“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”
Bang. Pretentious quote. Four years ago, that strategy worked for my college application personal statement. It probably shouldn’t have.
In the period leading up to graduation, I’m forced to recall such moments in hopes of being “reflective,” but honestly I’ve felt a certain alienation as one milestone has fallen anticlimactically after another. The days came and went, plagued by intense senioritis and the necessity to finish things. Retiring after seven-and-a-half semesters with The Observer, submitting my senior thesis after two years of work, attending my last classes after four years and convincing the last few professors to give me passing grades. Days fade in my memory as I pass through this liminal period, unsure whether that’s a light at the end of the tunnel or … unemployment?
Four years ago, I picked up the Welcome Weekend edition of this very paper on move-in day and the front-page graphic informed me that of the 23,642 applicants to Notre Dame’s class of 2025, I personally had been chosen to be here. Forgive me for my main character moment, it was the start of college. Sometimes, winning a lottery can be deeply disconcerting. But I settled to realize that we get lucky sometimes, especially with modern college admissions, which is increasingly like playing a game of darts in a completely dark room.
Sometimes the dart hits bullseye, but its timing isn’t the best. When I was applying and committing to colleges, it had been two years since my mom died in a traffic accident halfway through my high school education. Grief weighed on me, as did California’s prolonged pandemic lockdowns. Two years of responsibility and deafening silence in every corner of our house. It was perhaps a selfish decision. Members of my family told me it would be wiser to stay at home. But luck had knocked at my door, and I was in no state to say no.
The four years went by since I ran away to the Midwest, and the pomp of graduation approaches. “Just a moment / Right before all the song and dance,” Tame Impala croons over the speaker in my room again and again. Many times, I have feared this moment, the end of my Notre Dame life. I have been immensely privileged as a student here, on funded trips eating poké on the beach in Hawaii and sleeping under the stars on a dogsledding trip in Minnesota. I’ve traveled the world reading old letters in grand reading rooms on the University’s dime. I’ve had the privilege of complaining about a dining hall where ice sculptures make regular appearances, to be awestruck weekly by a dome gilded in gold, of seeing the magnolias bloom by LaFun. I’ve had the privilege of incredible conversations. I had the privilege of being cussed out as part of the press in the Notre Dame locker room while players undressed and/or sobbed after our loss in Atlanta. My luck has continued, it seems, most of the time.
And so if most of this was luck, or at least persistent grade inflation in the College of Arts and Letters, I’ve found it difficult to be excited this year about graduation and all the LinkedIn posts that seem to come with it. By some indiscernible accident or gift from God, I was better at reading and writing than some other kids, so I got into college, and then I managed to pass my classes for four years (thanks, again, in part to grade inflation). Are congratulations truly in order? Not to me.
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My mom, Shabana Patel, was born in 1977 in Vadodara, India, immigrating to San Francisco when she was six. Life was not kind to my mother. Soon after the move to America, she lost her own mom to breast cancer when she was a child. With her father living mostly in India, she and her siblings lived with extended relatives, going to school without lunch while her relatives stuffed cash under the mattresses. My grandfather died when she was 21, leaving her entirely parentless and dropping out of San Francisco State University. Despite this, by the time she was reunited with her parents, my mom changed her small corner of the world, as evidenced by the hundreds of people at her funeral and the school that bears her name in West Africa.
For someone who had been through so much, hundreds remember my mom for her joy. The guests at fundraising parties she hosted for one cause after another, the countless teachers, parish goers, police officers, firefighters, neighbors, librarians and homeless people my mom fed with her cooking. No chef will ever walk this planet with better food than my mother’s, and she served it with a spirit of pure generosity, an American Muslim eager to build bridges and accompany suffering.
My mom was dyslexic, something she learned after getting tested at City College after watching an episode of “The Cosby Show.” Despite never earning her college degree, my mom was always committed to learning, academically, spiritually and otherwise. At the time of her death, she was enrolled in our local community college. As a little kid, I missed her and asked her to stop classes when she resumed community college for the first time. She did. I’m forever sorry to my mom for my puerile mistakes.
My mom continued to have faith in education as a cornerstone of the American dream. She imbued this in her children early on, along with faith in Islam and pride in our heritage. Without many resources, my mom did everything she could to give us the childhood and opportunities she hadn’t had. She made us voracious readers by taking us to the public library and making sure the weekend TV stayed on PBS. Despite being most comfortable in English, she decided to speak with me only in our native tongue when I was young so I could be bilingual. She homeschooled us for a couple years when she wasn’t satisfied by our neighborhood options. She encouraged us to keep asking the questions we wanted to ask. My childhood was often difficult, but my mom made almost every day fun. And when I went to school, I never went without a home-cooked lunch, a midday revelation in Lock-n-Lock Tupperware.
She raised me with my father, for the first dozen years in a small hotel in San Francisco, attempting to shelter us from the fact that we lived above noisy strip clubs. They had married in India, where my dad grew up, and he moved to America soon after I was born. Life in India was very different for my dad, and education was a far-off prospect. He started driving a rickshaw young to support his family. When I was a kid, my dad kept driving, now taxis in San Francisco all night. He still works a driving job in Sacramento, where my parents bought our American dream suburban house. He recently told me how proud he is to be coming to graduation. It will be his first time visiting campus.
I think about the years of driving my father has endured and the thousands of miles this man has traversed. The sacrifices he made to move hemispheres. I know that my graduation is his accomplishment, as it is my mother’s. I can stop my self-indulgent moping about the meaninglessness of graduation, because it’s really not about me.
There have been moments when the “luck” at Notre Dame has felt so profound that I have recognized it for what it was. How did I possibly get here? Time and again, my mother’s prayers had brought God’s grace into the workings of my life. “So which of the favors of your Lord would you deny?” the Qur’an asks in Surah Rahman, my mother’s favorite chapter. But not all gifts are easy to recognize.
The dead mom thing didn’t always feel like a “favor” from Allah. But in college, I’ve had some time, away from my homework, to think about some ideas. One of them, courtesy of an interview with amateur Catholic apologist Stephen Colbert, has echoed in my head. “What punishments of God are not gifts?” Colbert says.
“It’s a gift to exist. It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There’s no escaping that,” he explained. If I had not been running from my mother’s death, I would not have gone as far as Notre Dame. Even then, I couldn’t have gotten there without her lessons or her prayers for my success. God’s plan can be mysterious and hard to follow.
So, as I graduate, I thank the creator for all of it. And I forward all congratulations to one of His favorite people, my mother.
