The Second Hug

The Second Hug

by Munir Virani

A Son’s Story of Love, Loss, and the Life-Saving Promise of Early Detection

On Thursday, January 22, 2026, I walked into the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi carrying two things. One was a small plastic bag containing my phone, my wallet, and a driver’s license. The priceless Emirates ID I’d forgotten still sat on my kitchen counter at home. The other was far heavier and far older: my father’s last months, and the quiet terror that a family story can circle back when you least expect it.

The preparation began the day before; that ritual so many people describe with a grimace and a nervous laugh, as if embarrassment is the only honest language for what comes next. Fasting from seven in the morning. Two boiled eggs and coffee, the last solid comfort. Then a day of clear broth and water and the strange mental negotiations that come with hunger: I can do this. I’ve done harder things. It’s only one day. It’s worth it.

Then came the preparation itself, split into two rounds like a test of will. At five in the evening, after navigating through a couple of zoom meetings, the first round. I mixed it, drank it, and waited. And when it began, there was no poetry to it. Just one’s body doing what it must. I measured time not in minutes but in urgency. Emptying. Rinsing. Starting over.

The second round came just before midnight; a liter of foul, aspartame-tainted electrolyte water that tasted like surrender. Drinking when you don’t want to drink. Swallowing against your own instincts. Because you’ve committed to the reason you’re doing this. Your mind insists on dignity. Your body reminds you that survival is rarely dignified. By morning, I was hollowed out (literally), tired, but strangely clear.

At seven on Thursday morning, I left my apartment and walked to the hospital. Ten minutes through Abu Dhabi waking up around me. Soft morning light. But the walk was strangely, bizarrely cold. A gust of wind howling through the streets, palm trees whistling and bending like they were trying to warn me of something. It was very, very windy, the kind of wind that makes you walk with your head down, that steals your breath before you can offer it. The city’s edges, usually so still at that hour, felt restless. Unsettled. As if the world itself was holding its breath with me.”

The Cleveland Clinic is one of those places where professionalism feels like kindness. You sense it in the way people look up when you approach, in the calm certainty of their voices, in how they treat your nerves as if they’re the most normal thing in the world. I found the elevator. Rode to the third floor. Walked to D3, the endoscopy unit.

A handsome Emirati gentleman checked me in. I handed him my driver’s license, already rehearsing an apology about the missing Emirates ID. He smiled and said, “No problem habibi.” Just like that, the first knot in my chest loosened. Then I sat down to wait.

And that is where the past found me.

Nearly thirty years ago, colon cancer took my father. He was fifty-six. I’m older now than he was then. That fact has a way of turning time into something sharp. My father wasn’t just my father. He was the gravity of our home. Our best friend. The steady voice in the background of every plan, every dream, every moment that mattered. When he became ill, the world didn’t simply change. It tilted.

An Irish nurse named Alayne called my name and led me into a room. She explained the gowns, the bags for my belongings, the checks they needed to do. Part of the process, she said gently, was confirming someone would collect me after the procedure. My son was supposed to be that someone. He was sleeping at our apartment; a twenty-two-year-old young man who can navigate the world with confidence, yet still sleeps like a child when morning comes too early.

I called. No answer. I tried again. Nothing. I could feel the familiar rise of anxiety, that irrational fear that everything will unravel at once, even when you know it won’t. So, I called my dear friend Canan. If there is anyone I can count on in Abu Dhabi, it’s Canan. She answered, awake and kind and immediately steady.

It wasn’t about logistics, not really. It was about proof. Proof that you are held by a net of wonderful and kind people when you are momentarily vulnerable. Proof that you are not alone. Back in the room, two nurses moved around me with practiced warmth. Abigail, from the Philippines. Fatima, from Somalia. Both residents of Abu Dhabi, both bringing their whole selves to work that morning. They talked to me the way people do when they know you’re trying to look calm. Not pitying, not overly cheerful. Just human. Their kindness had a quiet effect: it lifted my spirit without making a show of it.

