I am in my pajamas, watching a Netflix documentary about space telescopes when I begin to think about my mother.
“The iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones was literally formed out of a star that exploded billions of years ago,” the documentary’s excited astrophysicist says.
An image of the Southern Ring nebula floats across the screen. “This is a dying star in its last gasp of light,” she explains. It looks like an eye, an iris, a nipple, a womb, a portal opening up in space. I stare at the dying star — taking its last breath, mothering us all.
I was with friends in Hell’s Kitchen when I first saw my mother’s brain scans. We were neuroscientists at Princeton in our early 30s, freshly done with our Ph.D.s. A few days earlier my mother — the political scientist, the litigator — had woken up next to my father in their home in Tehran, unable to speak properly, terrified.
Her brain scans arrived the night before my hurried flight home in January 2016.
When I showed them to my friend James, he gave me a knowing look. We each had scanned over a hundred brains for our memory research. “The stroke is eating my mother’s brain,” I told him as if he didn’t see the dark oval taking over her right hemisphere, a black hole swallowing a star.
“Touch her limbs and name them,” I texted my father and sister as I got ready to fly home, leaving my research and one-way work visa behind. “Record your voices, have the nurses play it. Perhaps some brain connections survive.”
My mother was a healthy 62-year-old. Her stroke and ensuing coma threw us into a surreal limbo, utter disbelief. It was hard to sleep. Soon, it was hard to breathe. I picked up smoking. Perhaps to poison the grief in my lungs, perhaps to feel an iota of agency.
I found my mind jumping between past memories and future possibilities. From the last time we talked (did I tell her I love her?) to a future where she survived, most likely paralyzed, and I quit my job to take care of her. Jump to the second grade when she taught me how to notice the roots of words in three languages. To a future where she died peacefully. To my last night in Tehran in 2013. To the last Fesenjan she cooked for me, the last photo I took of her. To a future in which she never woke, and we could never sleep. I stood before all those pasts, all those futures. Helpless.
Before my mother’s stroke, I believed that time was linear, an arrow that only moved in one direction. In my research, I approached memory as a subject of empirical observation, a quantifiable entity. But through the lens of grief, the arrow of time splintered into a constellation of scattered, moving points. Grief teleported my mind to pasts where my mother was the star around which our family revolved, and to possible futures with or without her.
Grief makes us time travelers.
One day in the hospital lobby with family I hadn’t seen in years, I pulled up her brain scans on my iPad to explain the extent of the damage. I needed them to see what I saw. My aunt shrugged. “You have your science, and we have faith.”
I felt a sudden heat rush to my face. The fire needed a way out. “I am losing my mom!” I almost yelled. “And your praying won’t help.” How foolishly self-assured of me. The truth was that in the midst of this devastation, my science made me feel utterly powerless, while my aunt still had hope.
As did my father, who took my initial instructions to speak to my mother to the extreme. Everyday, after waking at 5 a.m., he would put on a suit and sit beside her, hold her hand, rock back and forth with eyes closed while reminding her who she was, singing their honeymoon songs, telling her it was time that she got up to enjoy their vacation home in northern Iran.
My father’s grief felt vast, of mythological proportion. It reminded me of Orpheus traveling to the underworld to bring Eurydice back from the dead. I envied his process. Her coma was not a matter of science to him. It was an underworld where he brought daily offerings — stories no one had heard in years — hoping to seduce my mother’s consciousness back to the surface.
I never knew he loved my mother like that. I began to feel guilty, inadequate. Why couldn’t I share my family’s faith? If I had a sliver of hope, would my mother recover?
I grew up learning about Persian scientists: Avicenna, the father of medicine, Khayyam and his astronomy, and al-Khwarizmi, whose name inspired the word “algorithm.” Their science was expansive, allowing room for philosophy and poetry, for a mystic realm that reason cannot reach. “This ocean of existence is made of the unknown,” Khayyam wrote. “No research can get to the bottom of it.”
Suddenly, my European and Ivy League education felt devoid of the sense of wonder I had been chasing since childhood. The wonder that brings us closer to nature and helps us hope. The wonder with which ancient scientists honored the unknown, so much so that they even gave nothingness a name: Zero — the root of an entire system of mathematics capable of adding and subtracting nothing.
I looked around my parent’s apartment, feeling like the rows of books accumulating dust: full of knowledge but unable to change anything. I learned that my mother had diabetes and took herbal remedies instead of her prescription medication. I learned she had the stroke a day after the boys’ club at her company tried to oust her.
I was angry no one told me. I was angry I wasn’t close enough to reason with her to take her prescriptions, that her stressful job wasn’t compatible with holistic medicine. And I was angry at my one-way science visa. I fantasized about my mother waking up, about quitting my job, living back home to take care of her, abandoning science in penance.
After a few weeks in Tehran, I could no longer bear to stay in my parents’ apartment. It was a monument to my mother’s absence, present in the shade of the walls, in every single piece of furniture, every doily she had placed under a vase.
I found myself crashing on the couches of artists in Tehran, smoking, discussing art and writing. Grief was turning me into someone new. I learned to play Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis.” I began dating a painter. Within a month, I was role playing life in my birth city after a decade abroad, learning how to build a self under the city’s fog of pollution and oppression. I began to role-play hope. And I began to feel it, too.
But then, 43 days after her stroke, my mother died.
We buried her in the north and planted a tree above her grave. I was losing it. My friends drove me to the forests in Gilan by the Caspian Sea. Broken, I held onto them like any moment left on my own would be a disaster. By the time we were deep in the moss-covered trees, surrounded by an ocean of greenery, I felt life like I had never felt before: Forceful, vast, beaming, reaching out to me. I was face to face with an entire ecosystem, and I was kin with it. I felt my mother in that wilderness, the safety of being mothered, of being embraced by ancestors.
In spring, three and a half months after seeing those scans, I finally got a visa back to Princeton. I returned to being a scientist, but one who befriends trees and indulges in poetry like it’s prescription medicine. I bought a piano and played Glass’s “Metamorphosis,” comforted by its loops, repetitions and gradual changes.
I’ve become closer with my mother since she died. No longer burdened by distance or past hurts, I meet with her in dreams. “Do you feel she is in a good place in those dreams?” my father once asked me. I nodded. “I think she is, too,” he said. “And I think she has friends, like when she was alive.”
I rewind the telescope documentary until I see three vast columns of gas and dust, The Pillars of Creation.
“We are made out of the same material,” the astrophysicist says. New iron for new blood, new calcium for new bones. New materializations of pure desire, birthing all creatures, as hungry as new life.
I didn’t grieve for my mother once. Grief has no end. It is a time machine, a force of change, a new origin story.
Is this where I begin?
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