My Mother, Nezhat

By Kamran Nayeri, August 26, 2013

My parents Nezhat Nikrad and Asghar Nayeri in 2004.

The following eulogy was delivered on the day of the burial of my mother Nezhat Nikrad at Oakmont Memorial Park, Lafayette, California, on August 26, 2013.  She died from complications from a stroke at John Muir Medical Center, Walnut Creek, California, on August 23 at 2:55 p.m.

*      *      *

Welcome and thank you for being part of this ceremony to celebrate the life of my mother, Nezhat Nikrad.

Many who have talked to me since her death have shared very kind memories of her too numerous to recount here.  As with all Farsi names, Nezhat has a number of meanings: purity, happiness and “the one who goes sightseeing” among them.  But almost all who talked to me about her in recent days pointed to another trait of her character: her kindness and her willingness to help others. 

Let me cite one: Bijan Nikrad, my second oldest cousin, says about Nezhat in an email message from Minneapolis:

“She was one of the sweetest women we've ever met- constantly smiling and saying sweet things.  Her eyes glowed with love.  I also remember when we were living in Narmak [a northeast district of Tehran; what Bijan recalls must have taken place in the mid-1950s], whenever my Mom would ask for help or felt lonely, aamme Nezhat [an aunt from the father’s side] was always there.”

Birth

Nezhat was born to Legha and Ibrahim Nikrad in Kermanshah, the major town in the southern region of Kurdistan, west of Iran, on April 23, 1927. She was the fourth of six siblings --five girls and one boy.  Ibrahim had another wife and Nezhat had one half brother and two half sisters.  Ibrahim was a landed aristocrat and family lore has it that each child had her/his own room and nanny.  For the Iran of the 1930s, the Nikrad family was very modern.

Nikrad means “generous” or “brave.”  I do not know of any particular story about Ibrahim’s bravery. But all accounts point to his generosity and carelessness with his wealth.  Also, he raised a family during the Great Depression and Second World War when Iran was occupied by the British from the South and West and the Soviet Union from the north.  

Of necessity, the entire family moved to Tehran so that Ibrahim who spoke English could find suitable employment.  

Marriage

It was there where my mother married my father, Asghar Nayeri, in 1928, when she was 21 and he was 25.  The two were second cousins, their mothers being cousins.  Asghar who had recently landed a civil servant job with the Iranian National Police was making a modest salary and felt ready to take the next big step in life. So his mother, Monavar, began looking around for a suitable bride.  They knew that Legha and Ibrahim have a few young daughters.  

So, they went for khastegari--a rite to ask the father’s permission to marry his daughter.  After quizzing Asghar for his ability to manage a family--financially that is--Ibrahim asked who Asghar wants to marry.  Asghar did not know and left it to Ibrahim.  Ibrahim chose Nezhat.  

A favorite story of my mother was her first date with Asghar after their engagement. Nezhat had not yet laid an eye on her future husband. It was deemed improper for women to look directly at men unless they were immediate relations.  Knowing that Nezhat did not like bald men, her sisters told her that Asghar was in fact bald. Poor Nezhat was miserable with the idea that she has to spend her life with a bald man.  

So when on their first date Asghar took her to a bakery for some sweets Nezhat was shocked to see a handsome man with a full head of hair standing next to her. Her heart lightened up.  She warmed up to my father so much that when they went for a walk on the boulevard [then the northern border of Tehran, now Keshavarz Boulevard] poor Asghar lost his bearing and fell into the canal ruining his fancy suit. 

Raising a family

My parents were born and raised during the rein of the Pahlavi monarchy--a period of state-sponsored top-down modernization.  These affected them both.  Much of their teenage years and early adulthood was during World War II when Iran was occupied, the central government was weak and there were waves of revolutionary upsurges from 1941-53. 

Like many young urban couples, Nezhat and Asghar began their family with modest means.  When Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected nationalist prime minister who was overthrown by a CIA-MI6 coup in 1953, sold cheaply priced public land to raise funds to survive the British imposed oil embargo, my father bought about 600 square meters. It was located in an undeveloped region northeast of Tehran which was named Narmak after a village existing there. 

They were pioneers. Our house was the seventh in Narmak to receive electricity which now is home to thousands of houses.  As their financial resources were limited, they built their house gradually with a number of additions and alternations.  

