This piece is part of the “Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart” series, a project inspired by the work of Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer (1996).

I heard the phone ring in my sleep. I turned over, thinking it was a dream. It stopped. Started again. I looked at the clock. It was 3 a.m. Drifting into consciousness, I realized what this meant.

This was going to be our end.

I jumped out of bed and blindly made it to the phone. “Hello, hello,” on the other end. “I’m a resident at Mount Sinai, I’m so sorry, your mom’s heart stopped, they’re trying to revive her. Can you come?” Or at least that’s what I remember. Whether there were mumbles, pauses, anxiety, guilt, on the other line, I cannot say. I hung up and, through punctuated sobs, pulled on clothes. I ran out into the street, looking for a cab in downtown Toronto. It was deserted.

I ordered an Uber. The driver appeared and I told him it was an emergency; he drove fast. I don’t remember getting to the hospital, but I remember running down the wrong end of the hallway. Too many people. Some curious, some bored, some excited. My mother’s body, half hidden behind a wall of scrubs.

This is where grief begins: not as an abstract category, not as something we study, but in the body. In the shaking of my hands. In the way my chest tightened until I could hardly breathe. Renato Rosaldo (1993) famously wrote about grief, admitting he didn’t understand the rage of mourners until his wife died in the field. I understand that admission now. The difference is that my grief was not in the field, not in the company of interlocutors who might have helped me make sense of it. It was here, in the hospital corridor, in the bright mourning room, in the solitude of academic life.

It was embodied grief, and it was lonely.

This is what I want to hold onto: the way grief registers through muscle, breath, skin. Anthropology too often erases that knowledge or contains it in footnotes. The university leaves us alone in solitude. Loneliness is not just a feeling; it is institutional. The solitary job talks, the endless travel, the estrangement from kin in service of careers. Grief exposed the texture of that solitude. My mother’s death showed me how profoundly alone I was in this profession, how the very structure of academic life conditions us to face loss without support (Ahmed 2017; Berlant 2011).

I pulled off my coat and threw it on the chair. A nurse turned to me and said words I couldn’t make out. A man came out of my mother’s room. He was the doctor, all I heard was murmuring, like I was in a movie, someone else’s story. I looked at him, unable to keep my composure. “Are you asking me to make a decision?” I asked. No, he assured me. There probably wouldn’t be a decision to make. They had been trying to revive her for close to 45 minutes and it wasn’t working. I looked in the window but could barely see her body. It was hidden behind the doctors and nurses. I recognized one of the interns from earlier that day, the one who made me wear a mask. A young Asian Canadian woman; she looked excited to be in on the action. When she later walked out of the room and made eye contact with me, she looked guilty.

The doctor went back into the room. They stopped. I knew what it meant, I had already known. They filed out, slowly, my mom’s body remaining on the bed. A doctor turned to a junior, “what could you have done better?” Mistakes were made. My mother was still wearing her beige hat that she had knit. When she had been admitted to hospital, she resisted changing into hospital clothes. The hat had stayed.

They led me to the mourning room. I walked around the corner instead, wondering what they had to clean up. I could hear them asking about me. I wasn’t hiding, but I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I leaned against the wall with my hands behind me, wearing pants and a striped sweater that I would later throw away. I stood there at 4 a.m. in an empty hallway, wondering what kind of life I had built, that I was standing alone in a hospital waiting to see my dead mother’s body.

People say the deceased look like they’re sleeping. I didn’t see that, she looked like she was dead.

In the aftermath, I would lie in bed and rehearse what I would say to the people who treated her badly: her doctors, old friends, family that didn’t visit, my father, prior colleagues. No one was safe from my trapped rage. The people in airports I bumped into who called me a bitch while I was running to catch flights to make it to doctor’s appointments. The Air Canada flight attendant who dressed me down for wanting to keep my carry on with me, not knowing I didn’t have time to collect luggage. The all-women-of-color bachelorette party that snickered and talked about how I took up too much overhead baggage space. I often imagined telling them I was preparing for my mother’s funeral. I was in hell.

This was rage that traveled with me through airports, classrooms, hallways, and the institutional spaces of academia that had no room for it. Grief became a kind of embodied ethnography, my body staging its own rebellion against what the academy expected me to perform. The loneliness of standing in that hospital corridor at 4 a.m. became inseparable from the loneliness of an academic life, one where care, intimacy, and grief have no sanctioned place (Behar 1996; Ahmed 2012).

My mother, Farhat, in Pakistan—before the hospital corridors that reshaped my grief. Photo by Lalaie Ameeriar.

Stage 4 cancer, 1-year prognosis. She would last 4 months.

I lived in Santa Barbara then, my mother in Toronto. Whenever I came home, our routine featured her favorite band, Queen. She liked to tell people she’d been the first Queen fan in Pakistan, where she grew up—also the Beatles, also the Rolling Stones—but her true devotion was to Freddie Mercury. When he died, she wore two black wristbands for weeks.

