[Phase Three]

Visiting Egypt after the death of my father felt completely foreign to me.  Every male was like him.  I used to tell my mother that he was still alive and that I saw him on the street, in a car, on a camel on the walls of the ancient tombs.  Egypt was supposed to connect me to him, but his absence just made my heart grow harder and more rigid.  

I was expected to be just like him.  I was expected to speak Arabic and read the Qur'an.  I was expected to fast [possible dialog here.  Ramadan in Alex.] and pray five times a day.  The truth was that I was indifferent about Islam and my father's heritage.  The only pride I had was that of being an American.  A fan of baseball and football, of the Astros and the Oilers.  My affections could not be imported or exported.  They were as native as I was Texan.  

My heart was going through a Freudian puberty and growing fonder for my mother.  She was my world.  I wanted to make her happy again.  I felt guilty for my father's death.  Had I been more concerned about Islam and Egypt, he would be alive today and Egypt wouldn't feel like an empty Sarcophagus or blood without oxygen.  

[Phase Four]

Immediately I saw how my mother's eye's lit up when I began to fast for the first time that summer.  [Continue with desire to please the mother as the futility of a life not lived for oneself.]  

I memorized every Sura I could get my hands on.  I practiced my prayers as if they were the very manifestation of the sacred Arabic alphabet.  [The expansion and contraction emphasis here is on the reaction, the wave is merely a memory of the original action that set it in motion.]  I was not praying of my own will, but in a effort to receive a positive reaction from my mother.  She loved it and did not want to see it end.  One Christmas, she discovered that there was a winter camp for Muslims.  It was just outside of Indianapolis, Indiana.  She told her friends that it would be good for me.  I would be surrounded by other Muslim boys and girls and not be tempted to go to the mall, or the movies -- tempted by the corporate Christian holiday.

I went along with it willingly.  She was happy and that's all that mattered to me.  [Explain the camp experience, the recruitment for the Mujahideen.]  The ultimate realization was that I could not repair her broken heart.  I could not bring my father back.  I had to live for myself as painful as it was to watch.  

[Phase Five]

[Meeting Heidi for the first time was like a blind heart not knowing where the sweetly oxygenated blood had gone.  I didn't understand the feelings of true love.  I didn't understand what compelled me to wait outside her dorm until she appeared.  The very sight of her, the knowledge that the was alive and real, continued to arouse that tender warm oxygen.  I could feel my blood thicken with joy.  I walked the campus smiling, like a crazed ragamuffin.  My heart was responding to this oxygen and I was happy truly happy to see the Isis around my Isolde's neck.  Had I not known her, I would have called her my Ayeesha.

[Continue with story of meeting her.]

Conclude with the present time.  The revelation that I have my father's heart disease.  That the cardiac cycle will repeat itself.  That love and loss are part and parcel of the Muslim identity.  The human identity.