The forty days, and what came after
Nadia tells her own story: the August 2020 explosion, the forty days of mourning that held her up, and the eighteen months after when the rituals ended and her faith went quiet.
A Druze father and the question he stopped asking
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Show notes
Where is she now
Kamal Abu Shakra is a pharmacist from the Chouf whose daughter Lina died of leukaemia at nine. In the Druze tradition the soul is reborn immediately, and Kamal talks with unusual honesty about how that belief both held him and tormented him with the question of where, and who, she is now.
- What Druze teaching says about rebirth, in Kamal's own words
- Searching for signs in the faces of other people's children
- The sheikh who told him to stop looking, and why that was kind
- Lina's bicycle, and what he decided to do with it after four years
Nadia closes with a reflection on beliefs that comfort and wound at the same time.
Transcript
Welcome back to What the Candle Knows. I am Nadia Boulos. My guest today is Kamal Abu Shakra, a pharmacist from the Chouf mountains, and a father. His daughter Lina died of leukaemia when she was nine. Kamal is Druze, and in his tradition the soul does not wait: it is reborn at the moment of death, somewhere, in someone. I wanted to understand what that belief does to a grieving parent, because Kamal told me it was both the thing that saved him and the thing that nearly destroyed him. He spent two years looking for her in other people's children. We talk about that, about the sheikh who told him to stop, and about a small bicycle that stayed in the hallway for four years. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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