How To Cope With The Loss Of Your Partner? Ft. Rabia Ahmed

In this conversation I sit down with Rabia Ahmed. She runs Basil Pantry, a food service that creates healthy meals for people managing conditions like diabetes and PCOS. But we are not here to talk about recipes and meal plans. We are here to talk about grief. About what happens when your partner dies and you are left to rebuild not just your kitchen, but your whole life from scratch.

Growing up creative, then doing what was expected

Rabia was born in Bahrain, the youngest and the baby of the family. When she was around twelve, her family moved back to Karachi. That is where she grew up, went to school, and started dreaming. She told me she always had a creative streak. She wanted to go to Indus Valley, an art school, but her father had other ideas. So she did ACCA from CAMS instead. She did well, she finished in one go, but she never liked it. “I hated accounting. Even now I do,” she says. At nineteen she got married. She admits now that if she could rewind time, she would have finished her education first. “You’re just a kid,” she says. But back then, that was the path. She took up teaching because it fit around her son and her husband, but the creativity inside her never went quiet.

The hospital years and the moment I let go

Rabia’s husband became very unwell. He had a heart condition that led to kidney failure. He was on dialysis and one of his biggest fears was not being able to drink water, because his own mother had been a dialysis patient and he had watched her go through that agony. The illness stretched over a year and a half, with six months of intensive hospital stays. Rabia lived in the hospital in Karachi, rotating with her sister. She was caring for her husband, her young son, and trying to hold herself together. “I would not want even my worst enemy to go through that,” she says.

There is a moment she returns to in the telling. One day her husband called her into his cold hospital room. He told her to discharge him, move to Islamabad with his parents, get a nurse, and start working. He knew he would not be there. “I still remember that cold room and his expression,” she says. At the time she was angry. How could he say that? Two days before he died, something shifted. She said to him, “I let go of you. I will take care of myself and my child. It’s okay. I can’t see you in this much pain.” She calls it the hardest thing, and also the most merciful. Part of her was relieved when he passed, because his suffering was over. That is a complicated truth to carry, and she does not hide from it.

Survival mode: a job, a boy, and no time to cry

After he died, Rabia moved to Islamabad to be with her parents. She started working at her son’s school within a month. The job covered his school fee and gave her a routine. For a long time, she was in survival mode. “Grief is there, but you don’t have time for it,” she says. As a single parent, the guilt creeps in. She missed the partnership, the co-parent, the person to rant to at the end of the day. But she kept reminding herself, “I’m doing the best I can. Yes, I will make mistakes. It’s my journey and it’s his journey.”

Then her son had an accident. He fractured his skull and had to be admitted to the ICU. He was nine years old, and he knew that his father went into the ICU and never came back. That night, when the doctors were not taking him seriously, his fear was enormous. Rabia describes it as one of the worst nights they have had. It pushed her to seek therapy for herself and for him, something that is still not normalized in our culture. She went for two years of post-traumatic stress therapy, and her son had his own confidential sessions. She says the therapist taught her how to let go of things that were not under her control, how to use breathing techniques, and how to snap out of spirals. “If something abnormal happened in my life, I’m sure it affected me,” she says simply. She now knows her trigger points and has learned to set boundaries. That work continues.

The bank account I didn’t know I didn’t have

One of the most honest moments in our conversation comes when Rabia talks about money. After her husband died, she realized she did not have her own bank account. She only had a joint account. “I did not have my own bank account, I had a joint bank account and I didn’t even know,” she says. Suddenly she was the sole earner, the decision maker, and she had to learn everything from scratch. She says no matter how much a husband loves you, if he is the only one earning, there is a power dynamic that shifts the ground you stand on. She wants women to know that financial independence is not a luxury, it is survival.

There was also the dependency on family. Her father took care of her, then her husband, and suddenly no one was. She missed companionship deeply. In our desi context, talk of remarriage comes with its own taboos. Rabia has been approached by men who said they would marry her if she did not have a son. “Nobody can take advantage of you till you don’t,” she says, but she has learned to be firm. She will not marry just for the sake of it. Her sister, also widowed young, remarried at 42, when her own son was her witness. Rabia holds that as a quiet possibility, but on her own terms.

Building Basil Pantry with ashes and hope

Basil Pantry began long before it was a business. When Rabia was in Karachi, she was 90 kilos. After her husband passed and she moved to Islamabad, she slowly lost weight over three and a half years. People noticed. Someone advised her to keep a cook and keep making the healthy meals she had been creating for herself. So she started small, from her home kitchen. Then her whole house caught fire. That fire pushed her to move into a commercial kitchen. Now she has a full setup: a storage unit, an office, and nineteen people working with her. It is a registered business that pays its taxes.

She tells me she has never taken money out of the business. Everything she makes goes back in. People see the orders and assume she is rolling in cash, but they do not see the investment in equipment, in ingredients, in staff. “When you start, you always start small,” she says. A man she barely knew, someone doing keto with her, once called and asked what she needed. He donated second-hand kitchen equipment worth a substantial amount. She still marvels at that gesture. That is the kind of kindness that kept her going.

Being the boss and being taken seriously

Running a business as a woman means navigating a dynamic where you want to be kind but also need to be the boss. Rabia says she has learned to be taken seriously without raising her voice. Her team, she says, eventually understood that she is both warm and in charge. She has had moments where she gave people more money than she should have because she felt bad, but she is learning to draw that line. Her son, now a teenager, calls her from his room sometimes and teases, “kya kitchen hai”, what a kitchen. She laughs about it. For her, even that small teasing is support. It means he sees her in her element, doing what she built.

A conversation that matters

I hope this conversation feels like a hand on your shoulder, reminding you that even when everything falls apart, you can build something new, one small thing at a time. Rabia’s story is not about perfection. It is about showing up, going to therapy, opening a bank account, accepting a stranger’s help, and crying when you need to. It is about letting go and holding on at the same time. Thank you, Rabia, for sharing it so openly.