Maisa Assata Abudayyeh

Maisa Assata Abudayyeh, ¡Presente!

Friday, July 8th, 2005 - Tuesday, January 28th, 2025

Maisa Assata Abudayyeh, our beloved daughter, darling niece, loving cousin, best friend, and fierce fighter, passed away early Tuesday morning, January 28th, 2025, at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, after an almost three-year-long battle with metastatic osteosarcoma, a rare, aggressive bone cancer. She was only 19.

Born at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, to mother Naima Hussein Saadeh, a childcare worker at Cradles Cribs & Crayons in Skokie, and father Hatem Khairy Abudayyeh, Executive Director at the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) in Chicago, Maisa grew up in the Jefferson Park Community Area on the Far North Side of Chicago, where she graduated from Jean Baptiste Beaubien Elementary School. She moved with her mother to Winnetka, Illinois, right after eighth grade, and graduated with honors from New Trier Township High School, one of the top high schools in the state of Illinois, in May of 2023.

From as early as the fourth grade, Maisa discovered a life-long love and passion for basketball, excelling at the position of point guard through her junior year of high school, when her diagnosis forced her to give up playing the sport. Her tenacious athleticism, competitive spirit, and perfect three-point-shooting form were encouraged by proud family members and friends, who cheered either from the sidelines or after watching videos of her games.

Maisa stayed on the New Trier team as a senior, strongly supporting her teammates and coaches, and was able to score one last basket, a layup at the start of Senior Night, when all the seniors were honored with pictures, posters, banners, and flowers for their commitment to the program. After she made the uncontested layup, she was substituted out of an organized basketball game for the final time, and enjoyed the rest of it – a big victory – from the bench. Maisa’s number was later retired, and her coach, Teri Rogers, said, “Nobody on the women’s team at New Trier will ever wear #1 again.”

Maisa also continued to be a fan of both the NBA and WNBA, the latter of which she loved to watch live. She attended a number of Chicago Sky games, even sitting courtside many times before the explosion in the popularity of women’s basketball made those tickets too expensive.

A proud Palestinian- and Arab-American, Maisa attended protests, rallies, conferences, and other AAAN and U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)-Chicago political events and activities ever since she was toddling, chanting and marching alongside her people and their allies in the streets of Chicago. Actively fighting against Israeli zionist occupation and colonization was of utmost importance in Maisa’s life.

The many summers spent with her mother’s family in Al-Jib, a tiny village near Jerusalem in Occupied Palestine, imparted on her the steadfast spirit and humble life of her Palestinian people, while also exposing her to the brutal oppression they faced at the hands of zionist Israel and its U.S. patron. The time she spent frolicking with her cousins on the land of her ancestors was some of her happiest and most memorable moments, and she spoke of them often and fondly. One of her biggest regrets was that – because of COVID and her illness – she was not able to visit Al-Jib and Palestine in the final years of her maternal grandmother’s life.

In addition, she also regularly joined her father and his AAAN and USPCN colleagues’ solidarity work, especially around immigrant rights, workers’ rights, and Black liberation. The Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2019, in which Maisa joined her teachers’ picket line at Beaubien, and the George Floyd murder and subsequent Uprising (led locally by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression), were seminal moments for her at a time when her political consciousness was rising, especially as anti-racism and Black liberation became such important issues in her life (she took her middle name from Assata Shakur, the iconic and brilliant Black Panther), on her New Trier campus, and across the world.

Maisa began her college career at Loyola University Chicago, where she studied Political Science and Pre-Law, with the goal of defending the wrongfully accused and convicted. She transferred the next year to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, continuing on the same academic track and greatly enjoying the college social life away from home.

Her time at Champaign was filled with intense studying, great times with her roommates and other friends, catching a few Big Ten football and basketball games in the fall and winter of 2024, and meetings and social events as a sister of Chi Omega sorority. Maisa was even planning to run for chair of the sorority’s philanthropy committee, especially since its main project is the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. Under the auspices and support of Make-A-Wish, Maisa took an incredible trip to Disney World with her parents and closest cousin Joleen in 2023.

And although she was not able to be as active in her political work as she wanted on either campus, Maisa was a proud member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at both Loyola and Champaign.

She and her doctors worked diligently to control the disease as much as they could to allow her to go back to Champaign for this year’s second semester, but one of the saddest moments of her illness was when she was forced to accept the realization that she had to start the semester remotely.

Whenever Maisa was not in school or on the court, she spent most of her time with her friends and family. She was well known by them as a fashionista, constantly shopping (much to her father’s chagrin) for new clothes and accessories, and patronizing nail and hair salons way more than truly necessary. She loved exploring Chicago and finding new places to dine, shop, and hang out.

Much of the time, she was the initiator of ideas and the identifier of restaurants and other fun places to visit, but as long as she was surrounded by the people she loved, she was always satisfied with the day’s plan. Maisa kept a running list of restaurants to visit in Chicago and across the world, and became a huge fan of filet mignon in the past year, ordering it almost every time she was out to dinner.

She wanted so much to work to pay for all of her fun, but could not while in high school because of COVID and her illness. Only later did she finally get a job that she absolutely loved, at LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics, which donates 100% of its watermelon slice soap profits to “projects providing urgently-needed professional mental health support, trauma counseling and art and play therapies for [Palestinian] children in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Maisa also admired Italian-American culture and food (she learned to cook chicken and veal cutlets in a New Trier class, and was studying the language), and it really shone through when she watched The Godfather Part II or Goodfellas for the 12th time each, and when she visited her beloved cousins in New Jersey, where she would live out her Jersey Girl dreams of driving down the New Jersey Parkway, tanning on the Jersey Shore, and taking pictures in front of popular filming sites of The Sopranos.

Maisa was with dozens of family members and friends the night before her passing, and died peacefully in the arms of her parents the next morning. She had fought cancer valiantly for nearly three years, and steadfastly endured hundreds of hours of chemotherapy and other treatment, but never let the disease define or defeat her spirit, even at the very end.

The wonderful and beautiful Maisa Assata Abudayyeh was predeceased by her grandparents Khairyeh and Khairy Abudayyeh and Fakhreya and Hussein Saadeh, and is survived by her mother, Naima Hussein Saadeh, and her father, Hatem Khairy Abudayyeh; paternal aunts Maysoun Abudayyeh and Omayyeh Amer; maternal aunts Sanaa Saadeh, Asmahan Saadeh Sbitan, Shafeeqa Saadeh, and Khawla Saadeh Shehadeh; paternal uncles Khaldoun Abudayyeh and Murad Abudayyeh; maternal uncle Jihad Saadeh; dozens of cousins in the U.S., Palestine, and around the world; and hundreds of loving classmates, teammates, and friends in Chicago and the U.S.

May she forever Rest In Power!

Memorial donations to AAAN and / or USPCN are appreciated.

You may also order [a memorial tree] (https://secure.everyaction.com/MSWr317UTk60sINxdGS_pQ2) to be planted in Maisa’s honor in Palestine.

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