As a child, I remember how my mother toiled alongside my father and sometimes helping the day laborers two of whom lived on the property.  These were young peasants who had come to earn a living as the crisis in the Iranian countryside deepened. Often, Nezhat invited them over to have dinner with us and tell us their stories.  This was before we had electricity so we sat around an oil lamp to have dinner.

Nezhat gave birth to her first child (me, in 1950). Two years later, she had a daughter, Zhilla (she had a miscarriage of a boy a year after I was born). After we moved to the house in Narmak, Nezhat gave birth to a boy and a girl, Kamyar (1955) and Mina (1961) respectively. 

After Mina was born, my father was asked to serve three years in Borazjan--a small town near the Persian Gulf, known for its hot and muggy climate and its prison for those who were convicted of a serious crime and of political prisoners.  We spent three years there. Every summer when the heat was unbearable, Nezhat took all her four children back to Tehran on the bus with a stop in Shiraz to visit my aunt Raffaat (who was five years younger than my mother) and her family.  

A couple of years after we resettled in Tehran, my parents decided to rent our house to a man who wanted to start a school. The house was reconfigured so much that it was hard for a family to live in it again. The school failed and my parents did not get their rent properly. They had to sell the house with a loss. Meanwhile, the family had rented a second story apartment in Koye Kallaad neighborhood a bus stop north of our rented house.  At times, the apartment that was too small for us as Zhilla and I were teenagers and my father’s mother also lived with us most of the time.

By this time, Narmak was an up-and-coming district. My uncle Manouchehr Nikrad and his family had bought a house near our old house in the mid-1950s and my aunt Farrah and her family bought the house next to our rented apartment. This was a happy period for my mother and for us the kids.   

Career in medicine

I was going to high school when Nezhat began her career in medicine.  As a child, Nezhat did not show much interest in school.  She preferred house work.  As it turned out, her household skills helped a lot to raise her family.  My father’s role in raising the family was limited to bringing in his monthly salary.  Nezhat took care of all the rest which as all of you can imagine was quite a lot.  

By the mid-1960s when Mina was reaching school age, Nezhat decided to find employment outside the home.  The opportunity presented itself when Zann-e Rooz (Today’s Woman), a recently established women's magazine, offered classes in First Aid for women. Nezhat enlisted and showed talent and passion for it. After completing the course she managed to find employment in a medical clinic and later she worked in doctors' offices.  She also freelanced---soon there was a stream of people coming to our door asking her for a house call.  Overall, she worked for 17 years as a doctor’s aid--treating wounds, giving injections, and taking care of uncomplicated emergency calls.  By all account, she was very good in what she did. When in fall of 1979, I fell in the dark stairwells of my cousin’s townhouse in Tehran, Nezhat who was there pulled my finger nail and dressed the wound. There are others in the audience who were her patient.  My aunt Raffaat used to say: “If Nezhat was born in the United States she could have become a physician!” 

Her tragedies

The 1979 revolution in Iran brought our family closer together in Tehran once again (as Zhilla and I returned from the U.S.). But the Islamic Republic counter-revolution dispersed us again. I returned to New York in August 1982 and Zhilla and her husband Touraj with their three-year-old daughter Maryam returned to Berkeley in 1983.  A few years later, Mina and her husband Bahram came and soon settled in southern California. My parents and my brother Kamyar who lived in a two-story house my parents purchased in Tehranpars (to the east of Narmak) stayed in Tehran and later moved to a new large three-floor apartment complex in Gisha district in the western part of Tehran. 

Nezhat visited us in the U.S. a number of times.  In May 1990, we unexpectedly lost our aunt Raffaat who lived with her children in Berkeley. She was only 59 years old. To Nezhat this was a great loss as the two sisters were close. 

In 1995, Kamyar died after a year of struggling with thyroid cancer.  He was just shy of his 40th birthday.  This broke my mother’s heart and darkened her spirit.  

After Kamyar, there was no reason for my parents to live in Iran and every reason to migrate to the U.S. where the rest of her family lived--now for good.  On Zhilla’s initiative, they moved to the Bay Area and soon became U.S. permanent residents.  As anyone familiar with older immigrants who do not speak English knows well, my parents were culturally isolated,  So, we arranged for them to move to Minneapolis where all surviving Nikrad siblings--four sisters and one brother--lived.  This was a fun period of my mother’s life as the sisters lived in the same building spending their time together doing all kinds of interesting things.

