A Final Toast for George Awad

I am proud to have been a friend of George Awad to whom this special volume of the Journal is dedicated. We met for the first time in 1990 during the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York. The ever reassuring opulence of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, the unmistakable scent of the system Unconscious in the air, the light conversations in the darkness of Sir Harry's bar, and the beaming faces of men and women at the opportunity to refuel friendships, all acted in unison to provide the correct ambience for our encounter.

With all this warmth around us, George and I somehow carried a private sense of aloneness and even isolation. He was a Palestinian Christian who had grown up in the West Bank and, later, in Lebanon. I was an Indian Muslim who was raised near New Delhi and now called Philadelphia his home. In the predominantly white, Jewish majority of the conference attendees, we brown, non-Jewish men were an oddity of sorts. This brought us together. We found similarities in each other. Both of us represented an ethnic minority in our profession. Both of us were immigrants. Both of us had mother tongues other than English. He, being an Arab, was automatically assumed to be a Muslim and I, being an Indian, was automatically assumed to be a Hindu. Not only was this wrong, we were hardly religious. We were intensely secular and politically open minded. We enjoyed a drink, loved conversation, could argue in a heated and backslapping manner, laughed together, and be of help to each other. What created this strong bond between us was our love for psychoanalysis.

Over the next 15-16 years, phone conversations, e-mails, encounters during conferences, and some more personal meetings in Vancouver, Toronto, Detroit, and London deepened our knowledge of each other and our respective families. A painting by his artist wife, Maci, hangs over the couch of my analyst wife, Monisha. Time passed and then a day came when George became ill.

The last days of his life