The first time my mother was diagnosed with cancer she was only 47 years old. That same year my parents’ marriage became irrevocably damaged, and while they continued to stay married and share a love that I did not understand, the romance of the relationship vanished forever. It was a sad thing because my parents, both with sensibilities of lost poets, were absolute romantics, and I think my mother never stopped yearning for the revival of her epic love story with my father. I have written about how she sort of just faded into the ether of death — one moment she was there and the next she was disappearing. In the act of disappearance, she remembered one name alone: my father’s.
The cancer she had at 47 wasn’t quite done with her and came back with a vengeance when she was 56. She fought it for 18 months, but in the end she was very much representative of the statistics. Mean survival with a Stage IV breast cancer diagnosis is 18 months — that’s how long she lived. When I went into her room after she was buried, I could see her everywhere. There was an unfinished article she was writing on her bedside table, a half-eaten date on a saucer, her water cup, the book she was reading, a diary in which she had written the household tasks for the week, her slippers cozy and inviting in one corner, the blinds raised slightly, the dull winter sun struggling to warm up the couch.
This poem is not about her death, however. It is about her fight to live. I wrote it when she was fighting the cancer for the second time. It is about her second battle, which I saw, and about the first, which I didn’t because at that time I was in the US and she was in Pakistan. I think she got used to everything in the end, the cancer, how it ate up her body, how she had to find new ways to fight it — but she never got used to the more mundane things: passage of time, her children growing up and moving away, her love dying before her, and so these lines remain my favorite:
It shocks you
still — the absence — when you wake up from dreams
of children when they were children yet, of love when it was love yet
