Then, just as the galleys were printed, I learned that my birth mother, Aminah Abulhawa, was critically ill. We spoke for the first time in ten years. She was in a hospital bed unable to breathe well, but we saw each other on FaceTime, and her eyes smiled behind the oxygen mask when I told her I was coming to Kuwait to see her. By the time my plane landed a couple of days later, she was already in the ICU, heavily sedated, unaware of my presence or of her body’s struggle to hold on.

I had always wondered what that moment would feel like. But it was like nothing I had ever imagined. It was an immensely sad, lonely land, littered with shards of ancient hurt, ancient anger, the corpses of so many unsaid words and unanswered questions, and memories without stories—meeting my mother for the first time in 1975. I was five years old. She was beautiful, with long shiny black hair, silky olive skin, and groovy bellbottom jeans. A hot wind across my face coming off the airplane in Kuwait. Black marks on my white shorts from the luggage conveyer belt. Aminah said “I told you not to sit there.” A photo of a mother and daughter cuddled, smiling in bed. I looked happy. She did too. I was her first born, and her only child then. The others (five more girls) would come much later. No one in the family knew the abyss that bound us. They think they do, and they have their own narratives—bad daughter, wicked sister, a mother’s tough choices, and so it goes. The truth is that I would have liked to know her as a woman. She didn’t have it easy, thwarted by terrible men, first my father then my stepfather. I have always had compassion for that. But she and I could not cross that abyss. It was too big, too deep, too dark, though we both tried, teetering on its edges at different times.

Six months prior, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which I accepted. Then she sent me a message: “Hi.” Nothing more. I didn’t know what to do with it, and though I came back to that message many times, I never responded. I thought I had more time.

Her lungs couldn’t take one more cigarette and just stopped. Her other organs followed one by one. I watched in the hospital as edema slowly dissolved her wrinkles and restored her face to the smoothness of her youth. We looked so much alike. Everyone said so. Some people who hadn’t seen me in a while thought I was her. One of her grandchildren, a nephew I had just met, thought his “teta” was out of the hospital when he first saw me. I liked that, thought it was poetic.