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.