There is a little corner in my garden that I have claimed as my sanctuary, though to call it a corner feels dishonest because what happens there is too sacred. It sits at the far end of my backyard where I have created a bed for all the spices and vegetables I am trying to grow. I cleared it all myself. That’s the one thing I was most proud of last year. 

On the 5th of December 2025, I came back home after a long day of work and went into my backyard to sit and watch the stars like I always do. Frustrated by the sight of things on the ground of the backyard, I knelt to the ground and started to pull out the weeds with my bare hands. Some of the dirt from that night lives permanently beneath my fingernails. I still see it till this day. 

In this sanctuary, I am a modified version of Lot’s wife or something of the sort. I am a pillar of salt looking up to the stars in worship, unable to stop looking back at the life I had before. And when I do go back inside, I am Naomi. The woman who, after burying a husband and everything that she loved, told her people to stop calling her by her name and call her Mara instead. Because whether you like it or not, grief has a way of creating a completely different version of your ‘self’. What is left of you will demand a new name. My new name is Nabilah. I have been called many things in this life but I still don’t know what I am. 

Every morning at 8am, I swallow three small yellow pills and I have been doing this for the last 4 years. For four years, those pills have been my daily communion. They are immunosuppressants that help prevent my body from rejecting the new organ I received 4 years ago. It has also been 4 years since my husband, Arian, died. He died on an operating table next to mine. When my kidneys failed, his blood matched mine in a miraculous way that made everyone at the hospital, including me, think that it was fate. Right before he went under, he kissed my forehead outside the surgical bay and whispered, "I'll see you on the other side." 

I woke up in the ICU to a functional body and an empty world. The doctors said that he had suffered a catastrophic anesthetic reaction. So here I was, alive, while the reason I was fighting to be alive was gone. 

Since then, my survival has felt less like a miracle and more like a sentence. I have been unable to live my life, at least not fully. To enjoy a cup of coffee, to laugh too loudly, or to dream about a future felt like desecrating his memory. How do you permit yourself to live when the only person you wish to live with is dead because of you?

On a hot summer evening, I was waiting at the airport for my flight when I heard a familiar sound. It was that distinct rattle of a prescription bottle. When I looked up, I saw a man in his late fifties sitting two chairs away and pouring two yellow capsules into his palm. He held up a bottle of water to take the medications and caught me staring. In the peculiar universe of chronic illness, the truth is that we recognize our own. He looked at me and smiled softly. "Tacrolimus?" he asked.

"Mycophenolate," I responded, my voice was almost as low as a whisper. "And Tacrolimus."

He nodded and said, "Eight years for me. A liver."

His name was Thomas. He had the kind of face that seemed permanently crinkled by laughter, his eyes were bright and so full of life. His voice had a seductive cadence to it. I had not found anything remotely seductive for four years. We began to speak as though we were familiars which is oddly something that strangers in transit do. For a brief moment while we wait for our flights, we tend to speak to others around us as though we share a sense of commonality. Out of a desperate curiosity, I asked him about his donor and once the question escaped my lips, he smiled very deeply.

"My wife, Sarah," he said softly. "There were complications in her recovery and she passed forty-eight hours after the surgery."

Immediately he said that, a cold chill ran down my spine. And then all of a sudden, that familiar and suffocating feeling of survivor's guilt started to build up in my chest. I stared at him, hoping to see a trace of that same survivor’s guilt but I didn’t find that.

"How do you do it?" I asked. "How do you breathe? How do you wake up every day and not collapse under the weight of knowing she died for you to sit here?"

Thomas put his water bottle down on the chair next to him and moved closer to me. 

"For the first two years, I lived in a dark room," he said slowly. "I didn’t allow myself to feel joy or peace. I thought if I suffered enough, if I stayed miserable enough, it would somehow balance things. But then I realized that my wife didn't give me her liver so I could build a shrine out of grief," he said. "She died because she loved me. And there is joy in that for me."

There is joy in that for me. Those words began to echo all around me as if suddenly the airport’s PA system was instructed to amplify the impact of those words in my chest.

It amazed me how he didn't say it with arrogance or detachment. He said it with the authority of a man who had come to learn that love is a gift to be honored through living. He went on to explain that he knew that to turn her sacrifice into his own version of hell was more of a betrayal than devotion. We spent the remainder of our time waiting together talking about all the ways I could begin to live my life without feeling guilty. Thomas was deeply interested in my likes, dislikes and what my perspective on love was before losing my husband. 

Whilst still speaking, the boarding for my flight was called. Thomas stood up, gave me a warm embrace, kissed me on the forehead and said "I'll see you on the other side." I didn't say anything back. I just nodded and walked toward the boarding gate. It was not until I had settled into my window seat that those words sunk in. At that moment, I knew that Arian was still with me.