The Loss of My Mother

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un “To God we belong and to Him we return.”

Friday, October 8th 2010, was the hardest day of my life. My mother passed away in the hospital ICU after four days of suffering from illness contracted by an immuno-compromised state. She had been struggling with illness for six long years but she remained a fighter til the very end. All the things I’ve realized and seen in these past few days since her passing has led me to conclude that – aside from what I already knew- my mother was a very special person (mashaAllah *as God wills.*) The overwhelming amount of love, support, prayers from family, friends, the community, and even strangers has touched my family beyond words. The signs we have seen since have strengthened my faith and increased our assurance that, God-willing, our mom is in the highest Paradise. The last few years of her life were filled with great trials and suffering and she is now in peace. Serving my mom during her most difficult years was the greatest honor of my life and I would do it again in a heartbeat if it meant she didn’t have to suffer through it all.

I just want to say thank you and give my heartfelt gratitude to all those family and friends who stood by her side all these years, who were involved with her life and care, and who were inspired by her story. I am sincerely grateful for all of your support over the years and the touching comments you’ve all left me, and will take the next several weeks to respond to each of you and give you your due time, we owe you at least that much. May God bless all of you and please continue to pray for her and for our family and the future that lies ahead of us. Wal al-akhiratu khayrun laka minal ulaa “and the hereafter is better for you than what came before.” [93:4]

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Thank you for all your love. You were all there for me and my family during the hardest times and stuck by our side, God bless you all for that (ameen!) Losing my mom was the biggest personal & collective loss for myself and my family. I had experienced the death of relatives and loved ones before, but never this close, never this personal. During someone else’s loss, I would feel sad for a bit, and be among those praying for them and their loved ones. This time however, people were praying for us and our dearly departed and it felt so different. There are many lessons I’ve learned in these past five weeks but it would take too long to write them all down here. For starters, you never know what you’ve got til its gone. Although I realize now what (at the time were projected feelings in the future,) that I’d look back at the time spent caring for mom and smile, I still yet had not known what that truly was to feel like until now. I have my days and moments where I am sad, and yet other times where I’m fine and well. Yet reflecting over it all, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to feel. I realize grieving has its stages and that our family has grieved constructively for the most part, but then there are times where I want to be sad, I want to dwell over her loss and let it sink in really deep, in a way that hurts – but something stops me. Whenever that happens, I feel prohibited from doing so; I feel like her spirit is stopping this, and that she would want us to stop suffering, to stop being sad and to continue living – living well, being happy and prosperous, hopeful and grateful. It’s like all the things she would have wanted, that is what I must do and that is how I must live my life, God-willing. Candid as I may be at times, I never spoke openly about how rough these years have been on me personally and I was not healthy during this time. I feel like all that must change now. Ironically, it took the loss of my mother to help me realize right from wrong – the right way to live and think, and to bury the self-defeating/self-deprecating old ways that became an integral part of who I was. No more– If I am indeed my mother’s son, and her living legacy, then I must be courageous and brave as she was to face life directly; to not turn away or cower over trials and difficulties. She was a lion in the face of adversity and I must emulate that spirit if I am to learn and gain anything from life. She was my role-model, afterall.

One thing my mother taught me early on, was that one’s character was in their own hands to fashion. She always taught me and my siblings that wherever you go in life, if you take with you your values and your character you’ll never forget who you are. Over the course of the past many years of my life, I was beginning to forget who I was because who I was had never really been properly defined. I don’t say I was “losing myself” in the conventional sense that most people take it to mean but rather that my values and character had been expanding and shifting so as to make it difficult to say I was one thing over another. “Amorphous” is how I like to describe it. So if my values and character were not defined, how was I to ever know who I was? Well, it turns out that I was wrong. I do have clear values I abide by and I do have a character that I am known by. Even though for years I always figured people never really knew me, or that I was always misunderstood, I think now that the more I claim to be misunderstood the less I will know anything about my true self and the more I will adhere to a false self-concept. The question of “who I am” is partly decided by me and partly decided by all of you. I am truly honored and blessed to have such loving, caring, and supportive friends and family in my life who have always over-valued and over-estimated me to the point where I would be left to question you and myself all over again; “am I really what they say?” I know I am nobody special, but the way you all make me feel I cannot ever repay and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. There is a saying in my faith, “showing gratitude to the people is showing gratitude to God,” this is my intention here, and I am in your debt. I pray that in my life ahead, I am increased in good deeds, improve my manners, and that I become better than I was to earn my parents more credit (ameen.) Being appreciative and thankful is something my mother instilled in me since I was little. She was my teacher, afterall.

Lastly, I say a word to my family and friends who are still blessed with the company of your mothers (and fathers too.) No matter what type of relationship you may have with them – enmeshed or estranged – cherish the time you spend with them, because one day you will miss their company painfully when they are gone. Humble your ego and pride before them because they played an essential role in helping you develop that pride. Care for them when you have the chance as they cared for you when they had no time for anything else except you. Give them company, become their friend like you would someone who supports and appreciates you because nobody appreciates you more than your parents. In short, realize your tremendous debt to them and try to seek their forbearance because in truth, their kindness and grace toward you blinds you from the responsibilities, obligations and contract binding upon you to help them. Granted, none of us are perfect and neither are our relationships with our parents, but all we’re asked to do is try to give our best. As with God, so too do we owe a debt we cannot repay to our parents, even if they put us through torment or gave us constant joy – their act of bringing us to enjoy life and teaching us the first experiences of things we’ve learned to love and hate in life are all worth noting, and appreciating in their own right let alone the care that came along the journey til now. I know I made the right choice by taking off from school and devoting my life to caring for my mom in her final years, I know that brought her happiness and brings me happiness, but I also know that I didn’t do enough nor could I have ever done enough. And if she were here today, I would be the happiest son in the world just to do one more thing she asked me to do for her…she was my mother afterall, and I will always love and miss her until I see her again, God-willing. Thank you all again for your loving support and private messages. We could not have endured this time as well as we have without your presence. I am honored to have you in my life.
Love,
-Ruhudeen Ali

“Death is nothing at all…I have only slipped away into the next room…I am I and you are you…whatever we were to each other that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Pray, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is absolutely unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near just around the corner…All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

-Canon Henry Scott-Holland

“Death, be not proud, though some have callèd thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,

Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;

And soonest our best men with thee do go–

Rest of their bones and souls’ delivery!

Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!”

-John Donne