From Najran by me

As I stand at my grandpa's grave located in the catholic cemetery on top of a hill, I can see different parts of Bethelhem. The majority of names in the cemetery is Giacaman, my grandfather's last name. His family is one of the prominent families in Bethelehem; in fact, if I were to walk into anyone in the street, s/he would probably be a Giacaman. People live next to each other in a city and they also lay dead next to each other in its graveyard. This is the city where my family has lived for hundreds of years, where I know I have always belonged, so that moving to the cemetery is just another location, one of the many taken up by the same family.

Next to my grandpa's grave is another one with the engraving of Carmel Nassrallah Giacaman, who died thirteen years ago from breat cancer. I was nine at the time and only remembered vaguely her dying in her last few days. Is my baby sister going to remember anything of what we saw today of the funeral? She tells me not to worry, that I am going to see my grandfather in a few years, and that in fact, I am probably the first one who would see him out of the four siblings! Older than her by 14 years, surely I am bound to see my grandfather before anyone else.

The winds are roaming the valleys and hills, invigorating my tears. They don't seem to leave anything or anyone in their place, but they rather move them. I could not believe that my grandfather laid in the ground. What is a body? We, the medical students, work with it in our dissection labs, it is not alive. My grandfather is somewhere else, with that wind that has blown for two thousands years in this city where his family has always been after coming from Najran in Yemen. He is somewhere around those hills and this city of Bethelhem whose spirit and history he spent his life getting to know and finally joined it for eternity.

What is life and death anyway but points of beginning and ends, how often are points so important? Isn't it the process through which we go, through which we come to be or come to be undone, through which we come to know and to learn that stand time? I can almost hear my grandfather tell me in his Bethlehmite accent in Arabic, "Ma fee waket, mashghool." I smile because he is right: there is never a time to stop, never a time not to do something meaningful. I promised him that I would translate his books and he still had another volume prepared, to come out about Nazareth. He is right: our lives are too short, what are they? 80, 90 years? Ma fee waket.His words blow in the winds, and they need to be so that my grandfather's spirit is not in that grave, neither is anything that we do in life and that is worthwhile stagnant.

It is all blowing, blowing in the wind.