A son is studying eight hours away from his rural home in Bangladesh. He’s at university, building a name for himself, paving a path not trod by his forefathers. He meets peers who have known only cities. He hones his formal Bengali, shedding his informal dialect. In a nationwide civil service exam, he ranks in the top percentile and earns a coveted merit placement. He leaves behind the swampy farmlands of his youth to forge networks in the big city.

The nation is still rebuilding two decades after its Liberation War, infamously referred to as a bottomless basket case. One day, he receives a letter: his father is ill. He drops everything for the rocky seven-hour drive on unfinished roads and marshy soil back to his ancestral village.

Two years ago, I received diagnosis that I’m still grieving from and struggling to accept. After an endoscopy and colonoscopy to determine the cause of my anemia at age sixty, I was told I had celiac disease. Somehow after sixty years, my gene for celiac was activated, and now I had to make drastic, lifelong changes.

My husband and I took care of my mom for five years, when she had Alzheimer’s. She could get lost walking out the door, which is why I was always her shadow. But I felt lost too: whom was I dealing with, hour by hour, day by day, due to the changes in her Alzheimer’s-riddled brain. I felt lost and confused by our new puzzling reality.

One thing that helped me cope was humor. Sometimes my mother would say something funny, like when she wanted to tell someone that she had pounded the pavement after college, looking for an accounting job in New York City. But what she said was, “I walked the streets of New York City, if you know what I mean.” Yes, my mom might have been a sweet talker, but she wasn’t a street walker!

There were three of us in the same high school class who chose to study medicine. We passed our admission exams together, and celebrated the fact with a hearty meal and a generous libation of red wine, a once-in-a-lifetime event. We were already making plans for future specialties and career prospects.

Then one of the three collapsed suddenly at home and died of a previously undetected heart problem. That was in the twentieth year of our lives, the third of our studies. Our trio became a duet.

Sitting by myself on the balcony at the Asa Wright Nature Centre. Waiting for the dawn chorus. Hungry and waiting for breakfast. And wondering: Am I too familiar with Death?

We first came into each other’s circles in 2008, when Uncle Steve died.

For the next few years, we watched each other from afar.

But then, in 2011 when I started in the Intensive Care Unit, we moved into the same neighbourhood. I saw Death more and more, especially during holiday season.

As I dwell on the recent death of my oldest son, I can’t help but think of my father, who dealt with his share of losses.

At the age of 16, he lost the use of his (dominant) right arm during a polio epidemic. The response from one girl he asked out was “I don’t date cripples.” How’s that for a confidence-booster?

After graduating from college in 1927, he went to work as an accountant on Wall Street, just before the onset of the Great Depression. Talk about poor timing. But one of his proudest moments was that after working a few days around the clock, trying to balance the books, he kept his job through the Depression.