In Memory of a Mother Who Never Stopped Fighting

My Mother’s Day Reflection

When people congratulate me today for my research, humanitarian work, international awards, or Apex Stride, a prosthetics and rehabilitation technology initiative focused on affordable adaptive mobility systems that recently became the World Champion at Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge in the United States which had finalist post-doctoral teams from Harvard and MIT, I often feel a strange distance from the life they imagine I have lived.

When I think of achievement, my mind does not first go to conferences, recognition, or accolades. It goes back to the slightly gaudy corridors of Dhaka Medical College, and to courtrooms filled with a constant, almost unintelligible bustle. It goes back to a woman trying to survive cancer while still making sure her son sat for his SSC examinations on time.

It goes back to my late mother, Shirin A. Chowdhury, who taught Management at the University of Chittagong; a woman who spent her life fighting for justice, who believed with all her heart that education could change a person’s future. She raised me as a single mother with very little in her hands except conviction, resilience, and an unshakable sense of integrity. Whatever people see in me today was first built in the motivation, sacrifice, and moral courage with which she chose to live every day.

When people speak to me now about achievement, I think of her more than I think of myself. I think of a woman who had to fight quietly for every inch of dignity she possessed. In her generation, especially outside Dhaka, simply being a woman in academia already meant walking against the current. She did it while raising children alone, while carrying illness in her body, while enduring the kind of uncertainty and social pressure that slowly exhausts a person from the inside.

Some of my earliest memories are not of success, but of watching her continue anyway.

She was no amateur when it came to enduring hardship. When I was in third grade, our family became trapped in a prolonged conflict with an abusive landlord. What began as an ordinary housing dispute slowly turned into a campaign of humiliation and intimidation.

The electricity was disconnected. The water supply was cut off. Toilets were deliberately flooded into our living space. Fear and psychological harassment became part of our daily routine. I still remember watching my mother endure all of it while trying to preserve some sense of normalcy for her children.

At that age, I did not understand property law or legal systems. I only understood fear and the lack of comfort that came from enduring such a condition.

I still remember accompanying my mother to courtrooms, carrying legal files larger than my schoolbooks. I remember standing beside her in tenant-rights rallies while adults shouted slogans demanding dignity and justice. Looking back now, I realize my earliest political education did not come from books. It came from watching a woman refuse humiliation despite lacking structural power.

Years later, when cancer entered our household, I was preparing for my SSC examinations. Most people remember SSC as a celebratory period of life. Parents waiting outside exam halls. Families bringing food. Relatives offering encouragement. My memories are different.

I remember waking up before dawn to help my mother bathe. I remember feeding her before leaving for my exams. I remember studying beside hospital beds while chemotherapy slowly hollowed out the strongest person I knew. Even then, she continued worrying more about my future than her own survival.

There were days she would return from treatment and still prepare lecture notes for her students. Looking back now, I realize how unnatural that kind of endurance really was. As children, however, we slowly became accustomed to survival itself. Illness became ordinary. Yet perhaps what amazes me most today is that amid all this, cancer, court cases, financial pressure, social humiliation, she still possessed an almost irrational, almost mystical, confidence about my future.

When I applied to the United World College ( UWC ), my mother was already critically ill. I still remember her draping a saree over her patient apron before accompanying me to the interview in Gulshan. Even in that condition, she insisted on being there. After reviewing my documents, the interviewers reportedly told her that although I was talented, they were uncertain whether they could offer a fully funded scholarship.

My mother replied immediately: “Today or tomorrow, my son will become something great. If you fail to take him, it will be your loss.” At the time, I thought it was simply maternal optimism. Now I understand it differently. I like to think that she knew, perhaps through some means I cannot explain, what would become of me.

Eventually, I studied at UWC campuses in China and the Netherlands. Those years changed my life. They exposed me to worlds I could never have imagined while growing up between hospitals, legal disputes, and uncertainty. But even then, my mother remained the emotional center of everything I did. Every achievement felt less like personal ambition and more like an attempt to justify her faith in me.

Then came the catastrophe of 2022. After one of my mother’s post-cancer recovery phases, we travelled to India for medical checkups, believing perhaps the worst years of our lives were finally behind us. We were wrong. On July 10, 2022, our lives split into a before and an after. The accident happened directly in front of us while we were crossing the road. My mother was critically injured, her body shattered so severely that doctors feared she might lose her leg entirely.

