'Top Chef' star Fatima Ali wrote a moving essay before her death: 'You can't let that fear cripple you'
Prior to her death, Fatima Ali, a fan-favorite contestant on Season 15 of Top Chef, penned an inspiring essay for Bon Appétit magazine. Ali died Friday from cancer at age 29.
In 2017, Ali was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that affects bone and soft tissue. After undergoing chemotherapy and surgery, she learned in September the cancer was back and terminal. In October, the chef wrote for the magazine about how she planned to spend her final months, so in honor of her memory, Bon Appétit has published an expanded version of her moving piece.
Ali found her passion for food at an early age growing up in Pakistan. At 18, she moved to the United States, where she attended the Culinary Institute of America. After graduating in 2011, she settled in New York City, which worried her mother at first.
“Watching me evolve gave my mom comfort and helped her understand that this was absolutely my calling,” Ali remembered. “So she finally let go and said, ‘Look, just promise me that you’ll do your absolute best. And I’ll be happy with that.’ And I said, ‘OK. That’s a promise.'”
That’s exactly what she did, working seven-day weeks and 14-hour days for nine months at her first job at an Indian-Latin restaurant, where she was both a floor manager and the sous chef. Ali recalled the often less-than-glamorous parts of her early jobs in NYC.
“One time several cooks called out [sick] and then the person who was transporting the catering trays dropped them all onto the pedestrian walk at 45th Street and Lexington Avenue., in the middle of lunch rush,” she said. “We had to remake everything, with all the cooks missing. There were plenty of days like that. But you know what? It was amazing. Managing to get through a day like that — and not only living to tell about it, but doing it again and again — I think it really makes you understand what a human is capable of. We’re so resilient. If I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t change anything.”
Her resilience was tested two years ago when she was first diagnosed with cancer.
“I’d had this weird ache in my shoulder for the past couple of months that I’d been ignoring. You know, popping a couple of Advils, going to sleep,” she wrote. “But one day, in the middle of lunch, my shoulder swelled up and the pain was mounting literally by the minute. I had to go to the emergency room.”
Ali remained hospitalized for three weeks.
“Honestly, until your first chemo cycle, I don’t think it really hits you. Then your hair starts falling out, and finally you’re like, ‘This is actually happening. This is the rest of my life,'” she said. “I did eight rounds of chemo. It was horrible, but at the end, my scans were all clear. I thought I’d beaten it. Then it came back. Worse than before. It was metastatic. It had spread to my lungs. The doctors told me I had a year to live.”
When stressing about the unpleasant things — like her newly dyed hair falling out — she thought, “‘You know what? Stop feeling sorry for yourself.'” She added, “Even now, it could be so much worse than it is. I‘m still very lucky to be able to do a lot of the things that I love.”
Ali continued: “I decided not to spend whatever time I had left (whether it’s a year, a month, another 10 years — you don’t know until you’re gone) lamenting all the things that weren’t right. Instead, I’d make the most of it. I’m using cancer as the excuse I needed to actually go and get things done, and the more people I share those thoughts with, the more I hold myself to them. If I write this intention down, if I have it printed somewhere like I do here, I have to hold myself responsible, because I have people counting on me.
“What is my intention? To live my life,” she said. “To fulfill all those genuine dreams I have.”
That meant spending time with loved ones and eating at all the best restaurants as possible.
“My brother and I were talking the other day, and he made an interesting point. He was like, ‘As chefs, you guys deal with death every day.’ And he’s right,” she noted. “When you’re a chef, you understand the circle of life. We’re butchering rabbits, whole hogs and baby lambs; we’re filleting fish and cleaning shrimp. All these things have died for us. I suppose you have to see it as the natural progress of life. Perhaps I’ve had to face it a little bit sooner than expected, but it’s not an unfamiliar feeling.
“There are days that I’m exceptionally afraid. There are days I sit alone and cry, because I don’t want to do it in front of my family,” Ali said. “And there are other days that we all sit down and cry together, because it is such a scary thing. But at the same time, you can’t let that fear cripple you. It’s harder being miserable than it is to be happy.”
A version of this essay will run in Bon Appétit‘s March print edition.
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