by Mona Khalafi
Image source: @earth on Instagram
“I never wanted to leave my home.”
These words from my father shocked me. Like most immigrants, my parents left for opportunity, safety, and for a life they could only imagine for me and my brother. I began to picture the life I would have lived had the Iranian revolution gone a different way. But what of the life that could have been? A childhood, summers, streets and bazaars now frozen in time.
December 28th: The headlines read: Bazaars in Iran have closed. Inflation reaches its limits.
I was across the world that day, leaning on the railing of my balcony in a different country. My family and I traveled on vacation with friends from the Iranian diaspora who have become our family in the United States. Meanwhile, my relatives waited for news thousands of miles away.
It has been over ten years since my last visit, a strange feeling after spending summers in Iran that once shaped my childhood.
January 8: Complete blackout. The entire country had gone silent after services were cut off while protests were escalating. Reaching a peak and point of no return.
I had my OSCE and lectures on ear infections, nutrition, and back pain. Life continued in microcosm, oblivious to the rupture happening half a world away.
January 9th: silence.
I went to lecture, then nursed a headache. A quiet ache that seemed to stretch across oceans.
January 10th: Smuggled devices brought affidavits from those still in the country. Weapons have started to be used against protestors. Mortality was predicted to be 200.
I was unproductive that Saturday. Quiet and mediocre for me while their history could not pause. January 11th: The death toll drastically rose to 2,000. Foreign aid was urged.
I did 60 practice questions, caught between my life moving forward while others were fighting for a turning point in theirs.
January 12: 100 hours without internet. Some devices slipped through Starlink. The words were morbid and raw: “They just kept killing.”
I spent 11 hours in the clinic seeing people’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, while we had not heard from mine in those 5 days. Out of reach.
As the days pass differently for us, I held the quiet of their struggle alongside the life I continued to live, carrying a reminder that these multiple realities have shaped the life I live.
In the depth of clerkships, life does not stop. Medicine brings me to the intersection of this feeling, where we are reminded to witness, to carry, and to remain human; fragile, aware, and attentive to the lives we touch.
Somewhere between here and home, I feel the pulse of a future that could have been, the life I was supposed to live.
Mona Khalafi is a fourth-year medical student at the UTCOMLS.
