Year Three - The Silence Continues

I find solace in imagining that somewhere beyond what I can understand, my mother is still watching over us. Maybe she can see Lila growing up. Maybe she can still witness fragments of our lives unfolding. But regardless of what exists beyond this world, I still have to continue moving through mine without her beside me.

There is no turning back from that.

Her touch is gone. Her laughter, her jokes that knew exactly how to push my buttons, all of it disappeared instantly. I would trade almost anything to experience those moments again.

Death feels unbearably permanent.

Some days, her absence feels strangely normal now. I no longer call my mom every morning and every night. I no longer plan vacations around seeing her or laughing while she tries to match Lila with every grandson her friends know.

Instead, new rituals have quietly formed. I call my dad. I plan trips with him, Thomas, and Lila. I lean on my friends. I call Michelle on terrible days because she somehow always knows what to say. The spaces my mother once occupied in my life are now held by other people who stepped in and carried me forward.

And then there are days I feel guilty.

Guilty that life has continued moving forward without her.

Guilty that other people now occupy spaces that once belonged only to her.

Guilty for sometimes feeling angry and wishing she had taken better care of herself so she never would have needed that dreadful surgery.

I can’t change what happened to her.

But I can decide what that loss shapes inside of me.

Every day, I fight against allowing loneliness to harden me.

I fight against apathy, cynicism, and the temptation to reduce people into stereotypes or abstractions.

I fight to remember that every single person I encounter is deeply important to somebody else and carries struggles I know nothing about.

Through grief, I have learned from the people around me what it means to be human: to be kind, to be a mother, daughter, wife, friend, teacher, colleague, and all the other identities we quietly carry within us at once.

I wear my heart on my sleeve, and in doing so, I have found that many people are willing to share their own stories, struggles, and private battles in return. Beneath all of our polished public selves is the same ongoing human search for meaning, connection, and survival.

I feel incredibly lucky that my work also allows me to practice empathy professionally. My career asks me to listen deeply, understand people’s stories, identify patterns, and connect individual experiences back to larger systems and structures.

I know not everyone has the privilege of work that feels intellectually or emotionally rewarding. For many people, survival requires compromise, exhaustion, and long hours simply to make ends meet. But regardless of what we do or where we do it, how we show up for the people around us still matters.

After three years of thinking about this almost every day, I can finally admit something difficult out loud.

My mother died on April 26th, but somewhere along the way, she was also failed by a system built on compartmentalization, routine, exhaustion, and emotional distance.

Maybe no single person intended harm. Maybe everyone involved believed they were simply doing their job. But systems are ultimately made up of human beings, and when enough people stop seeing the humanity in front of them, devastating things can happen.

Are we slowly becoming numb to one another?

Have we become so compartmentalized that we no longer fully understand the consequences of our individual and collective actions?

I have spent countless nights replaying the sequence of events that led to her death. Sometimes I wonder whether things might have unfolded differently if even one person in that chain had paused long enough to recognize that she was not just a patient, a billing number, or another task to process.

She was Mina Shah.

She was deeply loved.

She was central to an entire network of lives.

We are not isolated beings simply moving through systems anonymously. We are deeply interconnected through relationships, memory, care, and consequence. Every action ripples outward into somebody else’s life, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Lately, when I read the news, I often feel as though we are moving backward, forgetting essential truths about compassion, dignity, and our responsibility to one another.

Why are we so afraid of difference instead of curious about it?

The intellectual in me wants entire groups of people to wake up and recognize that their actions have consequences. But if grief has taught me anything, it is that empathy matters now more than ever.

We are networks of people woven together through stories, relationships, memory, and shared experience. Beneath all of our differences, the core human experience is remarkably similar.

We all want to feel loved.

We all want to matter.

We all grieve the people we lose.

Systems may be faceless, but individuals aren’t.

Actions have consequences, and we all carry some responsibility for how we move through others' lives.

I miss my mom every single day.

Since I cannot have her back, the next best thing I can do is spend my life building meaningful connections with the people around me and hoping that, in all of our existential loneliness, we might still find comfort, laughter, and belonging in one another.

Thank you for being on this journey with me and for reading these existential musings.

Until next time, keep on keeping on.