondering was it because I suspected I had Covid 19 and how 2 years of pandemic have linked it with death ? After all I had been suffering from related symptoms for 2 weeks despite 4 negative rapid antigen tests. Thoughts of Covid and death of course brought back memories of my dear friend Lubna who passed away tragically a year ago. When I looked at the date I realized that the first year anniversary was upon us. So I started thinking was this why I had the blues ? Or was it because of the still unresolved trauma of my mother’s death? There was just this nagging voice and this overwhelming sadness that was gripping my heart.Then thoughts of Lubna who was my high school friend connected with thoughts of another high school friend who was struggling and whom against all hope,I was expecting to hear of her demise at any moment.
Why was it important this specific week? My bestie and lifelong friend Huda Shalabi was a long time survivor of terrible illness. She was thriving for years and was doing so well, but in the last 3 months her situation turned for the worse with no warning. This time I knew she was not going to make it, I just did not know when and I hated feeling that way. I cried and though we had spoken and she had accepted her mortality too, I caught myself thinking about the old trade concocted before I was a teenager. I did not want to lose another friend, another guardian of the memories of growing up, one of the people who lived with you all the phases of life! We were too young for this “shit” to happen. We are supposed to grow into those old ladies and be crazy in our 90s with flowers in our hair and hearing aids!
I pushed away these thoughts and tried to embrace life, but I was not able to enjoy getting back to unmasking, attending events, going to restaurants with friends… it just did not seem real. The dark shadows were more real … Still I fought them by sending encouraging messages to Huda, not knowing if she read or heard them and wondering if those were for her or for me? When you don’t receive a response the messages taper down from daily to every few days to weekly. Then this Friday I received two messages about two hours apart from close family members, one was a voice recording stating that our Huda was gone and the other was a written short sentence stating “ to Him we belong and unto Him we shall return”. It concretized all the presentiments of doom I was having but at the same time I felt numb as I was expecting this message for a while. I felt horrible for this feeling of accepting mortality, of not being able to change anything about it for those I loved.
Huda was buried yesterday, but it’s been two days since she left this plane, I’d like to think she is in peace, with no pain anymore. Recalling my childhood nightmares, I have no way of knowing what’s in the other dimension all I know is that it’s the place where we will all go to and spend the longest time of our presence in the form acceptable there. I dream about it as a breeze, peace, quiet rivers and green grass.
It’s a tribute to how much I love my friend Huda, that the threat of her passing away brought so much intense feelings to me, feelings that were boiling in the last week which was the duration of her final struggle. Huda loved life and her family, she loved most of all her two sons and it must have been difficult to let go. But I am sure they will be ok after all their father is a good man and they were raised by an exceptional women.
The first time I met Huda she was 16 and she already knew what she wanted and the principles that she was never going to waver from. Huda was the wise one, the no-nonsense one, the one you go to for advice and who will give you the logical approach. She was fun and loved life, she was also a words craftswoman. I remember listening rapturously to the draft of her first novel when we were teens. I thought the hero she was describing so meticulously was hot. She never had the chance to publish that novel. Huda was no martyr, she made her choices and her life with eyes wide open, she chose her happiness and her family and was strong enough to stick to it. She used to tell me “you have to think of yourself too girl, not just everybody else!”. She would chide me for failing to do that, and I was looking forward to proving to her that in 2022, I finally was going to look out for myself! I am so sorry she won’t be here to witness that and that we will not partake in our daily conversations.
Huda had a tendency to mother me, as do a number of my other friends. That’s also something I need to think about deeply. But I will never forget how in her first year of marriage, every time I went up to London for a visit from my university I would stay in her home and she would make sure to cook my favourite Libyan dishes. I have been going over our photos in the past 3 months and there is so much we shared, perhaps one day her sons would like to hear how much their mum loves them and is a great woman or even look at our photos as teens their age.
The image that embodies all that was Huda for me will forever be the one on her graduation day from SOAS. Holding her son, supported by a wonderful husband and graduating with distinction. Huda had nailed the success story.
May you rest in peace my dear dear Huda Shalabi, you will be missed dearly now and forever.
