Where the Streets Have Your Name— Part One

A series of personal essays on family legacies and loss, grief and greed, ableism and erasure.

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver

Twenty-five years ago this month—on the night of February 3, 2001, the second weekend of the second semester of my freshman year at Rice University—I frantically stuffed all of my dress clothes, including my one and only black suit, into the small travel suitcase I kept tucked underneath my bed on the bottom bunk. I told my mom—insisted, really—that I would be fine to drive myself back home to Alexandria. One hundred sixty miles east on Interstate 10, then eighty miles north on U.S.-165. A four-hour drive, though I could usually make it in three and a half.

Earlier that night, I’d been at dinner with my roommate, Saaed, and a group of classmates whose names I don’t even remember today. I excused myself from the table to take a call from my mother. But the voice on the other end wasn’t hers. It was her older sister, my Aunt Jean, who told me I needed to leave the restaurant and call my mom back as soon as I was somewhere quie…