For Sana: Another Year Without You

For Sana: Another Year Without You As the year comes to an end, we are encouraged—almost compelled—to say goodbye to it. To welcome the next year with hope, resolutions, and grand expectations. A new year. A fresh start. A quiet promise that something will be different. But for me, it is simply another year without you, Sana. I don’t know what I am supposed to welcome. I don’t know what I am meant to feel grateful for. The calendar turns, but my grief does not follow its rules. Time moves forward, yet my heart remains tethered to the moment you left. I am writing this from a hospital again. My mother is in the ICU. The steady beeps of the monitor fill the room, each sound familiar, each one pulling me back in time. Her creatinine levels are rising, and with them, memories I did not ask to revisit. My body remembers before my mind can reason. Trauma does that—it collapses time. This space feels too known. The smells, the sounds, the waiting. I am once again a mother who has lost a child and a daughter terrified of losing her own. The roles blur. The fear settles in my chest. People speak of gratitude at year’s end. Of lessons learned. Of strength gained. I don’t know if I have words for that yet. What I have instead is pain—raw and unfiltered—and a quiet endurance that I did not choose but have learned to live with. Sana, another year has passed without your laughter, your presence, your winter joy. Another year of carrying your absence into every new beginning I am told to celebrate. If there is anything I can offer this ending year, it is honesty. I am still here. Still breathing. Still loving you fiercely. And some days, that has to be enough. The new year will arrive whether I am ready or not. I will step into it carrying you, as I always do—not with resolutions or promises, but with love that refuses to be measured by time. Always.

Holding Two Roles

For Sana: Holding Two Roles I am writing this from a hospital room in Mumbai. My mother is here because she fell and needs surgery. The lights are harsh, the air smells familiar, and my body reacts before my mind has time to explain. Trauma lives in places like this—in corridors, in waiting rooms, in the quiet between updates. Today marks 18 months since you left us, Sana. And today is also Maahir’s birthday. I am carrying too much at once, and yet I am still here. That is how I know I am coping—even when it doesn’t feel like strength. I am a mother who has lost a child. And I am a daughter sitting beside her mother, trying not to let fear show. Coping does not look like bravery. It looks like breathing through the hospital smells without running. It looks like sitting still when memories rise. It looks like allowing numbness to arrive without judgment. I’ve learned that when the brain is overwhelmed, it cushions the shock. It slows feeling. It chooses survival. This is how I cope now. I don’t force clarity. I don’t rush meaning. I let my brain do what it needs to do to keep me upright. Trauma has taught me that learning, understanding, and healing come later—only after safety returns. There is sadness in me today, and there is also love. There is fear for my mother and longing for you. There is joy in celebrating Maahir’s life and ache in knowing you should be here beside him. These emotions don’t cancel each other out. They coexist, uneven and heavy. As a mother, I carry the unbearable grief of losing you. As a daughter, I carry the quiet terror of possibly losing my mother too. So I cope by being gentle with myself. By allowing the numbness to protect me when the weight becomes too much. By remembering that this is not failure—it is biology. It is a nervous system doing its best to hold what the heart cannot yet process. Sana, you are with me in this room—in every memory that rises, in every breath I steady, in the way I now understand pain with deeper compassion. I carry you as I sit here, loving upward and downward at the same time. I am a mother. I am a daughter. And I am learning, slowly, how to survive being both.

For Sana

For Sana Today, I received a sweet message from my cousin. He spoke about how much he appreciated my blogs and praised the writer behind them. The writer he admired wasn’t me — it was Sana. I smiled while reading it, holding both gratitude and ache at the same time. This trip to Mumbai has come wrapped in contradictions. There is joy in seeing family, in familiar faces and shared laughter. And yet, there is sadness stitched into everything. Too many memories of Sana live here. Every street, every shop, every routine feels like walking through Colaba again — except this time, she isn’t beside me. There is an unassuming ache that follows me everywhere. A quiet loneliness. I can’t do the things I once did when Sana was alive. Even the simplest moments feel altered, as though the world has shifted slightly off its axis. I feel disconnected from many people here. Not out of judgment, but observation. They are evasive when it comes to Sana. They don’t ask about her. They don’t ask how I am. Maybe they are scared — scared of reopening wounds, scared of saying the wrong thing, scared of my pain. But Sana was my reality. Speaking her name doesn’t break me. Silence does. The world moves on, they say. And maybe it does. But the immediate family stays exactly where it is — suspended in the moment everything changed. My mother was once my biggest support. Today, because of her age and early-stage dementia, she doesn’t know about Sana. Sometimes I wish I could put my head in her lap and cry the way I once did. But that comfort, too, is no longer available to me. So I hold it all inside. This feeling — this quiet accumulation of love, loss, and longing — is what inspired my LinkedIn post: Home is where your children are, not where you were brought up. Maybe, silently, I was hoping for acknowledgment. Not sympathy. Just recognition of the pain that travels with me. That acknowledgment didn’t come on this trip. And that’s okay. Grief doesn’t always need an audience. Sometimes it just needs a place to rest. This blog is that place. For Sana.

