The moments that end up defining our lives are never the ones we expect. The moments that show us who we are, we rarely see coming. The last time I wrote about one of these instances, I was standing at the stern of a boat in the rainy and choppy Pacific ocean, ready to dive into shark inhabited waters. If you had asked me for a year and a half after that, I’d have told you going SCUBA diving was the scariest moment of my life. My story has changed since then. It’s been some time since my life was altered forever, but I’m ready to tell you the story, all of it. Starting far before I jumped off that boat, as massive waves crashed over me.
2001- Doctor’s Office
More than one imperative moment of this story takes place in a doctor’s office. On this particular occasion, I was about eight years old, racked with nerves, sitting with my mother. As the gentleman reviewed the chart, I looked at him, and I must have said something like, “I’m not going to take the pills anymore. I don’t need them!”
My mom explained further, that I felt strongly that I no longer needed to be on the medication he had prescribed. He looked at me and said, “You know you’re going to fail. If you don’t take these pills, you’ll end up a failure.”
In the 3rd grade a Child Psychologist, who wore a white coat and went to school for years, who had to know what he was talking about, told me I was destined for failure.
Leading up to this appointment, my parents had grown concerned about my performance in school. They decided to pursue tests to determine if I had a learning disability. The result was the doctor in question prescribing me Ritalin, a drug used to treat ADHD. As an eight year old boy, all I could hear was that I wasn’t as ‘normal’ as I thought I was, and almost nothing could have disturbed me more at this time. I pleaded with my parents to not make me take the pills, but they persisted.
This came to a climax one day in class, when the Special Needs Teacher walked in, asked the teacher to see me and then in front of the whole class asked if I had taken my pill for the day. In that moment, my fear of not being normal was realized, as the face of every student in the class turned to me and laughed. Tears streaming down my face, the regretful teacher walked me out of the room. And shortly after I decided I would never take another pill of Ritalin again.
Growing up, the doctor’s words haunted me. They were stuck in the back of my head, and every hurdle I hit, every time I fell, I fearfully asked myself: was he right? Was I destined for failure? His words rattled in my brain for years. Yet I persisted and at every turn, I chose to take challenges head on. And as time passed his voice grew weaker, and was replaced with my own. I’d look in the mirror and scream it in my head for years to come. “He was wrong!”
July 2008- Number 5 Drive-in
Most remember 2008 as the historic year Barack Obama became the first African American President of the United States. I remember it for a different reason: the release of the greatest action film of all time: The Dark Knight. Being that fourteen year old kid, sitting in the dark car at the Number 5 Drive-In watching that movie for the first time, is a memory I often revisit. And when the movie wrapped with Commissioner Gordon’s iconic speech as Batman rides through Gotham City, my life had changed forever. I just hadn’t realized it yet.
Months later sitting in the computer lab of my Grade 10 business class, Mr. Lustrinelli introduced a guest speaker: a past student and the older sibling of one of our classmates. He spoke about adversity, about how his mother was sick with a terminal illness, how every day was a struggle, and how even though it was immensely difficult, he still hadn’t lost hope.
He spoke about how he often wondered why this had happened to his family? Why bad things happen to good people? He mentioned his personal hero, and how he’d helped him get through it, and my ears perked. The answer to his questions came to him at the end of his favourite film. Years later, fear flowing from my eyes, I remember the words.
“He’s the hero Gotham deserves but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him, because he can take it.”
Because he can take it. In that classroom, at fifteen, this young man told me why bad things happen to good people. Because they can take it.
Summer 2010- English Class
At the age of sixteen, I decided to forgo my last summer as a high schooler to pursue an early and focused shot at getting an A in Grade 12 English. With university applications on the horizon, I needed to ace as many classes, which meant a condensed and focused attempt at one of the only ones offered in summer school.
So naturally, on the second day I slept in and was almost 30 minutes late to class. I sheepishly walked into the classroom past my peers as they watched a movie and gave the previous days homework to the teacher.
