Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel
The morning my mother died, I felt a second pulse low in my belly. Not only grief. A faint pull that almost escaped notice. Outside her hospital room, I watched the doctors trying to bring her back. One of them said there wasn’t a choice to be made. The words fell heavy. Paige and Meera came to help me pack her things: the beige beret she had knitted and worn even in bed, her shoes, the house keys, the half-finished pack of Tic Tacs in her coat pocket. Meera and I Googled “Muslim funeral,” we had never been to one and now I had to plan one. The air still carried the faint scent of her Crabtree & Evelyn lotion under the sharper smell of antiseptic. I moved as if underwater. Every object seemed to resist being lifted. I held the beret for a long time before Paige gently took it from my hands. On the drive to her place, I said quietly, “I think I might be pregnant.”
We stopped at a small Shoppers Drug Mart near her house. I bought a test and carried it in its thin paper bag as though the paper might split and the secret spill out. Back at her place, I took the test. We stood close together in her narrow bathroom. A faint line appeared. “If it were me,” Paige said, “I’d read that as not pregnant.” I didn’t argue. I just kept the thought tucked close, like something fragile I wasn’t ready to set down. That night I pulled on her fleece leopard-print pajamas, the ones I would wear for days, and lay down in her bed. My phone rang over and over. I didn’t answer. I turned it off and slept under warm, unfamiliar sheets.
Before she died, my mother had made the only cousins we had in the city promise to help with her funeral. She hadn’t told them she was sick. Sitting beside her body, I called them. Her address book was a narrow strip of paper, each number written in her tight, slanted script, the ink pressed so hard it almost dented the page. As if she could leave herself there for me to find later. They agreed without hesitation.
The calls began almost immediately. My cousin said, “Please try to pick up. There are so many questions.” It wasn’t until she was gone that we realized how much of her life, and ours, we had never asked about. They didn’t know her birthday. Even now, the burial record lists her as being in her eighties, though she was seventy-one. The days after her death blurred into a series of phone calls and decisions: flowers, prayers, the coffin. I felt split in two, half of me pulled down by loss, the other half tuned to a quiet hum inside me. At night, in Meera’s guest bed, my hand would drift to my stomach without thinking. I told myself it was too soon to imagine anything. But I imagined anyway: a summer afternoon with you in it. My mother’s face softening at the news. Her voice lowering to the register she reserved for babies. That night Paige’s husband drove me to Meera’s. They gave me their son’s room. I told Meera and her husband, Peter, that I thought I might be pregnant. “If you want to get a test, go ahead,” Meera said, “but I’m exhausted.” I waited until morning.
I kept thinking about how care travels through hands. The hospital room had been full of machines, but what stayed with me were palms and wrists and the way someone steadies another person without ceremony. At Meera’s, I washed my face and saw my mother’s motions show up in my own—short, efficient circles, water cupped and thrown toward the cheeks. I tried to picture how it would be to hold a child and not immediately reach for a form to fill out, a number to call, a policy to interpret. I wanted a life made of small instructions nobody wrote down: warm the milk; tuck the blanket; sing once more, softer this time. In the mirror I could see the tiredness pooled under my eyes, and under that, something I refused to name in case I scared it away.
The next day I crossed the street to the big Shoppers, the one where I’d worked in college, ringing up toothpaste and mascara until my feet ached in cheap black flats. This time, the line appeared clearly. Positive. I showed it to Meera. She let out a startled “whoa,” and I wasn’t sure if it was good or bad. Peter gave an exuberant laugh as though he was cheering when I told him. “You knew,” he said. And I did. Meera explained that if she seemed quiet, it was because of the timing, and the thought of reincarnation.
Birdie. That’s what I called you in my head. I never said it aloud. I imagined you in the quiet moments between phone calls, while choosing flowers for my mother’s grave. I pictured introducing you to her, imagined her teaching you the lullabies she sang to me, her palm resting on your back. I carried you to the funeral.
