This past Wednesday, we buried Dr. Sheeraz Iqbal, the firstborn son of our best friends. He was 46 years old and had been suffering from brain cancer for 18 months. In front of our eyes, we saw him slowly ebb away physically. He was not the first young person to succumb to cancer in our community, and as Dr. Azra Raza, a renowned Pakistani American oncologist at Columbia University has said in her book “The First Cell”: we need to do better at understanding and finding prevention for the dreadful C monster. She has said to us that she is seeing more and more cancer in younger people.
We have known the family for 40 years, and our children are best friends also. He was my best friend’s son and my son’s best friend. With pride, we watched as he took over his dad’s pediatric practice and expanded it, because his dad also has had a different cancer for 20 years. He only survived because of his own persistence and highly skilled research capacity. He even wrote a book called “Swimming Upstream” by Dr. Sajjad Iqbal, showing how patients need to take their destiny into their own hands. Currently he is on the Patient Empowerment Network (https://powerfulpatients.org) an advocacy organization for cancer patients to take control of their cancer journey, and counsels patients worldwide on their healing journey. It is ironic that he lost his beloved son to a more vicious form of cancer at the peak of family, career and community life.
For 18 months our family, and indeed the Pakistani community of New Jersey, held our breath to see if some clinical trial could help, but to no avail. It was disappointment after disappointment, while we continued to hold prayer chains endlessly. Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry for quite a long time, I felt so disappointed in the industry that has not gone deeper into prevention. One could say I am a fan of Dr. Azra Raza. Her colleague Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee has written several books on cancer as well, which I have not read. Just the title scares me: Emperor of Maladies, a Biography of Cancer.
In Muslim tradition, the body is to be buried as soon as possible. Within hours, all arrangements were made, and the burial took place only 7 hours after the event, with hundreds attending from the tri-state area at short notice on a cold, yet sunny day. It was a magical exit, as usually it takes at least a day or two or three. A few days later on Christmas Eve at a mosque in New Jersey we held a Muslim prayer and memorial. The attendance by so many non-Muslims – patients, friends, neighbors- no less on Christmas Eve, demonstrated the amazing impact Sheeraz had on the Ridgewood, NJ community and beyond. He was chairman of Dads Night, a charity organization for Ridgewood schools; he had transformed it and transformed his fellow Dads as well, as they shared their grief at the memorial. As his wife, brother, sister, my son, his friends from Tufts University and his Dads Night friends spoke, we cried and laughed alternatively as he was famed for his wit, charm, kindness and most famously his comedic talent. In death we saw the large impact this young man had in all facets of life: family, community, medicine and patient care. It was moving and overwhelming.
As is Islamic belief, we submit to the will of Allah, our Creator. We surrender to whatever trial we are put through, in this case our best friends’ family: his wife and two children, his parents, his two siblings and the extended family. But the heart is broken, the tears flow and the sadness will stay a long while. All I hope for is a fundamental breakthrough in cancer discovery and treatment. Our focus will be on healing now, and in particular supporting with love and care the bereaved family.
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