This Is How We Said Goodbye

Part I

I’m sitting on the plane, all thoughts are finally cleared from my mind. It’s easier than I expected—like wiping a dining table clean after a long, auspicious meal. My kids and I are heading to Paris. A consolation gift. A distraction wrapped in novelty.

Camouflaged as intentional and shrouded in enthusiasm, my husband and I decided it was time to leave Dubai—our home for the past twenty years—and move back to Canada for good. We floated the idea to our kids, then six and eleven years old, after a summer frolicking in Sandbanks and a winter roasting marshmallows on Blue Mountain. They yelled yes—just like we knew they would. We counted on that giddy rush to eclipse what would come next: the ache of saying goodbye to their friends, their school, their whole-lives-so-far.

We’ve hoodwinked them into leaving Dubai.

I sigh, exhaling from deep in my chest. Still, guilt clings—tight and stubborn. Maybe some rollercoasters and French food will help loosen its grip.

We check into the New York Hotel, a stone’s throw from Disneyland Paris. We toss our luggage not bothering to unpack and head straight to the park. The kids bounce with excitement. Around us: mini-princesses, over-prepared tourists, lovers laced together, sulky teenagers clutching keychains. Perfect.

Over the next three days, a rhythm forms. Up at 8:00 am, in the park by 10:00 am. Again and again we wait in line for four minutes of magic until the thrill becomes almost muscle memory. Back to the hotel by 4:00 pm, where the kids discover croque monsieur and refuse to eat anything else. I laugh at their coup de foudre with a fancy cheese sandwich. They don’t realize they’re creating a memory, folding meaning into a bite they’ll crave again one day—maybe not the sandwich, but the feeling.

Come 7:00 pm, we return to the park. Redo some of the rides we loved: the falling elevator, bumpers, Indiana Jones. We take silly pictures. Close to midnight the French yell that it’s time to go, and by then we’re ready to collapse.

On the fourth day, we decide on a bit of culture and ride the train to the Champs Élysées. L’Arc du Triomphe towers above us. I start rattling off history, a little French Revolution, a bit of Nazi occupation, but the kids are already tugging me toward something taller.

La Tour.

Minutes later, we’re at the foot of the Eiffel Tower biting into warm, crisp croissants tossed our way by a brusque boulanger. Buttery flakes fall onto our shirts and shorts. My daughter clutches hers like treasure. My son wraps his second in a napkin and stuffs it in his pocket. A keepsake.

Around us, crowds crane their necks at the monumental iron lattice. I watch the people more than the structure. I’m storing them, too.

Our guide, Gus, is a young student, eager to impress. He peppers the group with facts about French engineering. My kids are quick to challenge him. They’ve grown up in the shadow of the Burj Khalifa, watched fireworks streak up its sides, fountains dance below, visited its top more times than I can count. They aren’t tourists here. They’re measuring. Comparing.

They question the elevator’s creaky wooden frame. Ask why it’s not glass. Why not faster? Why not taller? Gus laughs it off. The group smiles at their curiosity. A Texan couple adopts my daughter for the ride to the upper level while I sit with my son, who has lost his nerve. Gus returns with a blinking Eiffel Tower keychain for him—and a plastic rose for me, tied with a ribbon that says “Veux-tu m’épouser” Will you marry me?

We laugh and laugh and laugh.

After La Tour, it’s time for steak frites and crème brûlée. At a bistro on Rue Saint-Dominique, we dine and watch a grand piano being swung through a second-floor window. My kids are mesmerized. “Why are the doors so small?” “Who buys a piano that doesn’t fit?” Their giggles stitch into the moment. The forever memory brought up every time they see a grand piano. “Remember when…?”

Our last day in France is for shopping. Their reward for four days of near-perfection is a few mementos from Disneyland’s souvenir shops. I began the trip on a strict budget. But five days in France have already blurred the edges. Soon I’m off to the luggage section. I buy another suitcase. In it: sweatshirts, keychains, baseball caps, a gift for Dad, trinkets, and LEGO sets of the Eiffel Tower and Burj Khalifa.

Not junk. Things. Important things. Proof. Evidence that joy happened.

My fingers trace the hot pink Arabic calligraphy on my new phone cover. Five days culminate into another fact: I want to go back. I am not ready.

Part II

There’s a speech. Then the goodbyes—so many goodbyes, stretched over days. Teary-eyed friends return again and again. Maybe hoping our plans have changed.

I offer them my legendary warm hug—one more tether, one more keepsake. Those who’ve woven me into their lives now hold on tighter. And slowly, I begin to understand: I’m not the only one packing.

For some, I’ll have to untangle slowly. For others, the separation abrupt.

What surprises me is the grief. Not just mine.

My husband and I were here before the skyline filled in. In 1968, his family arrived in Dubai, exiled from Syria, when this place was still a desert outpost for Arabian cowboys. I returned in 1996, expecting a short visit. I stayed twenty-two years. Fell in love. Watched it rise.

