Life Expands: Random Thoughts Remembering Uzma

What if Mom Were Alive

The kids and I were at our local swimming pool on a hot summer day a few months ago. The scent of chlorine and sunscreen swirled around. My daughter found some friends and was enjoying splashing around with them. My son and I sat in the shade of a tree. We started chatting about all sorts of things. Friends, hopes, dreams, summer activities, travel plans…life. At one point, the talk turns to Uzma. I ask him, “When you go over to your friends’ homes and see both their parents, do you ever find yourself wishing that mom was here?”

My wife Uzma, – his mother and the creator of this blog, had died of metastatic breast cancer over four years before. While I tried my best to be a good solo parent, I know it’s not the same as growing up in a two-parent home. And two-parent families are the norm among my kids’ closest friends. While my kids are not the jealous type, I have often wondered if they see the glaring difference between their friends’ families and ours and feel something missing.

He didn’t respond immediately, sitting with the question for half a minute. It felt like several minutes. The laughter and splashing of kids in the pool started sounding louder. It all quieted down again as he said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I miss Mom, but I don’t know how to answer that question.”

“I am listening.”

“So much of our life has happened without her. It is impossible to imagine what it would be like if she were still alive. Who would I be if she had been with us these last few years? Wouldn’t it depend on whether she was sick the whole time or well?”

That would make a big difference, I thought. I recalled how our life shrank as cancer grew in Uzma’s body. We withdrew our kids from most activities outside school. We socialized less. All our trips became impromptu as we couldn’t really count on being able to stick to any plans.

“I don’t think about her day-to-day. But I often think about her when I am sad,” he continued, “So much has happened that it is even hard to imagine how our life would be if she were to suddenly come alive today and plop right back into our life.”

Life Goes On

When people die, it seems like a cliché to make the observation that ‘life goes on.’ When you’ve built a life with someone, it’s hard to imagine how life could go one without them. It feels profane to even try to think about it. But life goes on, not because of one big thing, but millions of little incidents, decisions and memories.

Our kids have now lived about one-third of their lives – our son, a bit less, and our daughter, a bit more – without their mother. In these five years – over 1800 days – we have made countless memories without Uzma. Meals, after-school activities, birthday parties, movies, vacations, game nights, conversations, holidays, walks…. So many memories. So many decisions. All without Uzma.

At first, whenever faced with any decision about the kids – when they should have a smartphone, for example – I found myself thinking about what she would have said based on talks we had had. But as time went by, I realized I was on my own. There were so many decisions about kids that parents don’t talk about ahead of time because we don’t assume one of us will die before facing that decision together. Often, talking aloud with each other brings us to conclusions distant from where we begin. Without that, one has to figure things out on one’s own and process things with other trusted voices.

Life goes on…but with a twist. When grief suddenly resurfaces, it is raw and biting.

The Bouncing Ball of Grief

A few years ago, a Twitter user shared the bouncing ball analogy of grief. Imagine a box that represents our life. A ball inside that box represents grief. There’s a red button on the inside of one of the box’s walls. Whenever the grief ball touches the red button, it causes immense pain and sadness. In the immediate aftermath of a loss, that ball is enormous, occupying almost the entire box and pressing the red button at every attempt to move.

In the original analogy, over time, the ball grows smaller. It bounces off the walls of the box of life without hitting the button as frequently as before. But when it does hit the button, the pain and sadness are just as intense as they were in the beginning.

While the analogy resonates with me, I think the ball does not change in size. It only appears smaller because the box grows with all those countless daily moments of living life. Life goes on.

Memory Is Recorded, Then Built

A friend told Uzma, in what was to be her final year, “Make videos of yourself for your kids. Leave little messages for them about your hopes and dreams. Tell them you love them.” Now and again, I wonder how our memories of her would be had she followed that advice.

With the wondrous devices that our smartphones are, it is all too easy to make such videos memorializing oneself for loved ones. Uzma could have created hundreds of videos allowing her to choose how our kids would remember her. But she never made a single one with the explicit goal of helping shape the kids’ memories.

“I want the kids to build their memory of me, not receive frozen memories as inheritance,” she said.

While our memories may begin as mental recordings, they eventually become stories. How we see ourselves and how we want to see ourselves shape the details we remember, misremember, and simply forget. The warm feeling accompanying nostalgia depends on forgetting our past’s bad and sad parts. This selective forgetting is a feature, not a bug, of our mind. As opposable thumbs make our species infinitely adaptable in the physical realm, our tendency to shape our memories makes us versatile in the emotional sphere, allowing us to live well in the present instead of dwelling in the past.

Uzma wanted our kids to be adaptable and resilient. She believed that those videos would get in the way of them being able to shape their memories of Mom. She didn’t want to be a ghostly presence telling them things from a time and emotional space that would no longer exist. And so much about our world changed since she died.

Sometimes acquaintances ask our son, “How’s chess?” He tells them he no longer plays chess. He quit not long after Uzma died. He also quit playing the trombone. But now, he runs for his school. He has board game nights with his old friends. But he has new friends whom Uzma never knew, with whom he does other things that bring him joy. He has Uzma’s knack for cutting to the chase and speaking from his heart.

Our daughter, who has Uzma’s memory for faces and love of art, picked up the trumpet after Uzma died. She, too, has new friends, with whom she has various shared interests. She sings. She plays basketball. She used to be scared of dogs. But she is now the closest to the goldendoodle we welcomed into our family just before COVID. And that dog brings so much joy to our home.

Life expands. Life goes on.

Yet, She Lives

When someone becomes part of your soul, you don’t have to miss them every day to remember them. This is even more so for kids who have lost a parent after having built memories with them. Uzma comes up in conversations in our home about all sorts of things. About foods she used to cook, things she enjoyed, the wisdom she shared, where she worked, how she lived, how she died. Once a year we go online together and make a donation in her name to the local cancer charity where she volunteered.

David Eagleman says in the book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

This past summer, Iqbal, a wise and affectionate friend, invited us to dinner. As we were about to leave, Iqbal, who also knew Uzma, hugged the three of us and reminded us, “You know, as long as we speak her name, Uzma lives among us. So, let’s speak her name together.” The four of us looked to the sky and roared as loudly as we could without bothering other diners at the restaurant, “Uzma! Uzma! Uzma!”

And just like that, she lives.