At that time in our life, he alienated a lot of people. As I got back into the business of living, I’d go to New York to visit Jan or I’d go to Miami to hang out with my mother, but it was unusual for them to come to Minneapolis. We rarely had guests unless it was work-related, and my husband was gone a lot of the time. It felt so strange to not be working, to be sitting there alone.
The tabloid coverage of our loss rubbed salt in the wound. While the celebrity news cycle hadn’t yet reached the frenzied fever pitch of today, it was still in overdrive—and as one of the biggest pop stars in the world, my husband—and our tragedy—got a lot of play in some of the sleaziest media out there. One day at the grocery store, I was standing in line trying not to look at the twisted headlines, and some well-meaning idiot said to me, “Did you have your baby yet?” I left my tampons and Advil on the conveyor belt and cried in my car. The tabloids were full of speculation and ugly rumors. I’m not even going to address all that here. It was devastating.
Creating music was my husband’s solid ground; dancing was mine. It’s not like I could just slide back into my skinny jeans like nothing had happened. I’d gained over eighty pounds while I was pregnant. Forty of that disappeared immediately, because extreme fluid retention was one of the symptoms that indicated serious problems with the pregnancy; it had been the first real warning sign that something was terribly wrong. The rest of that weight came from the normal weight gain of pregnancy, combined with months of inactivity. I refused to beat myself up about it, but I had to work it off.
I’m built like my dad, with a body builder’s musculature. It served me well when I was dancing hard seven days a week, but as I lay in the hospital, I could feel myself getting softer every day. I had planned for this, but my plan was to go to work out with a personal trainer while Amiir giggled in his bassinet nearby. I planned to hike with him on my back and teach him to swim and play, play, play all day. Instead I was alone, trying to rebuild my body like a house after a hurricane.
Christmas came and went, but we hardly noticed it. I told Mama, “Sometimes couples need a break. So this is going to be our break, and we’ll get strong again. We’ll find each other.”
He wanted the same thing. On our first anniversary, February 14, 1997, he released Kamasutra, the music he’d composed for our wedding with the NPG Orchestra. I listened to it over and over and felt myself coming out of this thick fog of grief I’d been trying to find my way through. I listened to the new music he was working on, and it was full of love for me and Amiir. We agreed that we needed to go somewhere, make a place for just the two of us, far away from the business and the tabloids and the demands—a place we could retreat to and have another baby surrounded by peace and music and privacy. We considered Hawaii, but they said I’d have to leave Mia in quarantine for six months, and that was not happening.
“What about Egypt?” he asked, and I was into that idea right away. My memories of Egypt—going all the way back to my childhood—were filled with mystic connection, more beauty than a pair of eyes could take in, and the rich scent of dreams coming true.
“There would be a bit of culture shock,” I said, “but I would love to live there. And maybe we could do some good, you know? When I was a kid, the first thing was this culture shock. I’d never seen such poverty. The children run around, and their hair is light brown with dust. They’re out at midnight, because they swap times in the house. They rotate times to be out on the street. I mean, I’d come home and kiss the soil, grateful for what we have, and I do have a problem with the way women are treated, but I’ve always felt a connection to the music, the architecture, the people. There’s an energy there that I’ve never felt anywhere else.”
He’d been soul-searching, reading books on various religions, consuming one thick tome after another on Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam. He wanted me to read with him and discuss all the different types of scripture, and that was a conversation I was into. I was curious to learn about the world beyond the boundaries of my grandmother’s strict Catholic faith.
He asked me about the Muslims in Egypt, and I said, “There’s something about it that appeals to me. I hear the music and the prayers, and it seems natural. Comforting. I never felt out of place there. You hear this amazing singing, and everything stops, and the people pray. I’ve been stranded on planes because it was prayer time.”
“They stop to pray,” he said. “To observe that practice—to prioritize that in your life—it would change everything.”