“This was due twenty minutes ago,” Ms Zilkey said as she passed it back to me. As I sat down and tried to understand what I’d missed in the first fifteen minutes of Blood Diamond, I neglected to notice the worksheet in front of each of my classmates in the dark classroom. It was the second day and I was already behind. The first essay of the class came around and I spent hours upon hours writing it, and even stayed up the entire night before its submission to ensure its perfection. I was sure the A was mine.
“Your essays were all very well done. Only one failing mark, good job guys,” Ms Zilkey said as she walked around the desks to pass back papers a week later. I quickly flipped to the back page to find my 80-90% only to see a 0. A missed step of attaching my work cited made my paper inadmissible and landed me the first zero I think I’d ever received in school. I hated Ms Zilkey in that moment. Between the late homework, missing worksheet and failed paper, by the midterm I was only a few percentage above a failing grade. But I kept going.
“Write an extended ending to the novel The Kite Runner,” the instructions read for the next assignment. I spent some time creating an alternate ending for our hero, Amir and as I started to edit, my sister’s voice called out that we were late, so I decided to forgo the edit and hit print. A week later Ms Zilkey, in the prideful way she’d done in the past, read from the highest graded paper in the class. I was shocked to hear my own words read back to me, and as she wound her way through the desks she placed the paper in front of me and as heads turned, I saw the 10/10 written in the top corner.
“What is this lady’s deal?!” I thought. One minute she fails me for being late and accidentally not printing my bibliography, the next moment she’s praising me in front of the class for a short story I didn’t even get a chance to edit. As a teenager I was confused and agitated by this teacher.
I confronted Ms Zilkey late one afternoon as the students in my class packed their bags and filed out. I was sure she’d appeal to my pleas.
“I feel like I’m being penalized for a few small mistakes. I’m trying really, really hard to get an A and I just can’t get there if I have these 0’s on my mark sheet. Can you please just give me another chance to submit these things? I really am trying my hardest here.”
“I can’t. I’m sorry but I can’t do that. It just wouldn’t be fair to the other students.” I was livid. I’d worked up all this courage to be told what was and wasn’t fair by Ms Zilkey. I had almost turned on my heel, when she spoke again. She said something like, “You know Ahmad, that essay you wrote was impeccably written, I couldn’t pass you because you never cited your work. And that piece you wrote for The Kite Runner brought me to tears. You have such a strong writer’s voice. You have a gift, my friend. A gift for writing. I strongly recommend you consider a future in it and continue to write on your own.”
I’m sure it wasn’t the first time someone had told me I was good at something, but it felt like it. Because I knew for a fact she wasn’t bullshitting me. If she wanted to be nice, she’d have let me resubmit my paper. I knew she was telling the truth now because she was so adamant about the truth before, the truth that mistakes cannot go unchecked in a classroom. I’m so thankful for having a teacher like Ms Zilkey and not just because she told me I had a gift. She pushed me to strive for better, she taught me it wasn’t okay to get away with the bare minimum, she helped me realize that the details matter, and when I pay attention to them, I can write something that truly inspires. That’s the moment where it all began to crystallize. The moment I began to realize who I was meant to be.
August 2017- Off the coast of Phi Phi Island, Thailand
This part of the story I’ve told before. However, an important detail I neglected to mention during that telling was my final exchange with my best friend before we both jumped off a boat into choppy shark inhabited waters. Before I took that leap into the ocean for my first ever dive, I looked back at my friend, Chris, and as he had said it a number of times in the weeks prior to the dive, he said, “If we die, we die.”
This was the mantra for our trip; we repeated these five words to each other before kayaking through the jungle, while boarding a thirteen hour night train and even as we wandered the seedy streets of Bangkok late at night.
