My biggest fear after my mum died was having a baby without her. How could I be a mother without mine? Now I would have to lose a baby without her. I thought about how, when she was in the hospital recovering from emergency brain surgery and undergoing harsh radiation and chemotherapy, she wanted me to do her makeup everyday; it became our special routine, a lesson in resilience and Revlon. It dawned on me that the only way I would get through this would be to emulate the strength that my mum modelled her entire life, up until the end. After all, this was the same woman who, at the age of 21, left her family in a bustling city in Pakistan to start a life with her husband in the foreign lands of rural Canada. The same woman who, after becoming a young widow, managed to raise three successful kids with little money, but a lot of love. And the same woman who, upon being diagnosed with terminal cancer, never asked, “why me?”, instead posed “why not me?” and then, with a twinkle in her eye, delivered a stand-up routine from her hospital bed: “I don’t have a brain tumour… I have brain humour!” My anguish was darkly ironic: The way I mustered up the courage to rid my body of my lifeless baby was by channelling the spirit of my late mother. And so, I put on some lipstick, and put in the pills.