An Architecture of Connection - Part 3: Grief, Mothers and Late Night Clues
Previously: My mother returned to Iran to be with my ailing father, while I was left searching for my passport—until a strange pull at 2 a.m. led me straight to it.
Read the previous post in the link below.
“Kayvan jaan, salaam azizam. Chi shodeh? (What’s going on?)”
The next phone call my mom made was to the hospital in Noor, the Caspian town where my dad was being treated. She spoke first to his doctors, then to my father. I was surprised by the tone of her voice. It was soft. Familiar. They hadn’t spoken in a while. Their relationship was in a confusing place—like many long partnerships, it had passed through seasons of distance and silence. But something in this call stirred old tenderness.
The whole conversation took barely a minute—he was weak and couldn’t speak much.
“Kami jaan, halet chetoreh azizam (how are you doing, my love)?” she asked. A short pause followed as she listened to my dad speaking. Her chin started quivering as she pressed the phone eagerly to her ear: “I’m coming home. Everything is going to be okay. Don’t you worry about anything.”
My mother hung up and turned to me. “Your dad was crying. He’s really scared.”
She was wide-eyed and still in shock, but her body, which had tensed when I first delivered the news, was softer now. Slumping into a chair, she seemed suddenly lighter, like something in her had settled.
A nursing instructor for decades in Iran, she had been preparing—half-heartedly—for her RN exam for months. English had always been a struggle, and lately she’d started talking about volunteering at the hospital instead of working there, more to feel useful than to continue her profession. I think this moment gave her a different kind of clarity: a chance to reunite with the man she loved, and to go back to her familiar life.
I hesitated, then asked anxiously, “Well, what’s going on medically? How is he?”
She sighed. “He’s in bad shape. Apparently, he waited to go to the hospital—of course, the idiot.” Her voice cracked with both worry and frustration.
If there were a manual on how to neglect your health, my father could have written it. He would gamble for days on end, chain-smoking in rooms already thick with secondhand smoke. To top it off, he had terrible sleep habits and zero exercise. Given his habits—and the smog in Tehran—a heart attack was more a matter of when than if.
“Apparently, by the time your uncle got him to the hospital, a good portion of his heart was already dead.”
I sat there trying to figure out what all this meant but too afraid to actually ask the questions on my mind: Is he dying? Can he get better? I could tell my mom was holding back.
“He has to have a bypass. His arteries are clogged up. A lifetime of smoking like a chimney will do that to you,” she said, choosing again to feel anger instead of fear.
I wish I could say I had an emotion other than confusion and numbness in the days that followed. As I was trying to internally figure out the proper way to feel about all this, my mom suddenly got up with absolute purpose and walked into the only bedroom in the apartment, fetched her suitcase out of the walk-in closet, and started packing. I followed behind her hesitantly and after watching her for a while from the doorway said, “What are you doing, maman?”
I had been excited about her moving to the US. What does this all mean now? Is the US dream over? You’ve been so happy. Is going back to Iran a short-term decision? What’s going on here? I knew the answer to those questions. I guess I just wanted to hear her say it.
She sensed me standing by the bed with a questioning stare. “I’m going to him. He needs me,” she said without looking at me. Despite being sad for her, I understood where she was coming from.
I spent the rest of the day securing her ticket back to Tehran. She left the next day, and I told her I would follow behind shortly.
There was just one problem: I couldn’t find my passport. I’d misplaced it during a recent move.
After dropping her off at the airport, I took the day off work and tore through the apartment, checking every possible corner.
Nothing.
Sad about my father and wondering for the 100th time why I couldn’t hold onto things like other folks, I went to bed believing that an answer would reveal itself by morning–only to wake up abruptly at 2 a.m.
I sat up in bed for a moment, confused, wondering what had woken me up. Something had stirred me awake. I got up to use the bathroom–because I might as well. But on the way back to bed, my body turned—on its own, it seemed—into the walk-in closet. I didn’t decide to go there. I just went, like I was being led. I reached up, pulled the cord for the light, and immediately looked down. At my feet were two boxes I was sure I’d already emptied. Nestled into each other. Waiting.
I bent down, without hesitation, and lifted the top box out of the one it was stacked inside—and there it was. My passport. Expired, yes. But unmistakably there. Like it had been waiting for me. A small, improbable first step home.
It felt like the first quiet click in a sequence I didn’t yet know I was following. I’ve thought a lot about how I knew where the passport was that night. I still don’t have an answer. I don’t know what pulled me into that closet at 2 a.m. Maybe it was memory. Maybe I dreamt it–which opens up a whole other can of worms. Maybe it was instinct. Or maybe it was something quieter—something that shows up when we stop trying to force a plan.
