Last Words

I read his books, his articles, absorbing every word in search of his identity, in search of mine. I run my finger across the page, desperately trying to grasp the meaning of each adjective, noun, and verb, craving his vast knowledge in the mechanics of a good story. His presence leaps from every molecule of black ink, and a familiar warmth cocoons me. I can almost feel the prickle of his peppered gray beard on my cheek, the sound of his voice floating through the telephone from a war-torn Middle East, the faint smell of Mediterranean spices imbedded in his wool scarf.

But how could I be attracted to the art that killed my father?

My mother watches as I write, often commenting on the way my brow furrows just like his did, how my adjectives carry an uncanny resemblance. Having known my father for years prior to my existence, she watched him develop into the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner he became. She knew the sacrifice and joy that writing was in his life, knowing that it was the only thing strong enough to take him away from her and me, his three-month-old daughter, and into the Iraqi war that ultimately led to their divorce, his life in the Middle East, and his death.

As a child, I remember a house in Silver Spring where the lawn was always manicured and the beds always made. A place where my mother and my father danced in the living room, spinning me around in their arms. A place where we came together, only to fall apart.

When smoke poured from the Twin Towers on September 11^th, it drifted through our TV and soiled the clean air around us, suffocating our suburban home. My father knew what this meant, he had to go. He was the only one who could tell the real story.

“There’s only one place that this will lead back to,” he prophesized to my mother, their eyes glued to the TV.

Unsurprisingly, he was right.

Off he went to the Middle East, returning a few months later with a hole in his left shoulder where the bullet of an Israeli sniper had pierced his skin, entering his back, and barely missing his spine. On the verge of paralysis, he described the sky in Ramallah that day as cemetery gray.

My father wanted us to go with him to the Middle East, pick up our life in Maryland and live as a family between war-torn countries. My mother wanted to pursue her career as an obstetrician, in the safety of the East Coast.

I cried for my daddy. I cried because at nine months old, I didn’t know where he had gone, I didn’t know when he would come home, and when he did, I knew it wouldn’t be for long.

And now I wonder: Is this where he would have begun the story of his death? Or possibly with the phone call from his boss ten years later, forcing him to travel to Syria, telling him that it was risky, but there would be people there to help them cross the border. A plan that quickly fell apart when a pack of dogs began to chase my asthmatic father and the photographer accompanying him, John. He wanted to rest, to catch his breath, but John urged him to keep going, they would be safe soon, so he did what he did best: pushed his limits, limits I imagined were infinite.

Maybe he would have begun with the last puff of his army green inhaler, describing his struggle to breathe in the dusty air around him, kicked up by their final attempt to escape the daunting howls of German Shepherds. The feeling of snakes coiling around each lung, slowly constricting each capillary until release was not an option. Grabbing his weakened heart, collapsing on the side of a dirt road, the imprint of his valiant body in the hard earth, John’s immediate efforts to perform CPR that would prove unsuccessful, the ratio of 30 compressions to two breaths, his chest inflating with empty air, deflating with despair. He would have illustrated his last breath in such detail, that it would be yours too.

When all hope was lost, John lifted my father’s body from the ground and over his left shoulder, just like Daddy did when I was a little girl. I would scream and giggle as the blood rushed to my head. “Sack of potatoes,” he called it, careful not to drape me over his wound. “Again, again!” I would beg.

John walked for miles, reaching Turkey with news that destroyed my world.

***

I believed him when he told me he was not going to die, when he told me not to talk like that, not to think those thoughts. At ten-years-old I grasped his words tighter than the computer I held on my lap, his unshaven, two-dimensional face staring back at me with love, pain and guilt. I believed him when he did not believe himself, sitting at the desk of a seedy hotel room in Cairo, a revolution exploding outside in the hot Egyptian air.

And now, less than a year later I was asking myself: How did I get here?

How did I get to the bathroom floor, screaming on my hands and knees, pressing down on cold tiles through inconsolable tears? How did I bring the phone to my ear and listen to my grandfather cry? How did I fall asleep that night? Was it to forget for a few hours? Was it for that moment of pure oblivion before my eyes opened and I remembered the truth?

He was supposed to Skype me that day and tell me about his trip to Syria. The villagers he danced with, the children he spoke to, the hospitality of the woman who offered him tea on her budget of a dollar per day. We were supposed to review the latest Arabic homework, Ms. Maha would be angry if I didn’t do the assigned reading and I knew I couldn’t complete it without his help. He still hadn’t heard about my latest project in fifth-grade science, Ms. Brown’s praise of my short story or the A+ on my math quiz, and now he never would.

Suddenly I was flying over the Atlantic, making the same trip I had made for the first-time last summer, except this time, he wasn’t there to point out Beirut’s clustered coastline from the tiny window above. This time, I couldn’t hold his hand as the plane touched down on the land below.

***

In Marjayoun, the sky was cemetery gray. The house he rebuilt stood just as I remembered it, made of the same stone my great-great-grandmother touched as a young woman before escaping to America, her hands the same size as mine. I walked along the garden he had loved like a third child, always returning to Cambridge with stories of a new harvest or a bag of olives for us to pickle. I stopped at my olive tree, almost my height now, and reached out to glide my fingers along its silky bark. Zeytoun, I whispered, repeating his words into the fragile leaves, the language of my ancestors rolling off my tongue.

He wanted to be buried under the fig tree.

It stood taller than the rest, towering over the garden at one hundred years old, stretching its arms out wide, protecting everything below. I took the shovel and helped dig a narrow pit to hold his ashes. It was hard to believe you could fit the biggest personality in such a small hole.

Moist soil was scooped onto the thin white bag until every inch of the bright cloth disappeared into senselessness. They placed stone tiles on the dirt in a perfect square, perfect just like him.

I kneeled down at the edge of his grave and let my tears wash the dirt from my ancestors’ stone.

“Goodbye, Daddy,” I cried, lifting my head toward the sweet fruits above. “I love you.”

***

Daddy used his words to say “I love you” back, write my birth announcement, and tell his ancestors’ story where his guilt was uncovered. He called for me to be in his articles, books, and stories, but the choices he made to be absent in my childhood did not allow for my presence. Each word he wrote pulled him farther away from me–across oceans, Bedouin villages, and ancient olive trees–but without them, he would truly be dead. Daddy wrote to tell me stories I could not understand then, to make sure I knew where I came from, to understand the Arab Spring, and most importantly, his legacy. Part of him died with every story, but each gave him a reason to live.

I understand now that he wrote for the world that I was a part of, the world that I would come to recognize as my identity. He wrote my world, he was my world, and now it is my turn to write for this one. I call for him to join me in this journey, to live through my writing and his forever, because how can you die without having said your last words?