For you Sana

For Sana Some days, I find myself thinking about the quiet spaces. The moments that don’t make it into conversations or memories shared out loud. The pauses in between busy hours. The stillness at the end of the day, when everything slows down and there is nothing left to do but feel. That’s where you are, Sana. Not in the noise of the world, but in the silence that follows it. I think about you in fragments. Not always in big memories, but in small, fleeting ones. The way you connected with people so effortlessly. The softness in how you spoke to others, especially those who needed it most. The patience you had, the kind that can’t be taught. You had a way of seeing people. Really seeing them. And I wonder if you knew how rare that is. There are things I wish I had said more often. Things I wish I had understood sooner. As a parent, you think you are guiding, protecting, preparing your child for the world. But there are moments—quiet realizations—when you understand that your child was teaching you all along. You taught me about kindness in its purest form. About empathy that asks for nothing in return. About strength that doesn’t need to be loud to be real. Sometimes, I try to hold on to those lessons in a very deliberate way. To live them. To carry them forward. Other times, it’s harder. Grief has a way of moving unpredictably—soft one moment, overwhelming the next. And yet, even in that, there is something that remains constant. You. Not just in memory, but in presence. In the way I pause a little longer with someone who needs to be heard. In the way I notice the quiet ones in a room. In the way I try, every day, to lead with a little more gentleness. You are there in all of it. I don’t always have the right words. I’m not sure there are any that fully capture what it means to miss someone like this. But I write anyway. Not because it resolves anything—but because it keeps you close. Because it gives shape to something that would otherwise feel too vast to hold. And maybe that’s what this is. Not closure. Not answers. Just a way of saying that you are still here. In the quiet. In the pauses. In me. Always.