My mother left me a voicemail two days before having the brain stroke, and I’ve been listening to that voicemail again and again and again. Looking at her current situation leaves me shocked with disbelief of what’s happening and what she’s going through.

I read Muhammad’s text message twice, searching for the right words but I could think of nothing to say beyond I’m so sorry, and other platitudes. The tragedy is that the stroke she suffered did not take her life but instead trapped her within it. She has left-side paralysis, can’t see out of her left eye, can’t speak, feed herself, or remember her husband and her nine children. To further complicate matters, she lives in Kabul. Even when U.S. forces had largely secured the country and medical NGOs were operating, her condition would have been dire. But under the Taliban’s repressive rule—a consequence of failed U.S. policy—the situation is all but impossible. In the 1980s, the U.S. provided financial and logistical support to the Afghan mujahideen to fight Soviet forces but abandoned the country after Russia left in defeat. Afghanistan then fell into a brutal civil war until Taliban emerged in 1994 as a force promising to restore order and Islamic law. 

After 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan toppling the Taliban but without any plan to rebuild the country other than to install loyalists in the new Afghan government. The creation of a corrupt, unsustainable Afghan regime dependent on foreign support failed to establish legitimacy. Instead, many Afghans longed for the stability of the Taliban years leading to the group’s swift takeover following the 2021 U.S. withdrawal. 

When Muhammad’s mother had a stroke on August 7, 2025, Afghanistan’s healthcare system was in crisis due to a steep drop in international funding, economic collapse, and the flight of qualified medical staff. Taliban restrictions, especially those severely limiting women’s access to care, made the situation only more dire.

For thirty-two-year-old Muhammad, the American war in Afghanistan did not end in 2021. Trapped in Kabul, his family lived in fear as victorious Taliban fighters sought out anyone who had collaborated with the West, conducting door-to-door, retaliatory arrests. International sanctions and the new hardline regime left the impoverished country even poorer. Men and women educated during the American occupation, including doctors, had fled. 

As a reporter, I had worked regularly in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015, and Muhammad had been a colleague. His knowledge of the local dialects and customs, his keen sense of what people were truly saying, of the underlying anger at both the insurgents and the foreign forces, made him an invaluable companion. He understood that silence was a language, and he taught me how to listen to it. If someone smiles, he told me, look to see if their eyes are smiling too, or are they just telling you what you want to hear?

Over time, our professional relationship evolved into a lasting friendship. Towering about three inches over me, Muhammad was clean-shaven with a strict short haircut. He could talk endlessly, detouring through topics without the benefit of transitions. After years of deference, he eventually shifted to using my first name and I knew our relationship had aligned to mutual respect.

Muhammad was convinced that by assisting foreign journalists, he was helping to show the world the true complexities of his country, from the different ethnic groups—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks—to their political rivalries, beyond the simple narratives of war.

While working as a translator for both reporters and the U.S. military, he began receiving death threats that forced him to flee to the U.S. in 2015, leaving his parents and siblings behind. With the military’s assistance, Muhammad resettled and built a new life in Houston. During his first months in Texas, he would call me, miserable from the humid, summer heat. Is there another state I can move to? he would ask. I urged him to persevere. 

He did. He continued working with the military and started a side business as a truck driver. He became a U.S. citizen in 2020. We spoke often and shared memories of Afghanistan that our other friends could never understand: the searing temperatures of July and August when the bottled water we carried became too hot to drink; the children scavenging in trash dumps and whom we fed; the quiet resilience of fathers and mothers broken by the loss of family to the conflict.

Muhammad never forgot his family. They spoke by telephone nearly every day. In 2021, as the U.S. began its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan followed by the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed government, Muhammad asked me to write visa support letters for his parents, brothers and sisters. I did and explained in the letters that his family was under threat from the Taliban because of his work for the U.S. military. 

In response I received emails twisted with bureaucratic-speak:  June 3, 2021: The U.S. Embassy or Consulate General accepted this case for expeditious processing, and the case was sent to the assigned U.S. Embassy or Consulate General . As these petitions are no longer located at the [National Visa Center] you must resubmit your inquiry or request, and all future correspondence. The emails left Muhammad—misled by the formal and vaguely positive wording—with the false impression that his family’s visa application was successful. 

