Ghada Karmi - Return: A Palestinian Memoir

Amman, April 2007

As I sat at my fathers bedside, listening to his irregular breathing and the sound of the pulse monitor attached to his finger, I thought how frightening it was to be brought up sharp against the awareness of ones own mortality. I feared death equally as much as I knew my father did. He was a very old man, but age had not dimmed his ardour for life and I imagined I would be the same. Like most people, I did not like to contemplate my dying and avoided thinking about it, but it was always there, waiting in the background to be attended to. An elderly doctor I knew once told me, I believe that people must prepare for death. Avoidance and denial are foolish. If we face up fair and square to the inevitability of death it will lose its terrors.

I stroked my fathers hand but his eyes remained closed and he made no motion to indicate he was aware of my presence. The male nurses checked him over and then left us alone. I stood and went to open the window of his room, not seeing out but thinking about his approaching death. It was not a time for reckonings and resentments, but I had a memory of how affectionate and indulgent he had been when I was very young and of how he changed later. I was never sure if that memory had been idealised by hindsight and wishful thinking. But that early childhood experience was never repeated, for when we went to England he changed into a stranger who never showed any emotion towards me except a keen interest in my academic progress. His view of me as a studious, clever daughter, whose sole ambition in life was to gain professional success coloured my view of myself. I grew up uncertain of my femininity and wondering if I should model myself on him, to the detriment of many an emotional encounter I had subsequently. I never forgave him for that, nor for many other things, although I never said so.

Looking at his skeletal state now, pyjama jacket unbuttoned to show his bony ribcage, his sad hollow stomach with its overlying empty folds of skin, I put away those bitter thoughts. Whatever my disappointments about his personal relationship with me, I passionately did not want him to die, not just for who he was but for what. His final days would be drawn-out, overshadowed by family squabbles, as happens at such times. But hanging over that period was the haunting knowledge that an era, not just for his family, but for Palestinian history, was drawing to a close. My father was born in Palestine at the time of the Ottoman Empire, lived through its demise and its replacement by the British Mandate that ruled Palestine, endured the establishment of the State of Israel thereafter and was forced into exile. His life encompassed a century of conflict, a period of Palestinian history that demolished everything he knew and overturned the old order forever.

He had fallen ill a month before with what was diagnosed as pneumonia, malnutrition and severe anaemia and taken to the Palestine Hospital nearby. My sister Siham, who was living with him at the time, phoned me in London to say she thought he was dying. In the 1960s, when I was a medical student in England, we were taught to think of pneumonia as the old mans friend, a painless exit from this life which no one officiously strove to prevent. But in the late twentieth century and by the time my father fell ill, medical practice had changed. No one was allowed to die without energetic intervention, antibiotics, ventilators, intravenous fluids, even surgery. When I arrived I found my father in the hospitals intensive care unit, on antibiotics, a drip in his arm, being closely monitored. He was conscious and frightened. What rest he was afforded was constantly interrupted by a ceaseless flow of visitors inquiring after his health. The nurses feeble efforts to stem the tide of people entering a supposedly sterile and quiet area collapsed completely after the first day. He felt constrained to respond when anyone came, and was exhausted and querulous.

When I arrived to see this situation, unheard of in such units in Britain, I did my best to stop visitors coming in. But this was Jordan, an Arab country, where relatives, however distant, and friends who might also be accompanied by people unknown to the patient, were expected to show their concern and respect for the sick. In my fathers case, there was the additional factor of his public status as a scholar and foremost Arab savant, which drew admirers of his work to visit as well. My efforts to keep them out appeared ungracious, even offensive, and were in any case unsuccessful. In a while, the caf area outside the wards became a meeting place for his visitors where they ran into acquaintances they had not seen for some time or met new people. The place became a focus for such gatherings, often chatty, social and light-hearted. Meanwhile, my father somehow improved enough to be returned to an ordinary hospital bed.