Content warning: This piece discusses death, war, trauma and genocide.

Images: Courtesy of the author, years unknown.

I light up lanterns and wait for my friends,
They passed by, they left, I stayed at my door, all alone… 

– Talal Haidar

In December 2023, my father, who I call Baba, called me to tell me he was in hospital.

Baba had never gone to hospital. Baba was 85 years old, and was a flawless picture of geriatric health; the pin-up boy for the anti-nursing-home movement.

I asked what was going on. He said he’d been watching the news when he felt something happen. 

“Which news Bab?” I asked.

He went silent on the other end, before replying, “Ah you know, world news, nonsense, the stuff in Falastin.”

He said he felt like he couldn’t talk. His mouth felt funny, he couldn’t swallow or say words properly. At the time he thought it was a stroke of some sort. My heart sank.

The attacks on Gaza did this to him. It wasn’t a rational thought, but it was my knee-jerk reaction.

How did my perfectly healthy dad go from trawling the shelves of Aldi for new power tools and tech gadgets he would never use, to being unable to talk?

My sister and I had previously talked about hiding the news on my parents’ Facebook feeds so that they couldn’t see the violence coming out of Gaza.

To my family, the imagery was retraumatising: a reminder of the Lebanese Civil War we had survived.

It was the war where Baba had been forced to take up arms, and my Mama, at 27 years old, was crossing the road to buy milk during a ‘ceasefire’ and was shot by a sniper.

I can’t explain the horrors my family suffered in that war: the nightmares, the blood, the assaults, the loss and grief – but you can look at the stream of violence coming out of Gaza to see parallels.

I spent the next few days with my folks. They shared war stories.

We always shared war stories, but seeing the violence livestreamed from Gaza made sharing survival stories feel even more necessary.

The following Sunday was Baba’s 86th birthday.

He blew out the candles and declared he was driving himself to the hospital. He didn’t feel well. He was still unable to speak clearly or swallow properly.

At the hospital, we were told he had contracted COVID, likely on his previous visit to the ER. He spent six days in the ward.

I slept by his side on a recliner for all but one night: the night my mother was admitted. She had also contracted COVID.

I was worried Mama wouldn’t make it. She was the less healthy of the pair, battling cancer and what doctors referred to as “multiple co-morbidities”.

But I thought if Mama was there with him, albeit also sick, I could have a night off. I had COVID too with a raging fever, and I had been away from my child for a week. One night away would surely be fine.

Author and Baba, year unknown. Image courtesy of the author.

At 6am, I awoke to a call from a nurse telling me Baba was in the ICU. He had aspirated overnight.

The nurses came in to do their morning rounds and found him lifeless, having suffocated during the night. His face was blue when they’d walked in.

When I went back into the hospital and saw him – the man my family looked to for care, comfort and comedy – he was laying lifeless with every part of his body plugged in, tubed up and tied down.

From that moment, I became a hypervigilant bundle of anxiety.

My family’s trauma already put me on edge when it came to matters of grief, loss and death. These experiences have been passed down from survivors of war.

Endless feelings of responsibility, guilt and dread filled every part of my body. I had to sit there by my parents’ sides. I could not leave them for a second. I spent weeks wandering the hospital between their two floors. 

For the first time in my life, I took up some prayer beads and spent countless hours whispering pleas to the powers above to save my creators.

I sat there watching them, while consuming news from Gaza. 

I watched doctors begging for assistance in Al-Shifa Hospital. I watched in horror as staff were forced to abandon babies in the intensive care unit at gunpoint, told the babies would be sent to a hospital and cared for.

I watched the footage as they returned and found the babies dead, starved to death in their cots.

I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. I was filled with rage. I was plagued with guilt knowing we had escaped war like this.

Now I sat watching in horror from my father’s bedside, as I kissed his cold hands and wandered the hallway to kiss my mother’s forever-warm face. 

Christmas passed, but there was no Christmas.

We had already said we would not celebrate any Eid until there was a ceasefire, but now it was cemented with our own suffering.

A week later, the hospital staff called my family to my father’s bedside. We sat around him, we kissed him, we sang to him, we talked to him.

My mother came down from her ward and wailed. She was crying, and begging him to get up, to try, to move his hand – anything, just for her.

His heart rate slowly dropped as we listened to his favourite song ‘Wahdon’, which is a poem by Lebanese poet Talal Haidar, sung by singer Fairuz.

Oh time of the age, of the weed’s shadow on these walls
From before, when trees became tall
I light up lanterns and wait for my friends
They passed by, they left, I stayed at my door, all alone…

The mourning did not begin with the loss of my Baba. Mama still needed care, now more than ever.

She was discharged from the hospital two weeks later, a widow having lost her best friend. Someone she had shared her life with. They had rarely gone a day apart in 59 years. 

I still have not mourned. I cannot mourn yet. I am too filled with rage at the world. I’m enraged at the injustice and at the guilt of survival.

It has been eight months since this latest slaughter in Gaza began. I know it is irrational to blame the genocide for the loss of my father, yet I hold deeply how much it affected him that first night he went to hospital. 

I do not believe my father ever really processed the loss and trauma he experienced from the war he lived through.

It took him in the end. I don’t know if I will ever be able to mourn, to heal, to forgive.

I don’t think a ceasefire will bring me peace, just as previous ceasefires did not bring my family peace. 

I sit with knowing the effect this will have on the people stuck there, the Palestinian people, for years to come, and the children that will sit by the bedsides of their parents in 40 years’ time. 

We are connected in a deep communal grief that will never leave us.