by Halloween has come and gone. It is my favorite festival in America. Grown-ups get to be kids, and kids get to be themselves. No questions asked. They go door to door, and even the most reserved of people open their doors to them today.
Yet Halloween will always also bring sadness because of what I vividly remember thinking last year.
Uzma used to love Halloween. Mainly for the joy on the faces of all kids — not just our own. She would always go to our kids’ Halloween event in school. She looked forward to accompanying the kids when they went trick or treating. Last year she felt too weak and tired to go.
After being out for one hour with the kids last year, I remember thinking, “Two years ago, Uzma was with our kids the entire time. Last year she went for only about thirty minutes and then wanted to go home. This year she couldn’t come at all. I wonder…” I didn’t want to finish that thought. But I knew what I feared. She made it to 92 days after that.
This Halloween, I could find only one of our Halloween decorations. Though I was the one who put all of them away last year, it was my first year doing that. I couldn’t even find the kids trick-or-treating pails. It didn’t turn into a disaster because Gauri agreed to take a cloth bag, and Shuja decided to skip trick-or-treating altogether.
It snowed three inches on Halloween. It was cold, wet, and slippery. Shuja said, “I don’t want to be miserable out there. I would rather not go.” We barely had ten kids come to our house. Typically, the homes in our neighborhood, with its arrangement of smallish houses with small yards, attracts tons of kids. But I guess snow-covered jack-o-lanterns and Halloween decorations are uninviting.
The tradition in many Indian families is to not participate in festivals and celebrations until after the first anniversary of a loved one’s death. The kids look forward to Halloween so much that I had decided that we will make it an exception. But it felt today as if the gods didn’t want us to celebrate too much either. They were the same gods that made the night of Uzma’s passing the coldest night in Chicago in decades. I know I shouldn’t personalize a natural event, but that’s how it felt today.
Halloween also happens to be the last day of Breast Cancer Awareness month in the US. Last year, it was also the eve of Uzma’s book launch. Uzma deliberately chose Nov 1 to launch her book. She said, “Breast cancer awareness doesn’t end on Oct 31. For us, survivors and our families, it is a hard daily reality. I want to launch my book outside of the awareness month.”
She would have loved to see the incredible reviews her book gets. She would have loved to go on tour to promote it. She would have been impressive at it.
Halloween was when I first realized that she would not get to do any of that.
It will always be a fun festival. And a bittersweet one. Forever.
Left Boob Gone Rogue 
Thank you, as always, for your informative and often beautiful posts. Keep going…we need your voice.
Warm thoughts to you, Dheeraj. No more words to portray this other than it is; deeply sad and painful, and the bleakness of the weather echoes this. I pray that, though the hurt and grief will go on – perhaps in new evolutions and manifestations – that spring will come again, and even something beautiful will be revealed in the depths of your winter. But for now, I wish you some warmth to steady you in this grief. The kindness of family and friends; the care of strangers; and Uzma’s love, which is still part of you.