I’d throw open the door and sing “mooommmaaa” from Bohemian Rhapsody, and she’d answer instantly, “just killed a man.” Then together, “put a gun against his head…” It was absurd and perfect. Music stitched us together across distance, across illness, across the years.

I didn’t understand how advanced the cancer really was. Maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe no one told me. What I know is that I would never see my mom again in her prime. Our small traditions —the long walks from her downtown apartment to the Eaton Centre, shopping bags on our arms; lunch together; sometimes a movie—were over without our knowing. That first visit after the diagnosis, we arose from a late night of talking and I asked if she wanted to walk down to the Eaton Centre. She said sure, slowly getting ready. Putting on lipstick, always lipstick first. She set the lipstick down, sat back down on the bed. “Let’s go another time.” We never did.

Grief lives in the body like small memories under your skin, the rituals replaying themselves. Even now if I hear Queen come on the radio, I imagine it’s her saying hello. Grief is not abstract. It is muscular, cellular, a rerouting of the nervous system (Rosaldo 1993). And for me, it was compounded by the distance of academic life—Santa Barbara, Toronto, airports, deadlines, book launches. I was always arriving too late, always negotiating leave, always writing on borrowed time. This is grief as embodied knowledge, yes, but also as professional isolation. Anthropology asks us to witness the lives of others. Yet when our own lives fall apart, who bears witness to us (Behar 1996)?

She would get up at night and call out in pain, “Huyyy Lali help me.” She refused to take the opioids. There was non-stop news coverage about the opioid crisis in Toronto and she was afraid of becoming an addict. She was treating stage 4 cancer with Extra Strength Tylenol. I would beg her to take the meds and she tried for a few days, but they made her loopy. So she stopped, retreating to the comfort of Tylenol. Good for the heart, she would say.

One night I was startled awake by her cries for help. She had trouble standing, let alone walking, so she clutched the walls for support. She wouldn’t let me call her an ambulance. She wanted a cab. An ambulance, she remembered from my childhood, would cost $50, a cab would be less than half that. If she had articulated that I would have had the chance to say, “For god’s sake, I’ll pay for it!” But her desires were so entrenched; she might not even have known their origins. We pulled on outside clothing. I had her two Tylenol wrapped in a Kleenex. I hailed a cab. Mom couldn’t sit up; I sat in the front so she could lie in the back. “Huyee, Lali, I’m dying,” she called out. The cab driver, hearing her Urdu, pressed harder on the gas. It was the middle of the night. I had been away so long, I didn’t know where to go. She didn’t want to go to St. Michael’s, so we went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai. The whole time, she was calling out for help. “Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” The driver asked me. “She wouldn’t let me,” I told him. When we arrived, I pulled out my credit card, and the driver brushed my hand away. “No, I have a mother, too.”

On what was going to be her last day, Dr. D. looked at me and said, “She looks really sick.” I fucking know. Do something. “Tomorrow we’ll start testing,” she said. “Could be a blood clot.” She left. A little while later, a young South Asian resident came in. There was a test they could do, but it would require a needle in her wrist and blood drawn. I held my mom’s other hand. She had been drifting in and out of consciousness all day. Sitting up at one point, and making eye contact with me, she said, “Something’s really wrong.” All day she was moaning, “Huyeee.” I supported it. I encouraged it. She told me moaning made her feel better. “Moan all day, moan as loud as you want,” I told her. Needle in, didn’t find her vein. My mom yelled in pain. Then accused the woman in Urdu of doing it on purpose. Needle in again, didn’t make it. Mom yelled again. The woman looked at me with pity. I blurted out a laugh. I couldn’t help it. It was so surreal. My mom had started calling the woman a liar. “Chute, chute,” she said. Another laugh. The woman smiled at me sadly.

Later when we were home, on what would be one of our last nights together, she was asleep. I was in the living room, quietly crying because her decline was faster than I could accept. I wiped my face and went into the bedroom. She was sleeping on her right side, facing the door. Radio murmuring, lights off. She liked pop music, always. I crawled into bed and spooned her. We weren’t a touchy family. She recoiled from hugs. Even when I came home, we’d do a half hug, a kiss that sometimes missed. Now she was small, fragile, except for the grotesquely swollen belly where the cancer lived. It was eating her.

I startled her. In a dream state she whispered, “Who will you hold tight at night?” “What?” I said, lifting my head She repeated it. “Who will hold you tight at night?”
“What?” I asked again. She paused, softer this time. “Never mind.” Then she slipped back into sleep.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.

Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press.

Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Beacon Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.

Rosaldo, Renato. 1993. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Beacon Press.

Lalaie Ameeriar is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University whose scholarship traces the intersections of racialization, medical institutions, and maternal loss. She is the author of Downwardly Global (Duke University Press) and is completing a second manuscript on maternal harm and the afterlife of care. Her academic work appears in journals such as Signs, American Anthropologist, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and her creative nonfiction has been published in Rogue Agent and Ricepaper Magazine.