In the corner of her one-room apartment, Mona sat upright. Beneath the folds of her weathered, yellowed face, her eyes burned into a single point on the wall invisible to us. I knew that she had mustered all of her energy into waiting. Her daughter had passed her courses and was awarded her degree, but it would be months before the graduation ceremony. And patience was an endurance that Mona could no longer afford.
So I called the photographers, and I arranged for her graduation robe. The daughter’s degree in her hand, we held the ceremony in the one-room-apartment-waiting-room-no-longer. And on that day , Mona needed to wait no more, and the daughter asked her to make her way.