A Life Changing Deal That Took Me to Hebron in Palestine

The deal kept my dad alive and opened up a new world of family and heritage for me.

When my mother said to call my brother and sister and tell them to come home, my heart sank. I knew things weren’t good. My father, who had been diagnosed with kidney cancer a few months earlier had been rushed to the hospital with major complications from surgery and internal bleeding. I was at a friends house when my mother called me from the hospital. I had just been to Seattle only a week before when he had already been in and out of the hospital a few times for his initial surgery to remove the malignant tumor and then again for complications only days after returning home. It had been a roller coaster of good news followed by bad news and then good and bad again. I wanted to believe that the bad news this time was not SO bad.

When she called on that day in October of 2013, I could hear something different in her voice, and she quickly let me know in a matter of fact way that things were not good, not good at all. My throat started to close, my stomach turned, and I began to feel like my mind was separating from my body. It felt like I was watching myself in a sad movie, and the edges of the screen were blurred by my tears. I pushed the blurred edges back with fierce determination to be strong for my mom, who was silent, waiting, waiting for me to say the next thing.

“Should I fly up?” I managed to say with a calmness that took me by surprise. She replied yes, and the blurred edges of my sad movie started creeping back in. My mother’s answer was a brutal blow to my cry-prevention strategy because she hates to inconvenience anyone. Her affirmation that I should fly up from San Francisco to Seattle meant things were REALLY bad.

But I knew that the answer to my follow up question about my sister and brother would be the deciding factor on whether the blur in the corners of my eyes would grow or subside.

“Should I tell everyone to fly out too?”

My sister lived in Boston with my nephew, and child care can be a challenge, and my brother who lived in Utah had just started a new job. I know my mom well. She wouldn’t “trouble” them unless things were dire. I waited for her answer, desperately hoping that she would tell me that they could wait for more news.

“Yes, tell them to come.”

My vision blurred entirely, my ears were ringing, then the first big tear slipped off the cliff of my eyelid and down my cheek. Tears flowed quickly down my cheeks as I dammed them with my palm, choked for air and managed to say “We’re coming. I love you. Tell dad I love him.”

Within an hour, Josh, my husband, had bought me a one way ticket and had me on a flight to Seattle. Phone calls were made and the entire family was making their way home.

It was a mad rush until I sat in my seat on the plane. I could not make the plane go faster, I could not solve this problem. Usually work is my solace, my escape from sad thoughts, but no work puzzle could clear the feeling of helplessness that was taking over me. As I sat silently, staring at the back of the seat in front of me, I finally remembered how I handled this same situation as a child years ago.

My father’s delicate health was a constant reminder of his mortality for me as a child. When I was five and half years old, he was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night with a failing heart and little chance of survival. After that day and throughout my childhood as my dad struggled through and survived a variety of health issues, I became a serious negotiator with myself and a greater power that I called God — an entity that I never quite intellectually embraced.

I would make deals with myself and this power late at night in bed.

“If you let my dad live, I’ll be good. I won’t lie. I’ll help others.”

I’d bargain with myself, making deals sometimes on a daily basis, scaring myself into believing that if I didn’t keep my end of the bargain, this greater force would take my father from me. Over the years, I did this less and less, and my dad’s health got better and I became less constantly worried for his health.

On this day in October, though, as I grappled with my helplessness, I remembered all the deals I had made with my child self and this greater force that had to bear witness to my promises. And on that plane up to Seattle, I found peace in making yet another deal, but this time, and for the first time, I was dealing with my adult self. The situation was dire. I needed to offer up something big, something meaningful.

So that day I promised that if my dad survived, I would go back to his home in Hebron in Palestine to see my grandmother, meet the family that I had been so distant from for years, and do something to help the people that my father holds so dear in his heart. I had made a good bargain. My father managed to pull through yet another threat to his life. We were all thrilled, and he slowly recovered after the removal of the kidney that was causing so many of his complications. We all went back to our homes and awaited daily or weekly reports on his health. A year passed, life was back to normal and I had completely forgotten about the deal I had made with myself.

Around Thanksgiving of 2014, I had gone to bed thinking about all the things that I needed to get ready for our annual Christmas trip to Seattle. It dawned on me that my dad had been well for more than a year. I played the memory of the day I rushed to Seattle to say goodbye to him in my mind. I had thought about that day before, but this time was different because I remembered the deal that I had made on the flight up to Seattle. I froze in bed, realizing that I had not met my end of the bargain.

I couldn’t sleep. So much was running through my mind. How was I going to go to the West Bank?

“What will I do with the kids. I can’t leave my work for that long. I can’t be away from my family for two weeks or even more. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t…”

There were so many reasons why I couldn’t possibly keep my promise. So many that I began to feel helpless. There was no deal to get out of this deal. All I could do was cry.

Josh woke up and asked what was wrong. I didn’t know what to say. For my whole life I have vocally been a supporter of religion for others, but have not personally practiced any religion and consider myself agnostic. I find religions to be dogmatic and I don’t like the rules of inequity and wars that are created in their name. Even though I have never called myself an atheist, I felt like a hypocrite telling Josh about my deal with this greater force. So I started by saying “I need to go to Hebron in the next 6 months.” Of course this was not what he expected to hear in the middle of the night and eventually I told him the whole truth.

As I should have expected, he was 100% supportive and had solutions to all the reasons that I felt I couldn’t possibly make this trip happen. He wasn’t excited about the timing, but he agreed that the trip needed to be soon to be sure that I would see my grandmother who is now 93 years old. I needed to see her to honor my promise and to tell a part of her story.

My grandmother has lived in Hebron her entire life and she has seen her homeland ruled or occupied by 4 different forces: the British, the Jordanians, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Years ago she told me of a time when Arabs and Jews lived together peacefully in Hebron. She had learned to sew from a Jewish woman as a child and the Arabs referred to the Jews in Hebron as cousins. Her uncle was a musician who played music with Jewish musicians in his town. They lived as neighbors and they respected one another and each other’s different religions and cultures.

After this time of relative peace, though, tensions arose, potentially caused by the threat of Zionist forces and rumors of their movement. When my grandmother was 7 years old some Arabs in Hebron attacked their Jewish neighbors. My great grandfather sheltered and protected a Jewish couple that owned a hotel nearby and my grandmother remembers this couple, especially the woman, fondly.

After doing some research I discovered that there were other Arab families that took Jewish neighbors in to protect them from the angry rioters in the streets. It is this story, this snapshot in time, that I hoped to be able to tell, and while I only really scratched the surface in gathering information, I believe that I met my end of the bargain I made, but I also am so glad that I made it to begin with. In returning to my father’s homeland and the Middle East in general, I have discovered that I have an extended family that cares deeply about me in Cairo, Amman, Hebron, Ramallah and beyond.

I had become so used to just being an American, and forgetting about my heritage.It was easier to just call myself American, bury myself in my work, and not worry about what kind of stereotypes or misconceptions people have about Palestinians or the Arab world. I chose to be comfortable and in doing so I had little or no connection to a family that knew far more about me than I did about them.

I am glad I negotiated that deal with myself. Not only did I get my father, but I got a whole heritage, a whole wide and loving family back. There’s still work to be done, stories to be told, and connections to be strengthened, but I have never felt more supported in my life. The promise I made to myself has given me the strength to face “the political” and stand for a simple belief that justice, peace, equality, and collective liberation is always a possible truth. We just need to believe in it. We need to make a bargain with ourselves.

This post was originally written in 2015 on Medium.