In the intervening years, there have been other attempts by women to drive inside Saudi Arabia. On October 26, 2013, hundreds of women drove in Saudi Arabia, and an online petition that circulated on Twitter and Facebook received some sixteen thousand signatures in a few days before it was officially shut down. I lent my support to their effort—and drove in solidarity along the roads of Dubai. But women continue to pay a high price for driving. In December 2015, Loujain al-Hathloul, then twenty-five, was arrested as she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates border—with a valid UAE license. Arrested along with her was Maysa, the journalist who had interviewed and helped me back in 2011. Maysa had rushed to the border to help Loujain. Both were detained for more than seventy days, and their cases were referred to Saudi Arabia’s specialized criminal court, established to try terrorism cases. (They were released several days after Great Britain’s Prince Charles visited the Saudi king and raised the case of a male blogger, Rafi Badawi, who had been sentenced to one thousand lashes and ten years in prison for “insulting Islam through electronic channels.”) After they were freed, Loujain and Maysa were banned from traveling and faced the threat of renewed prosecution. Their travel ban was lifted and their cars returned only after the intervention of Germany’s foreign minister. There has not been another concerted effort by Saudi women to drive.
As I traveled and lived outside Saudi Arabia, my eyes opened, not simply to all the people and the news that I had missed, but to smaller, more personal things. I watched as a friend flew to Spain to watch his daughter play competitive basketball. All those years when I was studying at the university in Jeddah, my parents never knew that I played basketball. I never showed them my team medals or told them about our tournaments. I never told them because I knew that they wouldn’t have approved. They might even have insisted that I quit. There were so many moments that we missed because the rules didn’t allow it.
Between visiting Aboudi and traveling around the world, I did not make it back to Jeddah all that often to see my parents. When my second son was born, my mother came to Dubai, but she stayed only three days. As soon as she arrived, she got into a fight with some of the airport personnel. At our apartment, she was fighting, shouting, and driving us crazy. After three days, she went home. I insisted that she be evaluated by a psychologist, and the diagnosis came back that Mama was bipolar and likely schizophrenic—her illness had gotten worse with aging and stress. All our lives, my brother and sister and I had been told that Mama was possessed by demons. Mama herself often believed that we were the target of witchcraft or claimed that people or cars were following her. Instead, she suffered from a mental illness, one that was treatable and could be controlled. None of us had a clue that this was the problem. But after she was diagnosed, she refused to take the medicine that might help her symptoms. In frustration, I stayed away, longer than I should have.
On July 17, 2015, the day of Eid al-Fitr, Mama was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. I was visiting my parents with Aboudi for Eid, and when I saw her, I realized the mom I knew was gone. She had lost half her body weight and was lying in bed, too weak to get up and move around. And she was coughing up blood but refused to see a doctor. I was mad at Abouya for not telling any of us how bad her condition was. She couldn’t even take a shower by herself, so I guided her to the bathroom, and for the first time, I bathed her as if she were a child. When I saw her breasts, I started crying. I knew, but it was the emergency room doctor in the hospital who told me for sure. It took me a month to get Mama to complete the medical tests. She would lock herself in her room and wish herself death rather than go back to the hospital. Some days, she accused us of trying to harm her and refused to take any medicine. I spent hours outside her room, crying and begging her to allow me to take her to her doctors’ appointments. It was the most difficult and emotional time of my life. Mama’s cancer was very advanced. Finally, I got her to an oncologist, and we also started the shots to treat her mental illness. After the third shot, she was a changed person. It was only in the last months of her life that I got to know my true mother.
She was pleasant, warm, cooperative. I had been afraid to have Mama come to my university graduation for fear that she would make a scene. Now I could go anywhere with her. She came with me to Dubai, and we went to the movies, to restaurants, to the aquarium. I read the news to her, and we laughed a lot. She played and sang to Hamza. My brother was able to sit with her and talk for hours. We learned all about her past. She told us about her parents—about her own mother, who had died when she was four—and about her grandparents. Without knowing it, I had named both my sons the same names as each of her grandfathers, Abdalla and Hamza.
I told my brother that I felt as if I was losing Mama twice.
Mama wanted to go back home, she told me she missed Mecca and the Grand Mosque. It took only a few months for the cancer to grow stronger than Mama. She told us that she had seen a vision of her own mother in a dream and that her mother said, “I miss you.”
“I’m going to die before the end of the year,” Mama said. The woman who had been unhappy nearly all my life, who had always spoken about how she wished for death, had one last wish: to see my toddler son, Hamza, again. But she was too weak to come to Dubai, and even my father could not persuade the Saudi authorities to grant this eighteen-month-old boy a visa.
On February 28, 2016, she took her last breath. Her lungs literally collapsed from the cancer. But she was tough to her last day. She woke up, took a shower, did her laundry, and even arranged the guest room for a friend’s visit. When my father called the ambulance because she was suffering, she sent them away, saying she wanted to die in her own bed. She died lying on my father’s arm. The same ambulance came back to collect her body.
As a Muslim woman, I had one final obligation to my mother: to wash her body before burial. I told my father to have the body stored, that I would come. I remember standing in the Dubai airport, crying, and the passport control man asking me, “What, did you not enjoy Dubai?” and I replied that my mother had just passed away. I washed my mom and saw her dressed one last time in a pink dress with black flowers. Her own mother had been buried in Mecca (she died from heat stroke when she was performing the hajj, sixty-two years before my mom’s own death) in a cemetery next to the Grand Mosque where the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) wife had been buried centuries ago. Mama’s one wish was to be buried next to her mom.
In the Saudi practice of Islam, women are not permitted to attend burial ceremonies. I could not even ride in the car with Mama’s casket. But I went on my own to the Grand Mosque to pray. The mosque has 2 million visitors a day, so the crowds for prayer are always huge. At the end of my prayers, my brother texted me, “We buried Mama,” and I felt at peace.