My sister, Sajmila, was catastrophically wounded. I still remember holding her in my arms while everything around us dissolved into screams, shattered metal, blood, broken glass, and disbelief. There are moments when reality itself stops feeling real; that was one of them. My sister died the next day, and after that, something inside my mother never truly recovered. The woman who had survived three cancers suddenly found herself confronting a grief larger than illness itself.

During the forty days following my sister’s death, my mother’s own body began collapsing under the weight of psychological shock. She suffered repeated heart attacks. Then came the comas. Three separate times after my sister’s death, she slipped into a coma, and three separate times, she returned. I still cannot explain those days rationally.

At times, it felt as though part of her wanted to follow her daughter, while another part still refused to leave us behind completely. Toward the end, she could barely speak. We communicated mostly through eye contact. But there is one sentence I remember with unbearable clarity: “Work for the other mothers and sisters of the world. Never run after money.” On August 22, 2022, she passed away as well.

For a long time afterward, I lived with an overwhelming sense of regret. No matter how much I replayed those days in my mind, I could not escape the feeling that, despite all my efforts, I had failed to save my mother and my sister. Over time, however, that grief slowly transformed into a different question: What could I build so that other families might survive tragedies like ours with less helplessness, less abandonment, and perhaps less suffering?

That question gradually became research. After the accident, I moved to the United States and continued my studies at St. Olaf College with a fully funded scholarship, while later working at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. But my real education was happening elsewhere: inside hospitals, rehabilitation centers, and long conversations with accident survivors and amputees across Bangladesh and India.

I began meeting people who had lost not only limbs, but also mobility, dignity, financial stability, and hope after accidents much like ours. Again and again, I encountered the same reality: advanced prosthetics remained impossibly expensive, inaccessible, and often poorly designed for the economic and social realities of countries like Bangladesh. That became the beginning of Apex Stride. Research took years.

To fund the work, I delivered food and cleaning in cafeterias, odd jobs that are still taboo in our society. I rarely spent money on myself because every saved dollar meant another step toward building the system I imagined. I wanted to create mobility systems designed specifically for the realities of South Asia -- affordable, adaptive, resilient to humidity and uneven roads, and accessible to people usually excluded from advanced medical technologies.

Recently, Apex Stride received international recognition after winning the Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge in the United States. People often describe moments like that as success. I experience them differently. My first thought was painfully simple: “I wish my mother could see this.”

The Shirin Sajmila International Foundation (SSIF), a 501 c(3) global non profit, named after my mother and sister, emerged from the same grief. What began years ago as small-scale work with vulnerable children in Chittagong slowly expanded into humanitarian initiatives across Bangladesh and beyond: disability support, prosthetic access, maternal healthcare, refugee rehabilitation, disaster relief, and humanitarian work across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa reaching more than 700,000 people.

Through collaborations with organizations such as the World Health Organization, local hospitals, and the Bangladesh defense forces, SSIF has delivered emergency relief and medical assistance to more than 200,000 flood-affected families, operated mobile health camps serving over 25,000 patients, distributed thousands of menstrual hygiene kits to displaced women and girls, and supported trauma rehabilitation programs for refugees and protest survivors across Bangladesh, Egypt, and Nepal.

During the July Revolution in Bangladesh, SSIF volunteers and medical teams treated injured protesters, coordinated relief operations across multiple districts, and later launched the Reform Bangladesh Initiative in Chattogram and Dhaka, mobilizing thousands of young people in nationwide graffiti, cleaning, and civic reconstruction programs centered on memory, public dignity, and national renewal.

But whenever people speak about these accomplishments, my mind still returns to much smaller and quieter memories. I think of my mother returning home from chemotherapy and still worrying about whether I had eaten properly before an examination. I think of a woman leaving courtrooms after fighting landlords who tried to break her psychologically. I think of a mother who watched her daughter die and yet kept returning from coma as though refusing to abandon the rest of her family completely.

My mother never became nationally famous. She never tried to create a public image for herself. But the older I grow, the more I realize that some people shape history privately. They leave behind not monuments or recognition, but ways of understanding dignity, suffering, service, sacrifice, and love.

My mother left me that.

And perhaps that is what Mother's Day should truly ask us to remember.

Jarjis Rafsan is a policy architect, applied researcher, and humanitarian strategist.