In eighth grade I came home one afternoon after school and proudly showed my mother my math test on which I had got 99%. She looked at the test and said, “Why didn’t you get 100%?” As a child I was upset that my mom had not recognized my achievement but as an adult I know that was her unskillful way of saying, “I know your potential. Don’t settle for less than what you can achieve.” That was my mom.
My mother was the eldest of seven surviving children and only sixteen years younger than her own mother. She grew up taking care of her siblings especially the younger ones when her mother suffered from postpartum depression. After she completed high school her dream of becoming a dentist was unrealized due to various circumstances. So, she pursued her love for math and became a math teacher at the school where she had graduated.
1n 1961 when she was only 25 her parents were very concerned that my mom was past the marriageable age. Then she met my father through some manipulating of events by her sister who wanted to marry her then boyfriend but was denied permission from my grandfather because, “What would people say if the younger sister got married while the elder sister was still unmarried.” My father swept my mother off her feet and after a whirlwind romance they were married in less than a year from when they met. My father was a successful businessman and well able to take care of his wife, two daughters and a quadriplegic son. But being a high school dropout he had no means of supporting his family when he lost his one big client during the nationalization process by the government of Pakistan in 1972.
My mother stepped up and went back to school to get her diploma form the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) and started her own Montessori school. When she started there were four children enrolled in her school; my brother, two cousins and a neighbor. Due to her dedication and hard work she was asked to become a teacher trainer at the AMI Karachi. At night sometimes when I would wake up to get a drink of water I would see my mom sitting at the dining table preparing her lecture for the next day, writing down each word of what she was going to say. It didn’t make sense to me why she had to write each word and why she wouldn’t just write bullet points. It wasn’t like she didn’t know the material like the back of her hand. It was when I was studying to get my masters in special education that I realized that my mother probably had a learning disability. 
She had many tough years with my father; the financial struggles, the loss of a child (my brother), my father’s failing health and during all this I never once heard her complain or lose heart. When my father died in 1994 she was devastated and it was heartbreaking for me to see her, someone who liked bright colors, dress only in white like widows in our culture are expected to dress. It took years of coaxing from my sister and me for her to start wearing either light pastels or dark colors. There were no more bright oranges, yellows, greens and blues in her wardrobe. She lived vicariously through buying bright colored outfits for my sister and me and even though the colors were nowhere close to our taste we would wear the brightly colored outfits whenever we visited her in Karachi.
The year my mother turned 70 the monsoon in Karachi was one of the worst and the usual drips from the leaky roof were like waterfalls inside the house. Some furniture, clothes, books and other things in her house were destroyed but she couldn’t be bothered about them. The rains had also destroyed a photograph of my father and she could not get over the grief of that loss. I would call her every day from my home in Chatham, New Jersey to see how she was doing and all she could talk about was the photograph of my father being ruined. I assured her that I had the same photograph and I would express mail it to her. Before I could get to mail the photograph I got a call from my cousin in Karachi that my mother had been taken to the emergency room and she had been diagnosed with pancreatitis. When I arrived at the hospital in Karachi my mother was already in a coma. I slipped the photograph of my dad under her pillow and whispered to her that I was there by her side and my sister was on her way from Toronto. My sister arrived the next day in just enough time to say goodbye to our mother.
In my life to that point I had experienced many emotions, but I had never experienced the pain that I felt at my mom’s passing away. It felt like there was a hole where my heart used to be and people saying to me that time would heal the pain was no comfort. This year it was eleven years in September since my mother died and I don’t know if the pain has lessened or if I have become used to carrying the heartache with me. 
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