In Toronto, as a Pakistani Canadian daughter, I learned that grief speaks through the mosque, the clinic, and the body. In the small women’s room of the mosque where the washing ritual took place, my mother’s body lay wrapped in white. The elder women bent over her, pouring warm water in slow arcs. Rose water filled the air. Steam rose from the cloth. Their hands moved with the ease of long practice, their voices steady and low. My aunt touched my shoulder. “Beta, come closer.” I picked up my mother’s hand. It was the same shape as mine, only older, the veins raised like strong roots. I washed it gently with a warm cloth, tears blurring my sight. I imagined you there with us, smaller than a seed. I pictured her holding you while I slept, your tiny hand curled around her finger, her voice carrying the language of my childhood.
When we lowered her into the ground, the air was sharp with cold. My breath rose in small clouds. The frozen earth rang when the shovels struck. I couldn’t keep my hood up against the wind. I pressed my gloved hands to my stomach. You and I, still hidden. I told myself to wait until spring to tell anyone. I pictured us in the park, sunlight on your face, my mother in the shade.
Then the pain began. A dull ache on my left side, sharpening by the hour. I tried folding laundry, making tea I didn’t drink, staring at the pile of mail. Nothing eased it. My first ultrasound was scheduled for that day, but I already knew something was wrong. I walked, hunched, to the clinic. The technician said nothing. Grief and pregnancy took turns steering my body; the clinic decided which one was allowed to speak. She moved the wand, looked at the screen, then looked again. “Can you see anything?” I asked. She didn’t answer in the way I needed. She handed me a stapled set of papers. Instructions: go to your doctor now.
My doctor read the notes, then looked at me. “It’s ectopic. You need to go to the ER immediately.” I asked if I could go home first. He shook his head. “Go to Mount Sinai, not St. Michael’s. It’s where I’d send my sister.” At the hospital, a nurse asked if the pregnancy was wanted. I nodded and started to cry. I wanted to tell her how much, but my voice caught. “My mom just died,” I said instead. I begged the surgeon to try to save my fallopian tube. In Toronto, it was standard to remove the tube during ectopic surgery, but I clung to the hope. I gripped her arm, crying, please, so I can try again.
In surgery they tried, but the tube had already ruptured. One fallopian tube. One baby. Both gone. To medical waste, I thought. I thought of you with my mother, as if you had gone to her. When I woke, my belly was still swollen. My body still behaved as though you were there. My hands kept drifting down to cradle what was gone, tracing the bandages.
At my mother’s home, where I would spend the next three months, the world felt tilted. I walked slightly to the side, as though my body still adjusted to your weight. The house was too quiet, yet full of you both. I had lost one-third of the blood in my body when you left. All I could do was sleep and cry. TV shows were too much, even the elimination rounds of terrible reality TV were too much. So I slept and I cried. I caught myself sleeping with Mom’s faux fur white blanket, the one I brought from Target in L.A., pausing at the sight of her things, smelling the rose lotion and thinking, for a split second, that you were both still here.
Recovery emptied the days into bowls. Morning was gauze and pills. Afternoon was the walk from the bed to the couch and back, a pilgrimage across six soft steps. Friends dropped groceries on the doormat and texted hearts instead of questions. I learned the practical math of loss: how many stairs before the stitches pull; how long the kettle takes to boil if you lean on the counter and breathe slow; how to open the mailbox without bending, reading condolence cards in the hallway because the light there felt kinder. The hospital sent me home with a packet explaining what to expect. It did not say what to do with the sound of the washing ritual in your ears, or where to put a positive test you can’t keep. I kept it in a kitchen drawer between the elastics and the takeout menus. I opened the drawer every day to check that it still existed, to feel their edges, proof that it happened.
Grief rearranges a person. Losing you so soon after losing her felt like being struck twice in the same place. My mother and my child. Both wanted. Both gone. Some nights I press my palm to my belly. In the dark I feel her hand press back. As if she has you now. As if, somewhere beyond this, we are still together.
Lalaie Ameeriar is a Pakistani Canadian writer and Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto. Her work explores care, grief, and the everyday politics of the body across hospitals, homes, and bureaucracies. She is completing a monograph, Carry Me Gently: Maternal Harm and the Afterlife of Care. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in venues including Rogue Agent, Cultural Anthropology, and Signs. She lives in Toronto with her daughter.