Esse Quam Videri

Listen to Mike tell his story to Dick Gordan of The Story

My father, Mohammed Mallah, said this to me one night in 1995 as we rode home from the convenience store he had recently financed. A few months later he was shot dead for a few dollars.

As a child, you don’t really analyze things, but as you grow you can start to think about life with greater maturity. My father said, “Even your brother! You want your brother to be great, but you always want to be a little bit better. But your son, if he’s better than you, it’s okay. It makes you happy.”

Now that I am 24, I’ve had 14 years to listen to my father’s words echo in my mind. As well as to see the repeatedly flashing images that accumulated over 14 years of witnessing the sacrifice my mother made to raise me in the United States.  My dad and mom survived two wars. They went from being middle class in Palestine to being poor in Jordan to being rich in Kuwait and then back to poverty again in the United States. My mom survived the murder of my father, who had lifted himself up twice from the Palestinian refugee situation in Jordan and from the post-Gulf War devastation of the early 90s. He spoke three languages fluently and earned his Master’s in electrical engineering while being a husband and a father.

For this and other reasons, I’ve lost my faith. I’m not Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. But in its place I substituted my father’s wish that I be better than him. Every day, I reflect on those words. For my father, mother, my family, my community, and the impact I can generate on the world, I will live every day of my life and die trying to be better than the best man I’ve ever known. -Mike

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 9:57 AM and is filed under Portraits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.