Then came the cannula, the tubing, the gentle insistence of medical routine. My arm became a site of preparation. I watched the tape pressed down, the line secured, and for a moment I felt what so many patients must feel: Like a person turning briefly into a project. It wasn’t frightening. It was honest. The anesthesiologist came in. The gastroenterologist, Dr. Sara, arrived as well. An all-female team, composed and professional, carrying the kind of competence that doesn’t need to announce itself.

I lay back on the table, staring up at the ceiling, talking to my wife, Zahra on the phone. She was back in Boise, Idaho, with life demanding her attention in a different time zone. But she was there with me in spirit and in the steady way she listens, in the way she doesn’t try to fix fear but simply refuses to let it be lonely. And as I waited, my mind did what minds do in quiet rooms before big moments.

It wandered back to the first-time colon cancer entered my life.

It was July 1996. I was in Kenya, at Lake Naivasha, doing doctorate fieldwork. Raptors were my world then, and still are; wings over grasslands, fierce eyes scanning for movement, the constant lesson that survival is both brutal and beautiful. My brother, Faruk called. His voice was strained, careful.

“You need to come,” he said. “We’ve admitted Dad to hospital.” Then, the line people use when they don’t want to terrify you: “It’s nothing serious, but I need you here.” “WTF…..,” I thought. I drove in my tiny Suzuki, my colleagues Bernard Mburu and Francis Kagema with me. And because I was young, because denial can disguise itself as determination, I took a different route.

I wanted to pass at the back of Hell’s Gate National Park. There was a tawny eagle nest there. I had seen it occupied, and I wanted to check it one more time. We stopped on a hillside and looked into the nest. There, in the cradle of sticks, sat a tawny eagle chick; fluffy and downy and impossibly alive, exposed to wind and sun and chance. Anything could have taken it. Baboons. Storms. Hunger. The world.

And yet it was there.

That moment stays with me because it taught me something I didn’t understand until later: life is fragile, yes, but it is also stubborn.

It insists.

We drove on. Near Kedong Ranch, there was a dead zebra on the roadside, and around it a congregation of vultures; thirty-five or forty; feeding like a living storm. Rüppell’s vultures. White-backed vultures. A couple of lappet-faced vultures, their powerful heads rising and lowering with a grim, necessary rhythm. That sight, so rare in this day and age, lifted my spirits at the time. It was nature doing what it does: recycling death into life, making the landscape clean again. Vultures are misunderstood that way. People see only the carcass, not the service. They don’t see that some creatures are built to carry the world’s grief so the rest of us can continue.

I did not know then that I would one day think of cancer in the same terms. A scavenger of certainty. A force that arrives without permission and changes what you thought was permanent. I reached Nairobi and went to the Aga Khan Hospital, to the older wing, the private section. My brother came out into the corridor. The moment he saw me, he broke. He cried into my shoulder with a sound that I still feel in my chest, decades later. A sound that lives in the body, not just the memory. In that instant, I became the older brother in the way my culture and my upbringing had trained me to be: steady, quiet, holding him up without asking for words I knew he could not give. He took me to the cafeteria and told me the truth. They suspected colon cancer. They had opened Dad up during exploratory surgery and closed him again without doing more.

It was advanced.

I felt the blood drain from my head, the dizzy drop of a world shifting under your feet. I was thankful I was sitting, because bravery does not stop your body from reacting to grief. I went to see my father. He was asleep. I kissed his forehead, feeling the warmth of his skin, trying to memorize everything, the way his chest rose and fell, the familiar lines of his face, the reality of him still being here. Hovering around all of this was another life moment: in four weeks, I was set to travel to the United States for the first time, to present at an international raptor conference in Boise, Idaho. Visa in hand. Excitement brimming. A young scientist’s dream coming true.

Then cancer arrived and covered everything in shadow.

The weeks dragged. Family came and went. My father’s room became crowded with love and visitors and prayers and forced laughter. He went through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. There were hospital smells; the sterile and the sharp, the antiseptic scent of uncertainty. Eventually, he came home with a colostomy bag, a piece of medical plastic that became part of our family’s vocabulary. And home life adjusted around it. Support became practical, moment by moment.

I remember one moment with perfect clarity: My wife Zara—my fiancée at the time, seeing a leak on the floor and kneeling down without hesitation to wipe it up. No drama. No disgust. No pause to think about whether this was her responsibility.

