My beloved mother, I began writing this piece in the first month after your passing.
I gathered my words and my pain to pour into this text, but my tears would choke me, and I’d close the file.
I came back to it two months later, then six, then again at the end of the year, but I still couldn’t finish it.
Each time I returned to it, I carried new burdens, new grief, and new tears as the war wove itself into our lives, adding sorrows.
One time, I opened the file crying, between joy and heartbreak, with news you had waited so long to hear: A ceasefire had been announced. But you were no longer there, and I closed the file that day, too.
Now, I gather my strength to write this on the first anniversary of your death.
Eulogising our loved ones is not a choice, it’s a form of preservation.
A war without your prayers
Can you imagine, Mama – the war stopped, only to return with even more force?
Today marks 570 days of it.
The killing, bombing, and displacement weren’t enough for them. Now, people are dying from hunger.
How can I explain that, as much as I miss you, I’m relieved you don’t have to see these unimaginable days?
In our family home in the north, there’s only half a bag of flour left. They guard it fearfully and try to make it last. The canned food is running out, and the struggle to find food is daily.
I can imagine your agony if you were calling us now, worrying that we are starving.
Many have starved to death, and thousands are lining up at charity kitchens and communal food stations. The crossings have been closed for over two months, with food, medicine, aid – all banned by Israel.
Mama, my tears defeat me often, my fear that this war will go on even longer without your prayers, your constant prayers for our safety and protection, which I say every day now.
Life is hard, and while some things can be endured, war without a mother’s prayers seems especially unbearable.
Mama, I went to our family home in the north. The whole house was burned, shattered – except your room, your clothes, your things.
We gathered them and keep them like treasures that still carry your scent. We prioritise them in case, God forbid, we have to flee again.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about your last days in the ICU, how I struggled to stay on my feet, distracting myself with work.
But that was a false escape. This is the conclusion of a year of grief.
Illness, displacement, and loss in war
My mother passed away on May 7, 2024.
That morning, we woke up to images of tanks storming the Rafah border crossing as the Israeli assault on Rafah started. The one way out of Gaza was blocked; we were trapped.
Then, like a thunderbolt amid the darkness of that day, came the news of my mother’s death in Egypt, five months after her medical evacuation there.
We wept, for her and because we, like thousands of others, were paying the price for simply existing in this besieged land.
We were denied a final farewell to the one we loved. Denied a funeral, denied burial, denied condolences. All we could do was weep and pray.
My mother suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a severe respiratory illness. She needed an oxygen pump, an electric one, which meant any power outage was life-threatening.
Since October 7, it felt like we were living through multiple wars. Electricity was cut off at the start of the war, generators gradually stopped working, and the healthcare system was collapsing.
We moved her around in Gaza City, from our family home to my brother’s house, then to my aunt’s.
Regardless of relentless Israeli strikes, she needed the same thing: a place on the ground floor and a reliable power source, like solar panels. But just as she settled, Israeli orders would come, expelling people to the south.
So we went to my grandfather’s house in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza. We teased my father that he had made a “strategic” decision marrying someone from the south – otherwise, our displacement would’ve been even harder.
But the bombs followed us. An expulsion order was issued for a house next to my uncle’s and we ran, carrying the oxygen tank and propping my mother up.
The crises came one after another: contaminated water that hurt her kidneys, a shortage of gas to cook for her, medicines running out, then we ran out of electricity for her oxygen pump.
She would struggle through nights when the electricity was out, trying to breathe until the sun rose and the solar panels could work.
The oxygen tank became my brother’s and my daily companion – we took it to Al-Aqsa Hospital to refill until the hospital announced it had no fuel and could no longer operate its oxygen stations.
The only solution was for Mama to leave Gaza through the patient travel lists – any way possible.
We did everything to get her name on the list, with my sister Mayar as her companion, and miraculously, it worked and she left on December 6, 2023 – in an ambulance with a permit to cross the border.
I said goodbye to my mother, and that was the last time I saw her. I cried that day, as the ambulance drove away, worrying it might be the last time.
We didn’t realise that illness wasn’t her greatest enemy – it was the fear and psychological torment caused by the war.
In every call after she reached Egypt, her face and voice were pale and shaky, the result of countless failed attempts to reach us due to network outages that lasted days.
We tried to tell her not to worry, that we were alive.
But asking a mother to ignore her overwhelming fear for her children and grandchildren living through genocide is impossible. She spent her days glued to the news, grilling my sister for news, especially about Deir el-Balah.
For her, I would sneak up to the hospital’s roof to get some network on my eSIM, hide behind water barrels near the dangerous eastern border, and message my sister: “We’re OK. Tell Mama we’re OK.”
And her voice would come back like a lifeline to a drowning soul, thanking God and begging us to be careful.
She would tell me not to go to the hospital, not to put myself in danger.
We walked long distances to connect to the internet near a hill by the sea, moving left and right to catch a signal just to send the same message: “We’re OK, Mama. Don’t worry.”
We’d send her pictures, and when the signal was strong enough, we did voice calls.
But the world around my mother in Egypt moved in one direction, while she moved in another – her heart, mind, and soul still here with us.
Survival drenched in fear
It wasn’t the illness that killed my mother, it was heartbreak, distance, and worry that exhausted her and stole her will to live.
My mother died with only one wish in her heart: That the war would end, and she would see us again, alive and safe. But death was nearer than that impossible wish.
Mama, in a few months, the war will enter its second year, and it only grows more brutal.
The days have become heavier in your absence.
Every day I stood before the bodies of victims at the hospital, watching people break down at the news of their loved ones’ deaths. I watched their tears, their screams, their final goodbyes.
Sometimes, I envied them, they at least got to say goodbye, as my heart wept for them and with them.
Mama, we, the tormented in this land, are in a free-for-all festival of death.
Yesterday, Mama, they bombed a school full of displaced people. In a moment, they killed more than 30 people.
The world has grown used to our mass deaths on live broadcast. But who said we’ve gotten used to it?
Mama, there is no rest, not these days, and not in those to come.
How can we continue living when we are dying slowly? The only thing that comforts us is that those who have gone are finally at peace.
That death, as cruel as it is, is more merciful.
Mercy to your soul.
And patience to our hearts.