If we die, we die. Words exchanged to comfort one another. To tell each other that if we all have to go, we might as well go like this. But we didn’t go and I’m obviously grateful for it. However, when I reflect upon these words, I’m reminded of the fragility of life and the control we think we have over it. I’m reminded to be grateful for living to see these moments and for whatever else I’m destined to see. Although it’s been years since I made that leap, rode that train or kayaked through that jungle, these days those words often jingle in my head, in the dead of night, while crossing the street or in the passenger seat of Chris’ car. If I die, I die.
March 2019- The Hospital
I’m still unsure how one manages to wake up with the second worst migraine in their life and still finds a way to drive from Oakville to Scarborough at seven AM and work an eight plus hour production with the migraine only persisting in its potency. Yet, somehow I did so in late March of 2019. It was the last day of an important shoot, that I wasn’t going to miss over a silly headache. I drove home late in the day and even managed to get dinner with friends as the headache eased. As I got into bed that night, exhausted, I cherished the feeling that Friday night brings, and in my bed as I slowly fell, I was sure that all this headache needed was a late Saturday morning. It was instead the final night of life as I knew it. The final night I was that 25 year old kid worried about finding the right girl and advancing my career.
On Saturday, I woke up with the worst headache of my life. It felt as if I’d woken up with a vice grip for a pillow. Something was wrong. I called my mother. On Sunday, March 24th, 2019 after a series of events that included, a visit to the hospital on my doctor’s recommendation, a CT scan, an ambulance transfer to a neurology specialized hospital and an MRI, I underwent emergency surgery to remove a tumour from the front right part of my brain.
“No matter how much I remove, a part of it will always be there, and at some point it will become cancerous.” He sat on the edge of my bed in his scrubs and told me about the thing that would likely kill me. He tried to reassure me that I’d be alright. That I could live normally with a tumour. But as Dr. Shahedeh, left the room, my eyes had already filled with liquid fear and my hands shook as my mother grabbed one.
“I still have to fall in love. I still have to write a movie. There’s so much I haven’t seen yet.”
“You’ll see it all. Just have faith.” She tightened her grip as her voice began to shake. Hours later, l lay on a stretcher waiting for the anesthesiologist, I turned to Shahedeh and with tears in my eyes I asked, “I still have my best years ahead of me right?”
He smiled and an eternity later I blinked awake in the recovery room.
Three weeks. It took the doctors three weeks to complete the pathology on the eighty-five percent of the tumour Shahedeh had removed. Again, I found myself racked with nerves in a doctors office, this time surrounded by my whole family waiting for the doctors to walk in.
“Stage Three.”
That’s all I remember hearing. The rest was numbness. For weeks to come, I couldn’t look in the mirror, not because of the twenty five staples on the side of my head. All I could see was the mortality in my eyes reflected back at me as I felt my death rising slowly inside.
November 2019- Home
At the time of writing this, it’s been eight months, thirty three radiation sessions, four rounds of chemotherapy, two corrective surgeries, an infection and a summer in and out of the hospital since I had that first surgery. My radiation oncologist has since told me that the tumour I have can go away completely with the treatment plan I’m on, but it almost always comes back and I’ll be monitored the rest of my life. I have faith that the plan I’m on will work and once this cancer is gone, it will never come back. I have faith.
I re-found God in-between the clanks and bangs of an MRI, waiting to learn why my head was splitting in two. And when I found God, I was shown everything I needed to know to pick myself up, to get through this, to move forward- I already had. I knew that failure was mine to define, as was success. I was aware why I was handed this test, even though I am a good person and I knew that whatever time I have left, I have the talent to make this world a better place. I relearned and learned a lot in this time. I know everything will turn out okay. “God does not charge a soul with more than it can bear,” (The Quran 2:286).
If it doesn’t work out, I’ll still be grateful. If this tumour winds up ending me, I won’t be a tragedy. If I’m destined for a short time, it’ll still be enough. Because the moments that end up defining our lives and deaths are never the ones we expect. The moments that show us who we are, we rarely see coming. And if I die, I die.