Gratitude

Amidst all the sadness and separation anxiety I’ve been going through the past few days, there’s an overwhelming feeling of peace and gratitude. It’s as if I’ve started to understand the signs God has been sending me along the way.

It’s been one Aha moment after the other! The biggest one happened a few days ago when I suddenly realized that with every misfortune, God blesses me with guardian angels to fill my heart with more reasons to allow gratitude to outweigh feelings of pain and misery.  This thought has humbled me so much lately that I started to feel embarrassed to let pain take away this beautiful gift of unconditional love I’ve been so privileged to enjoy.

It has been a beautifully silent conversation with God that has revealed a new reality about acceptance. The minute you allow acceptance to find its way to your heart, you start seeing the signs more clearly.

With this Aha moment I started to go back in time to all the moments that I’ve missed and found the signs that went over my head. Putting all the pieces of the puzzle together has been a true blessing. 

First anniversary in heaven

Today is your first anniversary in heaven. You must be celebrating with the angels a new life of freedom. You must be flying like a bird picking up our random prayers with a smile. 

I have a feeling you were longing for the day the angels welcomed you to your new home because you barely visit our dreams. It’s as if you’re busy catching up with mom on the last nine years you spent in separate worlds!

I remember two days before you went away you looked at me and in total silence we had a long conversation. We said our goodbyes and you told me that you were going to be ok.

Deep inside I was happy to let you go in peace, but you have no idea how much I miss your smile, your face, your love, your presence, everything about you.  I miss holding you, and taking care of you. I miss arguing with you over when you can have your second cup of coffee! I miss your voice reciting the same prayer over and over and over again. I miss the sight of you siting on that sofa carefully sipping that second cup of nescafe with joy! I miss being your daughter who even during the hardest days when you could barely tell what was going on around you, still felt so safe and protected.  I just simply miss home, your home.

Letting go…

My next chapter has started…and as I was getting into the swing of things I realized that I literally opened a new page.

It is that simple and yet very complicated. When you think that your life experiences have given you control over the steering wheel, one incident or “a quiz” as a new friend has described it, can easily force you to put your life on hold. 

I was “paused” if I may say so, for quite some time. And when I was given the green light to walk again, I literally started running as if I was going to miss my train.

And what really prompted me to write this post was a thought I just had about letting go. What a difficult lesson it was to really understand what letting go of control really meant.

I will share a story I read in a book about a woman who was stuck in traffic.  In the rear view mirror she could see a speeding truck approaching her without any signs of stopping or even slowing down. She freaked out and held on to the steering wheel with all her strength. That is possibly the normal reaction anybody would have if faced with a similar situation. But as she could see that the truck was going to inevitably hit her from the back, she immediately decided to let go of the steering wheel and allow destiny to take its course.  The truck hit her car and she only suffered minor injuries. She later found out that if she had kept her hands on the wheel she would’ve died instantly. But because she let go, she allowed her muscles to relax and therefore saved her own life.  Letting go saved her! And I think this applies to everything we do. Assuming control over our life can really hurt us.

There’s so much beauty in life if we learn to let the universe do the thinking for us!

If we’d only pause and think of all the plans that never saw the light or the number of times we said I will never do this again, I think we’ll stop holding on to the plan as if it were the bible. 

When I experienced life in Beirut, I said I would live here for the rest of my life. I made a vow to myself never to go back to Jordan or Dubai. And guess what? I always tell that story, the angels packed my bags and sent me back to Jordan for almost two years and they packed them again and brought me back to Dubai.  And I can share a hundred similar stories about the many paths I never thought I would cross, and the beautiful people I never thought I would meet! Looking back, would I have wanted a different outcome? I don’t think so. I would’ve tweaked my plans to accommodate the same exact train of events.

All I can say at this point is thank you God for all your blessings and to all the good friends that have kept me sane throughout the difficult phase, I don’t want to imagine what my life would’ve been like without you in it! 

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My father is gone!