We lived through the city’s transformation—its ambition for breaking world records, its quicksilver towers, man-made islands sprouting out of cerulean waters. The post-9/11 arrivals with brown skin and Western passports seeking refuge from suspicion. The 2008 wave of white-collar expats drawn by oil, steel, glass. Money. The Arab Spring surge, hungry for safety and hope.

And we welcomed them. Helped them find homes, jobs, friendships. We were at their weddings, their baby showers, their Friday brunches and Ramadan feasts—and sometimes, their funerals.

We were the ones they found when they arrived. And now, we’re the ones leaving.

After forty-six years, my husband is being expelled. Not from Damascus. From Dubai. The irony clings to us like humidity.

And yet it’s not the politics or the paperwork that undoes me. It’s the objects being passed back and forth in these final days.

The way people press things into my hands. Things that represent what they couldn’t say out loud. Things they want me to carry.

This move is more than an ending. For some, it’s a small death. And when people grieve, they do strange, beautiful, unforgettable things.

Part III

The friends I mattered to most are the ones most undone.

Reema shows up to our farewell party with her latest distraction—a too-loud, too-handsy Yemeni named Mo. He wraps himself around her loneliness like cellophane. She’s still bruised from her divorce, aged by it. Once, she cried into my lap in the middle of a mall. I stroked her hair like a child’s.

I give her my black Prada handbag. The one she’s adored from our very first meeting fourteen years ago. I want her to have something beautiful that, for once, she didn’t have to beg for. Inside is a letter filled with words I can’t say to her face: precious, second sister, unconditional.

Graciela can’t bear it. She skips the farewell party. Our sons were inseparable. She’s always trusted me with him—once said she wished I were his godmother. She says she needs my honesty, clings to it in a world she finds increasingly hollow.

She waits until I’m on the plane to deliver her parting gift: a silver ‘Eternity’ necklace from Tiffany’s. She hands it to my husband, still packing in our half-empty house. The box is tiny, delicate. It speaks more clearly than she can.

Melissa arrives just hours before I leave. Her voice rushes ahead of her tears trying to outrun them. Each one that falls feels weighted with a chapter: the boyfriend she lost in 9/11, her IVF battles, the near-divorce, the three children, the fragile calm that finally followed.

I give her my small Gucci shoulder bag. It’s filled with personal knick-knacks. What can I give my beautiful friend except parts of me? For the first time in all our years of friendship, she is speechless. She clutches it like a lifeline and rushes out the door. Forgets to say goodbye.

My husband watches her go. Wrinkles his nose.

“Such odd fucking behaviour,” he says.

People do the strangest things when they’re grieving. I understand that now. You reach for what you can. You give away what you can’t carry.

Later, Melissa’s husband tells me she cried for days.

There’s one final visit before I can zip my suitcase. Danya arrives with two enormous artisanal cushions. Their patterns are wild and loud. We giggle at the absurdity of it. “I didn’t know what to get you,” she says. “I just wanted something big so you’ll never forget me.”

Forget her? I’ve known her since we were five. Our friendship is sun-warmed and soil-deep, an olive tree attached to the mountainside. The idea that she could be lost to time is laughable. Unthinkable.

“Don’t be silly,” I say. The last syllable wobbles off my tongue. She hugs me and we pretend we are five years old again, crying for sympathy not empathy. As she turns to leave, she rips off her phone case and gives it to me. It is a tacky, hot-pink plastic thing with “forbidden” etched in swooping Arabic calligraphy. She laughs. I laugh. We both blink too hard.

What is forbidden?

Forgetting.

Part IV

France fades behind me.

As we rise over the Atlantic, I feel the tears building—timid at first, then insistent. I try to blink them away, but my body is no longer listening to my brain. I am sucker-punched. Shoulders shake. Snot slips past my nose. Silence buckles.

I sob.

Outside the window, the ocean moves with steady indifference. “Take your time,” it seems to say. “We’ll be here a while.”

So I do.

I choke. I squeeze my eyes shut. I curse under my breath, quietly and viciously, like someone trying to fight off being robbed. I wipe my face on the airplane blanket and order a vodka tonic—hold the tonic.

My kids lean into me, their tiny bodies warm and solid. I feel the bulge of souvenirs tucked into their backpacks—stuffed animals in mouse ears, light-up keychains, squashed paper bags with receipts they’ve insisted on keeping. Each item proof that the magic happened. That they were brave. That we’re starting something.

I call my husband. He’s already in Toronto.

“The weather is beautiful,” he says.

In the overhead bin is the extra suitcase we bought in Paris. In it: trinkets, ticket stubs, fridge magnets, ponchos, metro passes, and of course, the LEGO sets of Burj Khalifa and Eiffel Tower.

And somewhere inside me: a rose with a ribbon, a silver necklace in a blue box, a letter in a purse, a designer handbag on my friend’s shoulder, two chaotic cushions, and a hot pink phone case that says “forbidden”.

Hello Canada. Maybe I’m ready.