The cabin air is stale, and my limbs are stiff. I’ve only picked at the trays of food that have been placed before me, my appetite as thin as the atmosphere at this altitude. I reach over and touch Mom’s hand.

“I’m really glad you’re here with me.”

“Me too,” she says, a light rasp in her voice. She clears her throat and exhales slowly and for a second I wonder if this trip might be too much for her. The years are starting to show on Mom.

When the pilot announces that we’ll be landing within twenty minutes, I squeeze the armrest. My mind is flooded with my parents’ faces, with echoes of Faheem’s giggles, with the feeling of sitting in green grass with Neelab and Rostam. As the plane descends, I plunge deeper into a sea of memories. Images I thought had faded bubble to the surface. By the time the plane touches down and rolls along the narrow tarmac, I can barely swallow.

I concentrate on the muscles of my throat, trying to reverse this feeling.

As a first-year medical student, I spent a lot of time in the anatomy lab, two large rooms in the basement of the school. The thick steel door did little to contain the smell of formaldehyde. We were doing head and neck dissections when I stayed back one day to ask our anatomy professor a question I hadn’t wanted to ask in front of my classmates. We stood over my group’s cadaver, an elderly woman with one replaced hip and a hint of mauve nail varnish on her fingers. My classmates kept her hands tucked under the drape so we wouldn’t see them during dissections but I would lift the edge and let her fingers show when it was my turn to expose a new muscle or nerve. I thought she deserved to be known as a whole, not just the sum of her parts.

When people feel sad, they get a lump in their throats, I said. But what does that mean anatomically? What’s happening?

My anatomy instructor, Dr. Sinks, was a wizened woman who looked to be in her late seventies. She had stark white hair cut in a severe bob and was nearly a foot shorter than me. She presided over the dissections in a rubber apron with her gloved hands clasped behind her back. When something noteworthy was discovered on any one cadaver, she would climb atop a stool and whistle between her teeth to capture our attention. She was surprisingly cheerful for someone who spent much of her day away from daylight and in a room with the deconstructed bodies of her contemporaries.

Ah, the physiology of globus hystericus, she’d said. She plucked a scalpel and a probe from a set of tools on a nearby table. With a touch that was at once delicate and determined, she peeled back the layers of the neck.