After her operation, Umma, despite the tubes of blood running out of her stomach, would get up from her bed at a certain hour and sit on the edge of it. She would light a candle on the nightstand, bring her hands together, and pray for over half an hour. Folding her stomach and legs like this could not be good for the recovery of her surgical wounds, but she insisted on repeatedly mortifying herself. After her prayer, she propped up the meal table of her hospital bed and copied verses from the Bible. Her obsessive transcription was like an ascetic practice. I suppose that instead of crying and screaming about her misfortune and ripping out her hair, she had chosen the method of copying out Bible verses, carefully pressing down the letters into the notebook with her ballpoint pen. That was the only penance that my mother, who had tried to refuse anesthesia, could achieve, and her transcription felt like a kind of breathing, almost.

A letter inhaling, a letter exhaling.

This act of breathing and writing struck me as being similar to the passion that ailed me at the time. Had it really been a passion for someone? Or a passion for the person I became when I was caught up in someone?

That was, in a way, a bottomless passion for me.

A passion for loving Jesus, for throwing oneself wholly into the act of living. That was, perhaps, the feeling I had toward my guy at one time, a feeling of giving myself up to something, an energy I was never a minute away from; perhaps it was something close to religion. To let oneself fall into complete darkness, a kind of faith.

I once discovered her sitting in this pose, unaware of her urinary catheter being dislodged. It made me so mad that I shouted at her. “What were you doing, do you think praying is going to change anything at all, how can you think this bullshit can help you in the slightest?”

Umma often used the word “miracle.” That a fellow worshipper at church had transcribed the entire Bible in a thousand days and had been granted the miracle of healing. That she herself would also experience this miracle soon. The miracle hadn’t happened to someone she knew personally but to the deacon’s nephew’s wife. For Christ’s sake, the deacon’s nephew’s wife? Such a miracle seemed as unlikely as peace between Palestine and Israel. Umma added that she was not necessarily wishing for a miracle, she just wanted to have lived a life that the Lord considered beautiful. The only thing I could do was to call the nurse, against her stubborn refusals, to reinsert the catheter and change the sheets on her bed.