August 11, 2012 signaled the end of life as I have known it for the past nine years.  I look at my parents’ picture and feel at peace that both are together in heaven smiling down at us. But then I wish I could grab them both out of the picture and pretend they’re still here.

I’ve been at peace with my mother’s loss for quite sometime. But the minute my father took his last breath, all the painful memories were awakened within a fraction of a second. I felt double the pain and double the agony. I felt my heart stopped beating and I wished God would take me with him. I was holding his hand, trying to keep it warm and whispered in his ears that it was ok to go, but deep inside I was aching for him to stay.  I was screaming inside.

I kept taking mental pictures of every second with him.  The last few hours are so clear in my head, every breath, every prayer and even every teardrop.

I thought the separation would be easier but it was much more painful than I have ever imagined. It felt like someone has taken my baby away from me! I swear for a moment I felt like a mother mourning the loss of her child. I could feel the pain in my heart like someone has just stabbed me.

I had been mourning my father for at least five years and I thought I’d cried all the tears but it turned out that I haven’t. 

I look around the house and take occasional glimpses of his empty bedroom and think ‘how on earth am I supposed to move on?’ Life can’t go on without him.  He can’t just be another portrait on the wall! But he is now and will always be.

It was less than a month ago when I sat at his bedside, held his hand and thought this moment will soon be a memory. I remember crying in silence because I was worried he’d sense my anxiety.  I don’t know how many times I kissed his hands and thanked him in my heart for being the best father anybody could ask for. 

Even throughout the hardest times of his illness, when roles were switched and he was the child, he still managed to express fatherly love.

I keep getting flashbacks of the times when he’d be looking at me with love in his eyes, and despite the fact that he’d forgotten all the words, he still remembered how to say “my love, my soul, my heart”!

Those are the moments that will forever be engraved in my memory.

I still don’t know how the new chapter of my life would look like.

But I do know that life without them will never be the same.

Double the love

(This post was written on May 17 and I never got to finish it. But I just decided to post it anyway)

I’ve been having negative thoughts lately…a bad feeling in my gut and heaviness in my heart.

The thought of losing my father has always been part of our daily lives ever since he was diagnosed with brain tumor nine years ago. But when this thought started to take shape in the past week into a close possibility, it erased every single moment we’ve lived with the illness! It felt like he was just diagnosed.

Everything came back…the same fear, the anxiety, and the memories of the most difficult moments we had when we first found out about my parents’ illness all rushed back.

Until last week, I felt things were relatively under control. I don’t know what happened a few days ago, a strange feeling of an urgent attachment to my father took over.

I suddenly had a gut feeling to do anything he asks for even the things that aren’t necessarily good for him like unhealthy food or too much caffeine. It was as if a voice inside of me was telling me it was now time to let go.

It may or may not be time but the look on his face says it all. Although he can’t express with words his eyes are pleading for us to stop torturing him with routine!

And we succumbed without negotiation…I don’t know what happened but I felt that we were inspired to grant him his freedom.

I never felt this scared ever since we were faced with the reality that my father’s brain tumor was untreatable. I don’t know what to think or how to rationalize or come to terms with the possibility of anything happening anytime soon.

A million thoughts are thundering through my head. I suddenly feel guilty for every second I complained about my father’s symptoms or felt tired because of them. I feel guilty for sometimes thinking of him as a burden!

I can’t help it but lately my memory is taking me back to the different stages of my father’s journey with his disease and it’s tiring to think of everything we went through.  

I don’t know why this is happening to me but I feel that God has suddenly granted me double the patience and double the strength to carry on caring for my father with all the love there is.

I must admit that sometimes I look at my life in the past nine years and ask God why? Why did I have to go through all this? Why was I chosen among all these people to live the most vital years of my life worrying about loss? I lost my mother and lived all these years worrying about losing my father.

And the scariest thought is that sometimes I feel like I lost sense of reality and can’t physically identify with most of what happens to me and around me. I sometimes make believe that I was and still am watching a long movie.