The long Illness

In April 2002 just before her 75th birthday, she had an open heart surgery. The night after surgery she had a stroke that took away the left field of vision from her left eye and generally weakened her.

The underlying cause was type II diabetes that was first diagnosed at Alta-Bates hospital in Berkeley in 1975.   

As soon as Nezhat was able to travel, Zhilla arranged for my parents to come and live with her in Orinda, California.  Soon afterward, they moved to individual apartments in Orinda Senior Village.  This was a bitter-sweet period.  Mt parents enjoyed their lifestyle there. At the same time, old age began to catch up with them.  

Nezhat’s health continued to deteriorate, first gradually and them more rapidly.  By the end of the decade, she was using a walker and she experienced three falls. In one instance, she broke her arm. The third time she fell, on the advice of her primary care physician and her physicians at John Muir hospital she was admitted to the Rheem Valley Convalescent Hospital on Christmas Eve 2010.  She had become wheelchair bound.

During the two years and almost eight months Nezhat lived in the nursing home she received constant attention and affection from Zhilla, her family, extended family, friends, and the staff of the nursing home.  But she continued to diminish physically and mentally. Her quality of life declined.  In more recent times, Nezhat had a number of TIAs (mini-strokes) and was briefly hospitalized several times.  Each time she recovered but was diminished.

It was the multiple strokes that she probably suffered on the night of August 9 or early hours of August 10 that proved fatal.  Seven days later, her physicians told us that she will not recover from the strokes.  She was provided excellent palliative care and she died peacefully surrounded by her immediate family on August 21 at about 2:55 p.m.  My niece Roxanne who was situated close Nezhat at that moment saw her smile before her last exhale. 

Farewell to my mother

Let me conclude with some personal remarks. My mother to me was a godsend.  She was the only human being who loved me with no expectation. She gave me unconditional love.  She was my support when I needed support. But she never tried to tell me what to do.  In fact, she always encouraged me in what I chose to do even when it required money that taxed her household budget.  So she bought me an accordion when my small arms hardly stretched around it. She bought me a bicycle when my legs were too short to allow me to sit on the saddle and paddle  She bought me books and magazines I wanted to read. When she sent me to buy mortadella from the deli she also gave me money to buy me a beer (I was only about 14).  When I chose to go to Haddaf high school, one of the best private schools in Tehran in the 1960s, she provided the hefty tuition. When I graduated from high school and decided that I want to go abroad to study physics she helped to convince my father to sell the one plot of land they had to pay for my plane ticket and the first-semester tuition, room, and board.  When I fell in love with Mary at the University of Texas at Austin and wrote to my father about it, he wrote back telling me about beautiful Iranian women from prestigious families that I could marry. But my mother fell in love with Mary as well--something she never ceased to do. She always asked about her until recently when she withdrew from such matters altogether.  

I short, this ordinary Iranian woman provided me with an extraordinary parental care that helped shape my self-confidence and strength of character.  I owe her much of whatever I have been able to accomplish in my life. I dare say that in large measure that is how she acted towards other people. 

Of course, my mother was far from perfect. Like all mortals, she had her weaknesses.  I like to note one: As I just described my mother was entirely supportive of me and allowed me to do as I wished. She was not so with my younger sister Zhilla.  When both of us were little, she expected Zhilla to stay with her in the kitchen to learn how to cook and other house chores while I was outside in the garden playing.  My mother like many other women of her generation was biased in favor of boys.  This hurt little Zhilla, of course. But it also hurt me as Zhilla vent off her anger by beating on me. 

However, even here my mother showed her kind heart and spirit. She never interfered with who we chose as our mates. Zhilla found her mate in college and Mina found hers in political gathering during the Iranian revolution.  And when they decided to marry them she gave her blessing and complete support. There was no attempt to manipulate us when it came to major life choices. 

Now this woman who we loved so much is gone. What are we to do? Of course, each one will remember her in her own way. However, a friend told me the other day that she is reminded of her mother when she sees a hummingbird and her father when she lays eyes on a butterfly.  It is a beautiful idea. Perhaps, I will remember my mother when I see a white cloud in the blue sky, or when a doe with her fawn visiting the meadow around my house or when a mother wild turkey brings her chicks to eat some of the seeds I leave for them.  There are so many other ways to remember her. That is a tribute to the vastness of her love and her spirit. 

Thank you.