Among a stack of photos from my mother’s childhood is a black-and-white picture from when she was 7 or 8. She’s standing on the sunlit balcony of her family’s apartment in Cairo. Her face looks directly into the camera, half in shadow.
Revisiting old photographs has become like the rituals my mother tried to preserve at our home in Ohio — the way she’d prepare Turkish coffee when my maternal grandmother would visit; the lamb she’d cook at Christmas with slivers of almonds and raisins buried in the rice; her love of Egypt’s legendary singer Umm Kulthum, whose melodic and low voice my mother taught me was like a sadness.
It wasn’t sudden like a spark, but gradual with time, that I realized the full extent of what I’d lost when my mother died 12 years ago. In addition to her presence in my life, her voice, any fight we’d ever have again, what dissipated like dew was a tangible connection to the Middle East. For me, photos have bridged the loss.
