Love Does Not Need Time: Remembering My Amma

My mother-in-law, whom I called Amma, passed away on a Thursday night from heart failure. She left behind a big family, an even bigger extended family and hundreds of people who were not related to her at all, but whom she cared for throughout her 50 years of marriage.

It has been a few weeks now. I still do not feel steady. Everything reminds me of her, and almost every day there is a moment when it hits me again that she is not coming back. I have been trying to understand why this loss feels so heavy. Writing is how I make sense of things, so here is what I have learned from her and from losing her.

The question I used to ask

Before I got married, I honestly did not understand how someone else’s parents could become your parents. I used to ask friends how they could call their in-laws “Baba” or “Ma” when they already had their own parents for a lifetime. I assumed I would call my mother-in-law “Aunty,” or maybe avoid using any name at all.

Then Alvi and I got married, and none of that planning mattered. From the very first moment, I called her Amma. I did not decide it or force it. It simply came out, because that is who she was to me.

She loved me the way my mother does

Like most people, my idea of a mother comes from my own mom. And Amma treated me exactly the way my mom does. She would push food on me that I did not want, refill my plate before I finished and make sure I left the table far too full. Every Asian child knows this sweet torture. We pretend to be annoyed, and we secretly love it. With Amma, I recognized it instantly. It felt like home.

A home bigger than its walls

Amma was a homemaker. She made a home in Dhaka and another in Bhandaria, but her real work reached far beyond those walls. She shaped the people and places around her.

I saw her generosity firsthand in the two years I had with her. What I did not know was how far it went. At her funeral, people I had never met came forward, one after another, to share what she had done for them. Much of the good she did, she did quietly. Most of it I am only learning about now that she is gone.

Grief does not check the calendar

Part of me keeps asking whether it is normal to feel this much. She was my mother-in-law. I knew her for only two years.

But I have come to believe that the depth of a bond is not measured in years. Some people take decades to feel like family. Amma made me feel like family in a single day. It makes sense that losing her feels like losing a mother, because that is exactly what she was to me.

What Amma taught me

• Real generosity is quiet. The proof of her kindness was not in what she told anyone. It was in the strangers who showed up to say goodbye.
• Family is something you can grow into. I was sure in-laws could never feel like parents. She proved me wrong without even trying.
• A home is measured by who it holds. She built two homes, but what she really built was a circle of people who felt cared for.
• Love does not need time to be real. Two years were enough to make her my Amma for life.
• Say it while they can hear it. I wish I had told her more often what she meant to me. I am trying to do that now with the people still here.

I miss her every day. I am grateful that I got to call her Amma, even for a short while. May Allah grant her the highest place in Jannah and give our family the patience to carry this loss.