In my 8 years of blogging, first
privately as I shared family news with a selected private audience, then publicly sharing thoughts I wrote in English and in Arabic, this is the first
blog post I did NOT want to write. But here I am writing it because I felt I had
to.
Why am I doing this to myself? I
guess it’s because I fell in love with a boy who was 12 years old, and forever
will be. I fell in love with a boy I’ve never met, and I never will. I fell in
love with a boy called Jack. I heard about Jack during the first few months of
mothering my daughter. Those long days and nights that looked all the same as I
tried to navigate this new life with a toddler boy and a new born girl were
extremely lonely and I needed something, anything to help me survive.
My sister’s friend shared an article
from Momastery on her facebook page and that’s how I got to know Glennon, so I
started reading her posts which one day lead me to Anna’s blog “An Inch of
Grey” and the story of Jack’s accident. It was easy to do the math, Jack died
two weeks after my daughter was born. Later I’ll start hating math because it
revealed so much of what I had in common with Anna, only a decade ahead of me. In
the fall of 2011 Anna was 42 years old and I was 32. Her jack was 12 and my son
was 2, her Margret was 10 and my daughter was a few months old. We’re both
Christian, believers, church goers, and English teachers, veterans to be more
specific, neither one of us is teaching now (or was teaching 4 years ago) and I’ve
recently developed a love for painting furniture to decorate my gift shop/art
gallery Kharbashat-Doodle. Then gradually over the past 4 years my son seemed to have so much in common with
Jack. He too loves words, Legos, acting, jigsaw puzzles, and making up new
games. He is kind to his sister (also 2 years younger than him) and he loves
his Sunday School class as his love for God is starting to show and grow. Did I
mention how cute and funny he is too?
I mourned with Anna, I grieved with
her overseas. I wrote her a few e-mails and comments telling her that a Syrian
mother married to an Egyptian pastor is praying for her and sending her love
all the way from Alexandria, Egypt. Then when Anna posted a question on her
blog for readers to choose the best title for her upcoming book about Jack, I
clicked on the one choice that seemed to make most sense “Rare Bird”,
apparently many readers and friends picked the same title and the book was out.
When I started planning to ask my sister to order it for me and send it with
someone coming from the US to Egypt, I received a message from one of my American friends, Jessica, who is also a pastor’s wife asking if there’s a certain book I’d like her to
buy me because a guy from their church is coming to spend a few months in
Alexandria!
Jessica’s sweet gift sat on my night stand
for months. It wasn’t until last week that I decided to read “Rare Bird”, From the first few pages I knew two
things, I need an extra dose of courage to continue and I’ll end up writing
something about this book. I hated
it and loved it at the same time. Anna's writing style, the way she crafted words and sentences with both language skills and honesty was captivating. She took me with her back in time to the last few months of
2011 and to a brand new state not included among the five I’ve visited when I
went to the US in 1996, 2000, and 2001. I felt I was physically right there on September 10th 2011. I rarely cry when I read sad novels,
but this is not a novel, it didn’t even feel like a book at all, it felt more
like a movie, one of these 7D theaters in which you experience the story with
more senses than you thought you had. I was stupid enough to take the book with
me once as I waited for my son to finish his piano lesson, and I started
crying! I wonder what the other parents in that waiting room thought, she looks
like a crazy mother, she doesn’t look Egyptian, she’s holding a book in
English, we pity her son…. I don’t know and I didn’t care.
I received the book months ago, and
the timing I chose to read it was a bad one , we’ve just celebrated my daughter’s
4th birthday which meant that in a few days Anna, along with
everyone who knew and loved Jack will commemorate 4 years of his departure. I
couldn’t help but think that this year Anna turns 46, the same age her mom was
when she died. Why am I doing all these calculations and making all these
connections in my head? Maybe because I was looking for more and more things to
mark my family as DIFFERENT from Anna’s, different enough to feel safe!
As a Presbyterian Christian by
birth, I didn’t grow up to believe in signs, but I come from a Middle Eastern
culture that believes in luck and optimism. It’s also a culture that believes
in the evil eye and envy. In my family and at church we were raised to believe that our
future, luck, or destiny is guaranteed in God’s plan for our lives, so we need
to worry not. It’s easy to believe this and relax when you’re not a parent yet,
a mother to be specific, but when you grow up and discover the harsh fact of
life that bad things do happen to good people then you start to doubt your
faith. I’ve never doubted that God is good, but I’ve never had to face a tragedy
that shook me to the core and turned my world upside down. The war in Syria is the most recent tragedy I've experienced, with its ugly daily bloodshed and destruction, with horror stories of ISIS
taking over beautiful parts of my beloved country, treating humans in the most
savage of ways, left me bewildered and depressed. I mourn my country, a country
I used to visit twice a year but haven’t seen in almost 5 years now. Still I
count my blessings in spite of all the pain and tears. My uncles, aunts, and
first cousins are all safe and healthy, at least physically. My friends are all still alive,
my parents’ apartment, the only place I knew and called “home” is still there
in a relatively safe area in Damascus, so I can still dream of one day going
there and getting my photo albums, stacks of letters, journals and diaries. I dream about taking my kids there to visit their grandparents who will give them my childhood toys. When I get depressed upon
hearing more bad news from inside Syria or news about refugees abroad, I try to
re-count my blessings, which is easy sometimes because I don’t have a firsthand
experience of what my friends and family members have been through and are still enduring.
