An Open Palm

If grief is a landscape, it is a vast misty hinterland, uninhabited but full of echoes, admitting a lone traveler. The traveler searches the wilderness for her lost one. And though it is a search in vain, through an immeasurable terrain, she cannot leave the land of grief where she searches for what is missing, as if it has simply been misplaced.

I am not unfamiliar with loss. I have never evaded the dead. But for as long as I can remember, I have lived in terror of one thing: the loss of my parents. I wonder sometimes if the early deaths I experienced of loved ones to war made me more tender. My parents, my sisters, and I immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The atrocities during that violent and catastrophic time were innumerable. The war clung to us in California, where we regularly received news of loved ones who had been killed. Death was an early fact and facet of my life. And my heart was always a tender organ. As a 7- and 8-year-old, I would sit for hours at the window of our house in Los Angeles looking out onto the street and waiting with anguish—legs cramping beneath me, chin sore where it rested on the windowsill—for my parents to return home from a party. I knew it could happen in an instant. I knew it could happen when I was looking away. I yearned to have them back in the safekeeping of my vision. But decades later, when my mother died slowly in front of me over months, after battling cancer for almost two years, I found my eyes had no power to keep her in the world. I was 40, and I waited at the window