My son was not outside. He lay in bed, in a darkened room, unable to tolerate the noise, the light, the movement of his own body. The celebration happening just beyond our walls might as well have been on another planet. So often, over the years since my children developed neuroimmune conditions, I felt hollow. There was a hole inside me that nothing could fill.
For more than 11 years, I told myself it was too early to grieve. My father, Ali Mustafa, was arrested by Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria on 2 July 2013 and disappeared. Since that day, we have had no word, no trace, nothing. Every morning since he was taken I made my first thought after waking up: He is alive. Every night I went to sleep repeating it.
