December 8 Reflections

Between celebration and grief

They always say you should never make a deal with God.

The physicality of the act is just way too human. After all, the whole point of God is that He can do anything, no strings attached.

I used to plead with God to make Syria free again. I’d make dua, and sometimes I meant it so sincerely that there were tears in my eyes. Other times it was just out of habit, like ‘Dear God, please free us from this tyranny and also could you make sure I find a decent man in the future? He doesn’t even have to be tall.’ A lot of my duas became sort of like a checklist of faraway dreams I would list after prayer, and a small part of me thought none of them would get checked off.

In Islam, duʿāʾ is a prayer of supplication or request, asking help or assistance from God.

Ok, I admit, it was not just a small part of me. It’s very rare for our countries to see any sort of peace in this day and age because we are terrorists and America is the best and blah-blah-blah (I’m not going to get into this when Edward Said already has). There is a bit of powerlessness you feel when you’re in this situation, even when you’re having a conversation with God, the Most Powerful. I was more than certain I’d never be alive to see the day the al-Assad family was off the throne. I was even trying to accept the fact that my future children wouldn’t, either.

But then, one day, I tried to make a deal with God. On the prayer mat, out of pure desperation, I said out loud, ‘Please God end our suffering, and I promise I’ll never complain about anything ever again.’ Which is a really big thing for me, because you’re essentially asking me to retire my natural instinct. But I said it anyway, and I truly meant it at the time.

While I made the deal on the prayer mat, with my head to the ground, I knew this was more of a deal I would make with myself, because I had a tendency to relate all of my personal traumas, grief, and complaints to the fact that my generation (and my parents’) lived through the al-Assad regime. I thought to myself, ‘surely, if they ceased, so would my complaints?’ My complaints that I live a two-day flight away from my family members, that we’re all isolated in different pockets of the world, that we don’t feel at home anywhere (not in Lebanon, not in Saudi, not in Malaysia, not in Spain, not in Canada).

The past few years hit me the hardest. When you’re stuck (and I mean really stuck), with nowhere to go and nobody to lean on, it feels like the only solution is to die. I was quite literally waiting.

December 8, 2024

When Aleppo was freed, my mom told me not to get too excited. My family was quite hesitant, because their excitement turned to dread and mourning quite quickly back when this happened in 2016. It wasn’t until Hama was freed (where my mom is from) that we got the green light to celebrate. This time, the streets were not red.

On December 8, 2024, I had two finals left, and I nearly failed both of them. I cried in the Student Life Centre pretty much 24/7, but thankfully nobody batted an eye because it’s a typical sight during exam season.

That day, I didn’t sleep until 4 AM because I kept replaying videos of al-Sarout, Mai Skaf, Fadwa Suleiman, Mazen al-Hamada. I kept remembering scenes from the infamous book on Syrian prison literature, The Shell by Mustafa Khalifa. We were celebrating and grieving at the same time, and you could not tell whether we were crying tears of joy or sadness (because, as beautiful as the moment is, you can’t help but think about all of the people that got us here but are no longer physically here to see it).

Then there was also a part of me that remembered the ‘deal’ I made. This event, one that I didn’t think would ever happen in my lifetime, has just happened. I think mostly I was paralyzed. What do you do when your country has just been freed after more than 50 years of dictatorship? I tried to visualize it. A free Syria. A Syria free from posters of the man who ruined our country? A Syria free from torture prisons and massacres? A Syria you could now enter without having to write a تقرير against your friends and family? A Syria that used to be filmed in grayscale, but could now be documented in Technicolour?

I started having conversations with my grandparents that we never had before— planning how we would tour our own country, city by city, street by street, tree by tree. We would make up for all the time we lost.

At the time, fulfilling my part of the deal seemed easy. What would I ever want to complain about after this reality?

December 8, 2025

My grandfather passed away on November 27th, 2025. The only way I could describe what I felt is maybe like if you put every paint colour from an artist’s collection and dumped them into one giant palette, mixing it until it turned murky.

No doubt there is a deep blue. The sadness of having someone special to you die alone in a hospital bed, unaware. The sadness of not being able to be there at the burial. The sadness that comes with trying to visualize him as a young boy. A son. A brother. As a medical student. A new doctor. As a groom. A new father. As a retired physician. A patient. Trying to visualize him in all the roles he played throughout his life that weren’t ‘loving grandfather’.

In this mix, there is also a light blue, too. The shade of awe that his death could have this effect on so many people. The shade of awe that his kind-hearted soul helped raise three girls with the same qualities, which continues to be passed down through generations.

It was also the calming white shade of relief. My grandfather was sick and never fully recovered from his last heart surgery. More than anything, he was scared of a painful death, of his heart bursting. Alhadmulillah, he passed peacefully in his sleep.

When we broke the news to my mom, I think a part of her heart burst. Her worst fear realized. It was the awkward shade of yellow of not knowing how to support the person you love in what is likely the most difficult time of their lives.

I visited my grandparents in Lebanon less than a month ago. My mom and I would help with medications. We would sit with the photo albums and go through my mom’s childhood memories. My grandfather would sit quietly, but in very random moments of the evening, he would recite poems directly from memory. Whenever he called my name, it was always with a question mark at the end. With a tone of curiosity. Mais, what’s the time? Mais, what exactly did you study in university? Mais, why don’t you stay an extra week? When he called my mom’s name, it was with a tone of loving demand, a hint of panic. Randa, make sure you eat from the pomegranate we got.

Is it a warm pink, the gratefulness for getting to see him right before he passed?

Or is it just black, fear that I might forget these moments, forget the sound of his voice when he would call my name?

Most prominent, maybe, is the deep red of anger.

The anger that my grandfather was too sick in the year that followed our freedom, that he never got to visit a free Syria. The anger that the first time my grandmother would visit a free Syria would be to grieve her husband. The anger that they lived not even two hours away from their home, waiting for the right time. When my grandmother said her dream was to go back to Hama, was this what she had in mind? Are we supposed to be careful of what we wish for?

This December 8, I feel quite similar to last December 8. The unsettling feeling of celebration and grief simultaneously. Like being at a hospital at the same time as the death of a loved one and the birth of another.

For a minute, I wondered if maybe I should have been more specific with my dreams. Maybe I should have pointed out that the whole point of asking for freedom is so that we could be together again. That by freeing Syria, we would also undo all of the consequences of a dictatorship. That I would not have assimilated into the West, that I always lived with my people, that my grandfather would never have reminisced about his home country because we never would have left. I thought that December 8 meant I could stop thinking of the What-If? but instead, I’m left with the question of What-If-It-Happened-Sooner?

It is a depressing thought, and as a pessimist I typically would have ended this essay here. But here is the thing about spending time your with grandparents— it might turn you into an optimist.

And so, with this newfound, unfamiliar optimism, I have decided that on this palette there is a colour that overpowers the red.

Ironically, the colour that always trumps red is green. The same colour we reclaimed on our flag. The green of a revolution that insisted we were still alive, still capable of meaning, still worthy of pride. The green of the life we keep living despite all. And what is life without acceptance? Acceptance that maybe this is the timing of a divine plan. That maybe this was the chosen direction, and God knows best. Acceptance that my grandfather lived a happy life. That maybe, if he had one wish now, it would be to live it all again, beginning to end, exactly as it happened. Just to take it all in.

Maybe.