The State Department’s silence prompted Muhammad to ask me to write follow-up emails about the protracted delays, but my messages received no response. Despite the passage of years, his hope endured, perhaps driven by—or in spite of—the government’s years of deliberate silence, a quiet misdirection built on empty promises of an “expeditious process.”

The day Muhammad told me his mother had a stroke he had already bought an airline ticket for Dubai. From there he would fly to Afghanistan, determined to get her the medical care she needed. 

I’ll shed my tears here so I can be strong for her there. 

I understood. I lost my own mother after she experienced a stroke. My father died in 2009, and I moved in with my mother to keep her from a nursing home. For five years, her life ran like clockwork: early rises, the newspaper, church, and an occasional friend’s visit. Then, four months after she turned 98, she had a stroke. Although she recovered, her essence was altered. The lively spark that once defined her was gone, replaced by long stretches of sleep and a quiet fatigue that kept her indoors. I could attribute her decline to age, and it was certainly a factor. But I knew better. A piece of her was gone, stolen by the stroke, and without it, she was fading. I brought on a hospice nurse to help with her care.

Some nights I would sit beside her while she slept on the living room couch and shed my own tears. I remembered her as the energetic woman she had been when I was a child. How she liked to work in the garden, attend yoga classes and paint. The smallest things delighted her: a chipmunk scampering across the terrace prompted her to make up a story that she would tell me as if she was reading from a fairytale. I clung to these memories as if their vividness would sustain her.

Before my father died of respiratory problems, she told me she used to wake up in the middle of the night and listen to see if he was still breathing. I listened to her breath as I sat with her. Honey, is that you? she would ask when she woke up looking confused. Yes, I’d tell her. Yes, it’s me, and then her chin would sink to her chest, and she’d fall to sleep again.

Let me know if I can help, I texted Muhammad.

He planned to arrive in Kabul and transport his family to Peshawar for medical treatment, followed by an appointment at the U.S. Consulate to request an American visa. He retained the email from the State Department as corroboration.

She has an approved case. All she needs is to be interviewed by the U.S. Embassy, he said in a text. 

Since the Trump administration had stopped issuing visas for most immigrants except in rare circumstances I had my doubts. Temporary Protected Status for Afghanistan ended about a month before Muhammad’s mother had a stroke. In addition, the administration had placed a full visa ban on nationals from 12 countries, including Afghanistan. An exception seemed improbable, and her condition made travel unlikely. Yet I said nothing; she was his mother, and he deserved that hope.

I reached out to an Afghan colleague and mutual friend, Najib, who lived in Dallas. He referred Muhammad to a doctor he knew in Kabul who had earned his medical degree in the United Kingdom. He would also put him in touch with a Peshawar physician who treated his father when he experienced a stroke. Muhammad would need a Pakistan visa, Najib said, and he’d have to pay bribes, possibly as much as five hundred dollars per visa. He also advised against revealing that Muhammad lived in the U.S., as it would likely raise the price.

Muhammad arrived in Kabul on August 17th and communicated with me through WhatsApp. The differences in the country since he left distracted him. He saw more Europeans in Kabul than he had during the American presence. Blast walls had been removed and people traveled without hesitation to all parts of Kabul. The moment he arrived at his parents’ house, however, these observations were eclipsed by the shock of his mother’s dire condition.

I talk to her like she can answer so she feels our presence. I massage her arms and legs to keep her circulation strong, help her move her hands and feet so her body doesn’t get stiff, and make sure she eats healthy food. I keep up with her medicines on time and make sure she is always comfortable. I want to give her every chance to recover. 

It quickly became clear that her medical condition was worse than he expected. For one thing, she had been under the care of a cardiologist instead of a neurologist. 

I talked to the doctor. We went back and forth on this situation. Very, very inhumane situation. They will scam you and then they will tell you you’re good.

He took her to the French Medical Institute for Mothers and Children where the physician Najib knew worked. He offered little hope of recovery.

The doctor said there is not much we can do at the moment. He said a stroke is a very complicated situation where you can’t solve it in one day, it’ll take time and it’ll take families to come together to help the patient, to gain back the memory to gain back the strength and do the physical therapy while she is recovering.

