The following was written in summer 2024

My last maternal uncle died yesterday. He was the last one of the children of my Gido (grandpa) Hussein and Teyta (grandma) Amina, besides my mom. This feeling I am sensing is called grief, and I am examining it, working through it with my bare hands, to try to understand it, as I write this piece.

I can only imagine what my mom is feeling. Death is never commonplace, but my mom has seen her siblings, her own elders, and some friends pass over the years. I am sure this does not make anything easier. My Khalo (uncle) Bahaa, though not perfect, still connected her to her own immediate family that grew up with. 

He was in pain, people say to make themselves feel better about the death of our loved ones. This I understand. I understand the desire to make this, the eternal journey into the great dark unknown into something more positive than it is. 

But what about our pain?

I have found myself a bit listless today. At some point, between doing things in my home, I found myself paused in the hallway, between our bedrooms and the living room, looking downwards, like a robot that encountered an error. I found tears in my eyes.

I have things to do today. Nothing major. Mostly computer work and a few errands, and a few people I need to get back to people about a few things. Some are really simple and easy, quick five minute tasks. But I feel clouded, confused, and this complex feeling that we have given the simple name of “sad” to.

I remember when my uncle was young. He was the brownest of my mom’s siblings. Actually, he was the only one who looked like my grandmother. He liked to dress well. He had an old pair of Raybans that he had brought back to Egypt after his brief time living in New Jersey in its Egyptian corner and he continued to wear them for the rest of his life.

He cut his hair short and slicked it to the side even while it turned white. He was handsome. I know this because I thought he was handsome, but also because during the brief time I lived in Egypt after UC Berkeley—and somehow a bunch of my friends from college were doing the same thing—my friends met my Khalo Bahaa and were all enthralled with him.

It was during the time we were all waiting for our train back to Cairo. My friend, Ahmad, ventured to a stand in the train station to buy some food, and khalo went after him, reclaiming the rest of the change the vendor had kept from him with a few words that I imagine resembled something like, “dude, give me the kid’s money.” 

He was wearing the Raybans that day. “He’s really handsome,” Ahmad commented. 

During that time all of my friends called my Khalo Bahaa “khalo,” meaning maternal uncle. This affection and bond came from my foreign friends and Egyptian friends alike. Even my friends who were born in Egypt were intrigued by him. To me, khalo symbolized joy and fun. He could get on the phone and just shoot the shit with my 7-year-old cousin and had a way of talking, even seriously, that made him feel like a character in a retro movie. When he was young and healthier, he liked to take me and my brother to eat roz bi laban, traditional Egyptian rice pudding, in Bahari, the neighborhood of Alexandria that houses Qat Bey, the western most part of the city along the sea.

In retrospect, I wonder if everyone was enthralled with Khalo Bahaa as me, or if they just mirrored my own excitement to be around him.

For me, I lost my uncle, it’s true. I am acclimating to this new reality where I have no maternal aunts or uncles anymore, and that is hard. But I am also acclimating to something else.

I have contemplated what it means to be an Egyptian-American who emigrated to Mexico, what that will mean for my children and their connectivity to my homeland of Alexandria, Egypt—I have also contemplated what that would mean for myself. I don’t know Alexandria like the back of my hand like my parents, though I am glad I had that year abroad there after college to try to get to know it.

I sometimes imagine that one day I will go and no one who connects me to the land will be left to tell me about it or our family that led to my existence. With my Khalo Bahaa passing away, this is a lot closer to being reality than it was just a few days ago.

What will my connection to Egypt be moving forward?

I imagine myself as a daisy that was plucked from a field of daisies and planted in a desert. Regardless of my survival as a daisy alone, what exactly does it even mean to be a daisy in a desert?

