It’s not about my political affiliations or my religious beliefs. It’s about trying to feel the pain of a wife waiting for her hubby.
WAITING FOR SHAHBAZ TASEER
BY MAHEEN TASEER*
The author is a psychologist who married Shahbaz Taseer, the son of Punjab’s assassinated governor Salmaan Taseer, in 2010. Her husband was kidnapped in Lahore on*Aug. 26, 2011. His whereabouts remain unknown.**
It’s been five Eids, two wedding anniversaries, and four birthdays since Shahbaz has been gone. Friends have gotten married, children have been born, and world-changing events have taken place all around us. And yet if you were to ask me what my overwhelming sense of the time that has passed has been I would say it has been one of stillness. It is as if nothing has moved at all. He walked out of that door that day, two years ago, and I am sitting where he left me, waiting for that door to open again.*
You hold on. You hope. You pray. You survive. You wish the best for him yet you know that there is suffering. You can abide your own pain, but what do I do about the pain that he might be going through and that I know nothing about?*
I am told that all suffering has a purpose. Such pain can either break you or make you. I am told that I have become stronger, and knowing how Shahbaz is, I know this is true for him too. Wherever Shahbaz is being kept, I know he is worried for us. Those who know him have no doubt that this trial will make him braver, wiser, and stronger. And that perhaps will give some meaning to his senseless and violent abduction. I would like to think that my love for him and his commitment to me are helping him through this immense trial.*
People ask me often how it feels, how I handle the pain. There is no frame of reference for this kind of a situation. How does one cope with something like a kidnapping? It is easier to explain away other, more familiar traumas to attain some sense of comfort and even closure. A kidnapping is rarer, harder to examine and more difficult to process. It helps to speak with those who have gone through similar trials, forced to brave the taking away of those dearest to them without reason and without there being any surety of what the outcome will be. This is what makes the experience—a cycle of hope and despair—so much more difficult.*
I have been fortunate in many ways. I have family and friends to turn to. I have a job which keeps me occupied, more so as I deal with people whose pain and suffering I can ease as their psychological counselor. Yet when the day is over, the overwhelming feeling is of being very alone and isolated. This is a loneliness that nobody can really relate to. People can comfort you, but it is difficult to fathom what it really means to just wait and wait and wait. How do you explain what it means to be without your best friend, your soul mate, for reasons that have nothing to do with either him or you? Such pain changes you. Such loneliness could leave one embittered, if you did not have faith and hope, and a deep conviction that your love, loyalty, and commitment will triumph in the end. There is a future that you must constantly keep before you, if the present is to be survived.