Just love as action.

That was the moment I knew, with a certainty deeper than romance, that this was the woman I would build the rest of my life with. Love isn’t what we say in the easy moments. It’s what we do in the hardest ones. When it was time for me to leave for the United States, my father called me close. He looked me deep in the eyes. And in that look was everything a father wants to give his son: permission to live, to pursue dreams, to not be bound by fear.

“Promise me something,” he said. “If anything happens to me while you’re there, don’t come back. Make sure you finish what you’re going for.” I said, “We’ll see,” because I couldn’t promise him a version of myself I didn’t yet know.

On the day I left, I gave him the tightest hug I had ever given anyone. Then I got into the car, told my friend to stop at the gate, and ran back inside, tears streaming uncontrollably down my cheeks.

I rushed in to give him a second hug.

I didn’t know it with certainty, but I knew it in my bones: I would never see him again. And I wanted one more moment to hold him. One more chance to feel his arms around me. One more second of being his son while he was still here to be my father.

In Boise, I stayed with Rick Watson and his family; people who treated me like kin even though we had only just met. I practiced my talk on a bench outside the Peregrine Fund offices, reciting words about birds while my heart was tethered across oceans.

Then the call came.

My brother, sobbing. His wife taking the phone. The sentence no one wants to hear, delivered in the gentlest possible way:

“You need to come back.”

When I said, “He’s gone, isn’t he,” and she said yes, the world went quiet. I could not even hear the birds.

Not the dramatic silence of movies. Just the flat, empty quiet of a truth that cannot be undone.

Rick booked my ticket before I could decide. I was grateful and guilty at once; caught between my father’s request and the duty etched into my upbringing: the firstborn takes care of the family. The firstborn comes home.

I flew back through Amsterdam, wandering streets in a fog of disbelief. It still hadn’t sunk in. Grief sometimes arrives late, like weather moving across mountains.

On the flight to Nairobi, the plane taxied out, then turned back. Technical issues.

Again. And again.

In that suspended moment, trapped between takeoff and return, I felt caught between two impossible losses: missing my father’s funeral or abandoning the work that had brought me across the world.

I closed my eyes and told myself the only truth available:

This is out of your control.

When I opened them, the announcement came: boarding for Nairobi.

We landed at 6:30 a.m. Zara and my brother, Faruk were waiting for me. The rush to change. Then the solemn journey to the hall where the dead are prepared for burial.

The ceremony. Hundreds of people. Faces I hadn’t seen in years. A community showing up to hold our grief with us, to remind us that even in loss, we are not alone.

And then I see him.

My grandfather, Alibhai stands in the crowd, impeccable in a three-piece suit with his quintessential bow-tie, all of ninety-two years old. The Leopard of Nairobi—a title bestowed upon him by the late Sultan Mohamed Shah for his tireless service to the Ismaili community. A man of dignity, of strength, of unshakeable faith.

I stare at his grizzled face, at the lines carved by decades of living, of leading, of loving. His eyes meet mine across the gathering, and in them I see something that breaks me all over again:

This is a man who has outlived both his sons.

The Leopard of Nairobi, the pillar of our community, the man who seemed invincible—standing in a three-piece suit at his second son’s funeral. Standing upright because that is what leopards do. They endure. They survive. Even when survival becomes the cruelest burden of all.

I can’t help it. Every fiber of my being wants to run to him, to throw my arms around him, to say it’s going to be okay, I am here for you, you are not alone in this, I will carry what you cannot.

But I know, even as the impulse rises, that this is not what he needs from me. He needs me to stand. To be steady. To honor my father by becoming the man he raised me to be.

So I hold his gaze. And in that moment of shared understanding, grandfather and grandson, both carrying unbearable weight, I make him a silent promise:

You will not outlive me. I will be here. I will be vigilant. I will choose to stay.

I carried that memory into the endoscopy unit in Abu Dhabi like a stone in my pocket, heavy, familiar, impossible to set down.

Back in the present moment, the anesthesia took hold. The ceiling softened. Voices faded. Consciousness slipped away as gently as a curtain falling. When I woke, it felt like surfacing from deep water. There was a taste in my mouth. A heaviness in my limbs. The strange disorientation of being both safe and not yet fully back.

