Egyptian dispatch: Feb. 16, 2013

Today we went to the Italian hospital to witness Arda's body being put into a coffin to be taken to the airport and then flown to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. From there it will be picked up by the funeral home in De Pere. Koumaki (his African name) joined us, and as it turns out he's well acquainted with the place as he's coordinated the return of many members of the Sudanese refugee community back home to Sudan. He proudly showed us his new passport for South Sudan. We gave him a gift of Arda's MacBook — he glowed with appreciation.

This lovely Italian nurse/nun took Nina's hand as she showed us where the morgue was. Of the actual moments during which the body was brought out of the fridge and maneuvered from there to the coffin; I was too preoccupied with taking photographs to really feel the gravity of the occasion, or rather I used the camera as a shield to deflect what was really happening. Nina insists that I do not put up any photos of Arda's body on the blog, but was OK with me showing the gold cross that had been stitched onto her shroud and positioned over her upper body. I have also included a photograph of our funeral director paying the morgue workers after they had completed their task. We left the morgue and took some time to compose ourselves next to a pleasant little garden in the hospital grounds. There was such finality at seeing her body all wrapped up and there was no avoiding the concrete fact of her death. Also, I really can't imagine sharing a more profound experience with one's daughter than to see the person who gave you life being prepared for the next world.  

We then went with the driver to the Gayer-Anderson museum, which is an incredible place and literally a step back into the 17th century.

What was the icing on the cake however was the mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun, which is just next door to the museum. Completed at the dawn of Christianity (897AD) it's an unbelievable experience to be walking inside a building 1000 years old and Nina and I were just blown away. It also offered a fresh perspective on Arda's death with the realization of how we are all such brief flickers of light within the much larger human drama. 

After this we crossed the city as Nina wanted to check out the Armenian cemetery to find Arda's parent's family plot. I had a vague memory of where it was located, but since 99% of the names were written in Armenian, we were unable to locate it!  

Later in the evening as I finally began attacking our mountain of washing up I was suddenly struck by a detail that had gone unnoticed when we were in the morgue. Arda's flight plan has her flying from Cairo to Istanbul and then on to Chicago. The irony of her last journey passing through the very country that was responsible for her being born in the Armenian diaspora in Egypt was just too haunting and too full of pathos, couple this with the fact that Turkey still vehemently denies its role in the Armenian genocide — even as we approach its 100 anniversary in 2015.