So when it comes to signs, I kind of
wish I believed in them. They would’ve saved me so much trouble making big
decisions in my life, like choosing my husband and moving to Egypt. And later it could’ve saved my
husband and I the hard weeks of making difficult choices regarding our kids,
life, work, and ministry. My husband believes that God gave us our brains, life
experiences, and the Holy Spirit to guide our decision making process. We
talked about it a lot as I shared with him my secret wish for a story like
Giddeon’s in the Old Testament with his wool fleece (Judges 6 : 37), but we
don’t do signs in our family, we don’t ask for them, we don’t look or wait for
them. Instead, we think, we pray, we consult experts, we give ourselves a time
frame, and we decide.
But yesterday, something happened,
it made me re-visit this area of not believing in signs. I was reading the Rara
Avis chapter of Rare Bird, specifically page 154 that has the poem Anna’s
friend wrote about Jack. I read the poem (for the second time because I had
read it previously on the blog) then Anna wrote about the time she posted this
poem on her blog and started receiving stories from all over the globe. “They
are amazing stories of birds catching people’s attention at precisely the
moment they think of Jack.”. My son sat next to me
as I read early in the morning, he woke up with the same severe headache he had
the night before due to his high fever. I gave him his medicine and he decided not to
go back to bed so we went to the living room and he started building something
with his Legoes as I grabbed my book and read.
Finishing the poem and the page next
to it I choked, I didn’t want to cry, besides, it’s too early in the morning to
start crying, my son is right next to me, a little sick but alive. So I thought I’ll smile instead, thinking of the so many people
who thought of Jack and saw birds. Then, all of a sudden, in the silence of the
6am Alexandrian morning I hear it, so clear and close, coming from our bedroom.
Our rented apartment is on the 11th floor and even though it overlooks the
golf field of the famous Sporting Club in Alexandria, it’s difficult for birds
to make it this high above the tall trees. I’ve seen birds by our bedroom
window often but not that often, and definitely not in the blazing heat of
August. The window is covered with a fine
metal net that doesn’t allow mosquitoes and other insects through.
When I heard the bird sing, I
grabbed my camera and walked slowly to the bedroom to try and take a photo
without scaring the bird away or waking up my husband. I knew if I took a good picture then this will prove to me that this sign is not a figment of my imgagination. The picture was bad and hardly showed any bird,
then the bird flew and stood on the rusty laundry bar I never use, I took
another picture, still with disbelief. Then I said to myself, if I can capture
the bird’s face looking right at the lence in my hand then I’ll believe. Much
like Thomas’ request upon hearing the story of Jesus’ resurrection. And here it
is.
Dear Anna,
Your book took me on a roller
coaster experience of reading such an amazing story about pain and hope. At
times I wanted the book to end so the story would end with it and I can walk
away and pretend none of it happened to you and it never found its way into my
life. At other times I read and read and never wanted the book to end because I
wanted to know more about Jack and to love him more, I wanted to know how you’re
doing years after the accident.
I found the book to be scary,
because it got me thinking that something might happen to my family, something
so sudden and tragic that it will leave me broken beyond repair. I keep
convincing myself that the real reason I’m reading your book is to help grieving people and as a pastor's wife to understand their struggles more. The
psychology courses I took in collage fifteen years ago are very helpful, but a
book such as yours written through the "perspecticles" (Glennon’s word) of a
Christian mother is definitely a priceless reference. But you’re not a case
study, and I’m not writing a term paper. It’s Jack we’re talking about, it’s
Jack we’re missing, and it’s Jack’s life we’re celebrating. So my Egyptian bird
came to remind me of that. Asfour Nader. “Asfour” (starts with the letter “ع” Ayn articulated from deep down in the
throat) means “Bird” in Arabic. And “Nader” means “Rare”, noting that nouns in
Arabic always come before adjectives.
The Rara Avis chapter was a
beautiful one, so beautiful I didn’t cry till the very end, instead I had misty
eyes, goosebumps, and a smile on my face. It made me love the bird metaphor even
more. A bird not a fish, for instant, because fish swim but birds soar. This chapter
was a milestone in the journey of reading the book, it gave me peace and comfort. One thing caught
my attention is the fact that there’s no English word for a parent who lost a
child, while in Arabic there is. It’s not a very pleasant word to hear, it
sounds bitter, more like a curse or an insult. It’s mostly used in the feminine
form for mothers and you can very rarely hear the masculine one for fathers,
the root can be used for losing an offspring or a loved one.
This year Margret is two years OLDER
than Jack. At the beginning of your new school year in the USA and ours
starting next month, I wish and pray for Margret to have a safe, fun, and
fruitful year, regardless of the painful math!
I worked as a part-time then
free-lance translator for over 7 years during which I kept contemplating the
idea of translating a book. But I kept shoving it to the back of my mind
convinced that book translation is for people above the age of sixty, so I still have 24 years before I start. I don’t know how serious I was when I felt that Rare Bird might just be
the first book I’ll translate, but what I do know is that it HAS to be
translated into Arabic Anna, please make sure you have Arabic on the list of
languages you’d like to see your book published in.
From the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, I'm sending you a huge THANK YOU. Thank
you Anna for every minute, hour, and day you spent, thank you for every tear you shed writing this book till
it saw the light. I think all Christian mothers should read it. It took one brave
bereaved believer mom to write it and it took me all my courage to read it. Thank
you for this journey you honored me to be part of, I’ve learned so much as your
words addressed specific fears and doubts I have in my own faith in Jesus. Not
only your book has nothing dishonoring to God (one among the many fears you
confessed), but it also brings glory to God. The God we all tend to put in a
box like you said you did, our little own boxes are as different as we are. But God
surely is bigger, greater, and more active than we can ever conceive. The most beautiful part of your book is what comes next, your story is a real and an ongoing one, I don’t have to wonder what will happen to the characters beyond
the book cover because you’ll keep us updated as we keep praying for you, Tim,
and Margret.
Shukran Anna.
Love,
Riham
