My last fight with my Palestinian father still haunts me. Neither of us could bury the past

2026-03-26 - 11:10

My eternally exiled father was dying and witnessing a siege on Gaza. Afterwards I could go home – but he couldn’t The last fight we ever had, my father and I, occurred on a night in May 2021 on the eve of his first chemo treatment. At this point in our story, I was a new mother, and he was a year and a half from his death. To treat his stage four prostate cancer, he had been given a series of experimental hormone treatments, which had put him in a sort of male menopause and which had just begun to fail. This last fight of ours also happened to fall right in the middle of that previous siege of Gaza (before the more recent one none of us will ever forget), which itself resulted in the destruction of 40 schools and four hospitals. That night in May, we were in the rented ranch house in Arizona, the one with the broken dishwasher and the blue pool slide that had not been functional for decades, the house with its view of the sky and faint hint of the McDowell mountains. Though my father had lived in Palestine, Syria, Kuwait and Italy, he had fled to the Sonoran Desert after going bankrupt in New York in the early 1990s and loved the dramatic landscapes of the west with a fealty he had for nowhere else. Whereas I missed New York like a lover. I felt unmoored, restless. Exiled. Continue reading...