heartbroken

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un.

At the end of 2013, our family lost our house due to my (now-ex-) husband’s mental illness and moved into a low-income apartment complex called Abbey Lane. Our new neighbors were primarily refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Nepal.

Our church offered a tutoring program on Tuesday nights where we met a darling 8-year-old named Nabiha who needed no tutoring and just came for the fun. She introduced us to her parents, Mohammed and Hodan, and her three younger siblings.

These two were 3 and 5 in 2014:

We ate dinner at each other’s homes and became friends. Then at the beginning of 2015, our family moved to Cambodia. We saw them in the summer of 2016 when we visited the States and met baby #5 (a girl). Baby #6 (a boy) was born in 2020.

Nabiha and I have kept in touch over the years on Instagram and via text. She just finished her first year of college and is pretty much the sweetest, most brilliant and talented human ever. She has been helping her mom study for her citizenship test. Her three sisters (now 13, 12, and 10) contributed poems to my new kids’ poetry book.

On Sunday Nabiha texted me to tell me her mom had died two nights before. She was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer just two weeks before that.

My heart is broken for Mohammed and their six kids (ages 5-19).

A friend has set up a Go Fund Me to help pay for funeral expenses and whatever the family needs. If you have a few extra dollars to give, I would be so grateful.

I’ll miss you, Hodan. Your beautiful babies will be okay. You were such a wonderful mama. I love you.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un. (Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return.)