He pressed on with his plan to take her to Peshawar for a second opinion, but officials at the Pakistan Consulate demanded $480 per visa.

I’m looking to cut the cost down to the maximum amount possible but there is no friendship when they are making money or trying to make money off of people.

The same quiet grief Muhammad and I had seen in those Afghans mourning war deaths now engulfed him. It was a mixture of fury and hopeless resignation, realizing he had to pay exorbitant prices because she was his mother. I think he knew then that the obstacles in his way were mirroring the inescapable failures within his mother’s body. 

Muhammad paid the required fees and obtained visas for himself, his mother, and his father. Then he hired a driver for an additional $1,000 to take them from Kabul to Peshawar, a five-and-a-half-hour drive.

I had no doubt Muhammad hated putting his mother through such an ordeal. I had been unable even to take my mother to the hospital. Unaware she was having a stroke, I struggled to understand her behavior. She was confused and believed we were in a hotel and insisted on leaving. When she refused to stay in bed, I had to physically hold her. She also experienced visual hallucinations, asking me to clean up imaginary cheese from the floor. I called an ambulance; to get her to cooperate with the paramedics, I told her a taxi had arrived for our departure.

While Muhammad was traveling to Pakistan, I reached out to an immigration attorney I knew in Austin, Texas. I asked her if she had contacts at the U.S. Consulate in Islamabad who could help expedite his mother’s visa to Texas for medical reasons, but she replied that she had none, adding that for any chance of success, he would need to hire a lawyer. She did not offer her services.  

I am in Peshawar. No good result. Nothing changed. Multiple doctors have said the same thing, none of it good. Take your mother home, make her as comfortable as possible. There is nothing to be done. I really don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next. I don’t see any positive news coming out of the medical facility here.

Shortly after I received this message, Najib called me. He had spoken to the doctor in Peshawar, who had told him the same thing: Muhammad should take his mother home, make her as comfortable as possible. There is nothing to be done.

It was unclear to us if the condition of Muhammad’s mother was untreatable as the doctors seemed to suggest or if the necessary medical resources simply weren’t available, but one thing was clear: the care he desperately wanted for her was unattainable. 

I’m completely lost and confused with my situation. I really don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know where to start and where to end. I haven’t received any convincing answer in regards to her medical situation. She is still the same.

Muhammad asked me to call the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and make an appointment for his mother. I listened to his explanation; all his hope rested on the “expeditious processing” email I had received years ago. 

Can we work on expediting the process of getting my mother to the United States so she can get some proper help because that’s the only way at the moment with the current situation, he wrote, followed a few days later by another message: Now I sit by her every day. I hold her hand and talk to her, even though she does not know who I am. She looks at me with empty eyes, and it breaks me inside because I am her son, and she cannot recognize me. She makes sounds, sometimes even screams as if trying to speak, but the words never come. Yet I still see her in the silence. To love someone so deeply and have that love returned only through silence is the hardest pain I have ever known.

I agreed to try to make the appointment. I had no hope of success. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell him: your mother is lost. Take her home. I called several times, but no one answered.

The next day, I spoke to Najib and told him Muhammad was not listening to the doctors. He said I should keep calling the embassy anyway, although he understood no good would come of it. He reflected on his father, who had miraculously survived his stroke and escaped Afghanistan with his family. The contrast was stark; we both knew Muhammad’s mother would not share that same good fortune. His critical service for the U.S. Army did not protect his family, as a detached immigration system remained indifferent to his loyalty and tragedy, leaving his mother unprotected.

How do we let go? I wondered. My mother had just finished breakfast the morning she died. Two scrambled eggs and a slice of tomato. She had been listless and at times dropped her fork, spilling food. She asked to lie down. I walked her to her room and helped her get into bed. When I checked on her thirty minutes later she lay on her right side; her eyes were open and she wasn’t breathing. I called the hospice nurse who said she’d come right over. I rolled my mother onto her back and with my right hand closed her eyes. Then I sat with her, as I always had. I didn’t think of things left unspoken, things I wished I had said to her. I didn’t think of anything. I absorbed the silence of the room and wanted her back.

His mother is his mother, Najib said. Muhammad wants to keep her alive. What can anyone say to that?