Earlier this year, my Palestinian father passed away from cancer in his home in the midwest (USA). My father has a story that is hard to absorb in its entirety. Just 3 years after being born in Palestine, my father's family was displaced during the Nakba in 1948. Over the next 15 years, they were shuffled between ~30 different refugee camps. In 1963, my father was allowed to take the Jordanian Tawjihi exam and scored 3rd highest in the country, which earned him a UNICEF grant to medical school in Egypt. After practicing medicine in Bahrain for 2 years , my father was sponsored to come to the United States. In the years that followed, he went through a medical residency and fellowship, put 5 siblings and countless nieces and nephews through college, got married, had 4 children, got divorced, lost his medical practice in a tornado, lost my brother to suicide, and was forced to retire from practicing medicine on the same day he found out he had terminal rectal cancer. Despite a grief that was complicated and complex, coming and going in unexpected and mysterious ways, my father always managed to find joy and kindness and love in his heart.