Then I saw him.

Kaisaan, my son, was sitting by my bed.

He looked into my eyes the way people do when they’re trying to measure the truth without asking for it. Concern lived openly on his face—no attempt to hide it behind adulthood, no pretense of casual confidence.

In that moment, he was not twenty-two. He was my child, my baby. And I was his father. And we were both vulnerable in different directions.

And suddenly I was transported back; decades collapsing like a wave, to another hospital room, another bed, another moment of sitting and watching and waiting.

I had been the one sitting beside my father’s bed then. Watching him sleep after they closed him up. Kissing his forehead. Feeling the awful weight of knowing something had shifted, that the ground beneath us had given way.

But this time, this time was different.

This time I wasn’t the son watching helplessly as cancer stole everything.

This time I was the father waking up to good news.

This time the story bent in a different direction.

I reached for his hand.

“I’m good,” I told him. “I’m healthy.”

And I watched his shoulders loosen. I watched relief wash over his face like light. I watched his smile return; slow at first, then certain.

There are moments that feel like a baton being passed without anyone speaking.

I looked at him and thought: One day, you and your brother may sit where I am sitting. One day you will drink the foul water, curse the midnight preparation, and walk into a hospital with your own private fear.

And I want you to have what I had today.

A good team. A clean result. A future that stays open.

Here is the blunt, urgent truth that my father’s story gave me, and that my own screening confirmed from the other side:

Colon cancer does not always announce itself until it has already stolen too much.

And yet, and this is the hope I’m offering you and for many people, it is preventable. Detectable. Treatable.

It asks for something simple that feels complicated: the willingness to be screened before you feel sick.

Yes, the preparation is unpleasant. Yes, it’s awkward to talk about. Yes, it requires surrendering a bit of pride and a bit of comfort.

But I have stood in a hospital corridor watching my brother fall apart. I have kissed my father’s forehead and felt the weight of goodbye settling into my bones. I have been the son who rushed back for a second hug because my heart knew what my mind couldn’t bear.

And now I have been the father who woke to find his son waiting; anxious, loving, relieved.

If you love your life, if you love your people, if you have ever looked at a child and felt your chest tighten with the desire to stay, then please hear me.

Do the screening.

Do it for the ones who will sit by your bed someday, watching you wake up.

Do it for the ones who will miss you in ways you cannot imagine.

Do it for the future hugs, the second ones, the unexpected ones, the ones you thought you’d already given for the last time.

We protect what matters by showing up before the crisis, not after.

In my work with birds of prey, I have learned that survival often comes down to small decisions made early: a nest protected from disturbance, a powerline made safe, a threat addressed before it becomes a tragedy.

Our bodies deserve the same respect. Our families deserve the same vigilance. Our futures deserve the same care.

Yesterday, I walked into one of the best hospitals in Abu Dhabi with my father’s memory beside me. With the weight of what was lost and the fear of what might be repeated.

Today, I walk out with gratitude so fierce it almost hurts.

Not because I enjoyed any part of what it took to get here. Not because the preparation was anything less than miserable.

But because I am still here.

Because my son smiled again, his relief as bright as sunrise.

Because the story did not repeat itself; at least not this time, not today.

Because somewhere in Kenya, a tawny eagle chick once sat in a nest exposed to everything the world could throw at it; and survived anyway, stubborn and alive, insisting on a future.

We can be that stubborn too.

We can insist on staying. We can choose vigilance over fear. We can trade a day of discomfort for decades more of morning light, of holding hands, of being present for the people who need us.

I never got to give my father a third hug.

But I woke up this morning and my son was there, and I held his hand, and I told him I was healthy.

And that, that is the gift that early detection gives us:

More time. More hugs. More mornings. More chances to be the person someone is waiting for.

The most powerful act of love is not always dramatic.

Sometimes it’s unglamorous, quiet, and deeply human:

To book the appointment.

To drink the foul water.

To choose to stay.

Not for yourself alone.

But for every person who loves you.

For every moment still waiting to be lived.

For every hug. First, second, third, and beyond; that you haven’t given yet.

Stay.