The truth is, I don’t really know. My children will be half Egyptian, a quarter Italian, and a quarter Venezuelan. By nationality, they will be 100 percent Mexican, and most likely, they will mostly feel Mexican, and will eventually teach me nuance in the culture, history, and language that I can’t currently know without having grown up in this society. They may not mind not feeling Egyptian or connected to Egypt. I will have a classic experience of being an immigrant parent to children who are not immigrants. And no matter, I will continue to be 100 percent Egyptian even if I no longer have family there to prove it, which is an experience my kids will not share with me.

What does it mean to be a daisy in a desert?

The truth is, I think I’m going to find out. I am not excited about it. I love being Egyptian. Just today, I was conversing with an Algerian friend, Meliza, who is currently vacationing  at Villefranche along the Mediterranean. We both talked about how, despite being born in the US, when we are on the Mediterranean, we are in our natural habitat. 

Everywhere along the Mediterranean is my home, and as an Algerian, it is hers too. I asked her if she could feel the presence of her ancestors while along the sea. “It’s funny you mention that,” she told me. “Every time I come here I feel my parents. They send me messages that I pick up. Sometimes it’s aromas, but most times it’s music.”

I am sure more memories of my uncle and the people that came to make me myself will flood me over these next few weeks, but today I remember the meals we shared in my uncle’s home, which was previously my grandmother’s. I remember my uncle’s living room filled with members of my family, my cousins who I would play with, sometimes even an occasional visitor from my dad’s side would join in the colorful evenings with my mom’s family. On those evenings—those were some of the rare moments growing up in which I felt like I had a family. In which I felt like I belonged to something bigger than myself.

But I also belong to the Mediterranean Sea itself. The sea is my mother. I imagine the water itself birthed me.

“I always think when I am by the sea. I hope you feel the presence of the people you loved and love today. We are both the drops of the ocean and the whole, and that is why I love the water,” I told Meliza. By the sea is the place I feel the most seen and the most whole. Especially on the Mediterranean. 

The human body is up to 60 percent water and I wonder if that is why it is so calming to us. We are the water and the water is us. We are water no matter how far we go from it. We will always be water.

I put a box of feta cheese from Costco in my UberEats cart last night so when I received the order after my mom told me Khalo Bahaa had passed, I had forgotten that I had ordered it. We mainly eat three types of cheese in Egypt: gouda, parmesan, and feta. This crumbly Costco feta is a far cry from the kind we sell in Egypt, which comes in a large, wet block that you can buy by the kilogram.

My parents prepare feta the way their families did. First they crush it, then cube tomatoes on it, douse it with olive oil, stir it up, add black seed on occasion, and then eat it with pita bread. My parents did this because I assume they saw their parents do it, and my uncle’s family would serve this in the morning. Dishes would be shared, the bread both serving as bread and spoon. There’s a specific kind of way to hold the bread which I never quite got right, but I think my style is acceptable nonetheless. I am me and I am Egyptian so it is an Egyptian way to hold the pita bread.

The box of feta cheese caught me by surprise when I pulled it out of the bag, and yet, I somehow knew what to do with it.

Today I found a painting of a daisy for sale at a cafe I’ve never been to here in Mexico City.

I didn’t have the right tomatoes, but I cut up the cherry tomatoes I got from Costco as well and put the crumbly feta cheese on them. I doused them with olive oil. I had no pita bread to make a pita bread spoon so I ate it with an actual spoon. Egyptians, my family included, think everything can be eaten with spoons.

It was almost at that moment I realized that from now on, my Khalo Bahaa will still be here, right here. In the very fabric of my being, of my existence. In my heart.

 “You know mom, someday I’m going to die. There’s birth, life, and death. That’s how it works,” Meliza told me her son told her in a way that made her take stock, not of her own life, but of her father’s. This was something her son seemed to know instinctively, not just as a concept, but word for word, as something her father had told her when she was a child. 

“Sweetheart, I’m going to die someday,” her father said, “I’ve lived a beautiful life, and I’ve had the privilege of being loved, especially by you. Death is a fact of life. There’s birth, life and death. That’s how it works.”