She lives in our dreams

She Lives in Our Dreams Sana comes to us in our dreams every day. Not summoned by dates or anniversaries, not tied to an occasion or a memory that demands attention—she is simply there. As if she never left our minds. Idris dreams of her too. It feels as though she lives with us still, woven into our waking hours and carried with us into sleep. Dreams are made of memory, and sometimes they feel unbearably real. In those moments, she is close enough to touch, close enough to forget—just for a breath—that absence exists. I choose to believe this is her way of reaching us, of speaking in a language beyond words. It is the only thought that steadies me: that love does not end, that it finds new ways to remain. This Christmas arrived quietly, carrying both tenderness and ache. Serena and Maahir had their first Christmas tree, its lights glowing with new beginnings. And yet my heart wandered back to Sana. She loved Christmas. She loved winter—the sparkle of lights, the rituals, the sense of celebration that filled the cold with warmth. It was never the extravagance she cared for. The simplest joys were always enough. I hold one memory with gratitude. Sana had always dreamed of celebrating Christmas and I am glad she ticked it off her bucket list. She spent that Christmas with Ritika and her family in Italy standing beside a tree, exchanging presents, wrapped in the joy of a season she cherished. That knowing brings a quiet, bittersweet peace. Grief does not always roar. Sometimes it drifts in softly—through dreams, through holiday lights, through moments meant for celebration. Sana lives on in those spaces. In our memories. In our dreams. In the love that continues to shape us, long after everything else has changed.

When the world caves in

When the World Caves In: Understanding What Sana Felt There are moments when grief presses so hard against the chest that the entire world seems to cave in. The air feels heavier, the colors fade, and even the simplest joys lose their shape. Lately, I’ve been sitting inside that feeling—a hollow quiet where happiness doesn’t live anymore. It is a place where everything feels overwhelming and empty at the same time. And in that darkness, an ache rises: “This is what Sana felt.” Those words break me open. Because when I fall into this space of helplessness and hopelessness, I’m not just feeling my own pain—I’m touching a shadow of hers. I’m beginning to understand the weight she carried, the exhaustion she hid, the silent battles she fought while trying to show the world her bright smile. But there is something about Sana that I hold close: she was honest. Honest about her sadness, her fear, her tiredness, her confusion. She didn’t pretend to be okay just to make everyone comfortable. She told me, in her own ways, how hard it was to live inside her mind. And I admire that more than I can ever explain. I wish she had never felt this way. I wish she had known that this heaviness was a temporary storm, not the truth of who she was. I wish she had felt safe enough—supported enough—to share even more. And I hope that someday, talking about these feelings becomes normal. I hope people can say “I don’t feel okay,” without shame or fear. I hope we create a world where honesty about mental pain is met with compassion instead of silence. This is also my reality now. Therapists tell me that feeling helpless, hopeless, and empty is a natural part of grief—a reflection of love and loss so deep it can shake your sense of self. Sometimes it feels unbearable. Other times, it feels like a fog that I can’t see through. And yet, I am learning that this is not weakness—it is a sign of how profoundly I loved, how deeply I mourn, and how slowly I am navigating a world without her. Today, as I move through this hollow place, I carry her with me. I see her not just as my daughter, but as someone who was fighting a relentless internal battle that no one fully understood—not even me. Writing this is not about drowning in sorrow; it’s about honoring her reality and acknowledging mine. Pain like this doesn’t mean the world is over. It means the heart is speaking in a language of loss, love, honesty, and longing. And maybe—just maybe—by naming it, I can slowly begin to rebuild a world where light can return, even if only one small flicker at a time.

The poser

The Girl Who Always Knew Her Angle Sana was such a poser—and I say that with all the love in the world. She would hand me her phone, strike a pose, and make me take twenty pictures, minimum. And after all that, not a single one would be “good enough.” She always had a very specific image in her mind, something only she could see, some perfect angle or expression she was chasing. Every time, she would look at the photos, shake her head dramatically, and say, “Mom, you are terrible at pictures.” And every time I would laugh and say, “I have no idea what you want!” It became our little routine: her directing, me trying (and apparently failing), both of us rolling our eyes in our own ways. What I wouldn’t give now for one more chance to try again. One more afternoon of her posing, fussing, and telling me I was doing it wrong. One more moment to stand behind the camera while she created the image she saw in her heart. Today, I yearn for her to be here so I can take as many pictures as she wants—hundreds, thousands—every imperfect one of them perfect to me. This is for you, Sana. My beautiful girl who always knew exactly how she wanted to be seen.