I am scheduled to have surgery next week. I am approaching 34 years old. Despite the relative simplicity of the surgical procedure, I am experiencing for the first time in my life the realities of mortality. Perhaps a psychological product of the imminent operation, my body feels older, my limbs ache, and I feel tired. I did not used to feel like this. In my mid-twenties, a lack of sleep hardly impacted upon me and my energy could not be depleted. My family and I recently took an unscheduled trip to Bursa on the bus, going without a solid night’s sleep for more than 30 hours. It took me a number of days to fully recover. Compounded by the tragic diagnosis of Usama Canon with a terminal illness, and despite its shadow being perpetually cast over all human existence, death suddenly seems more real. This is neither a morbid lament nor a cry for help, but rather a healthy acknowledgement that the human who does not take death as his advisor is privy to heedlessness, and likely to undervalue the glorious blessings that marinate his life. Modernity has hidden death from us. Deemed an unimaginable disaster to those who only find meaning in life, its smell and suffering have been sanitised by an age that is preoccupied with the facade of order and superficial cleanliness. Even the most boisterous rejection of tradition and faith withers in the face of death, as the ardent skeptic exclaims “God, if you are out there…’ as his condition slowly deteriorates.
But we need death to truly savour life. Carl Jung is reported to have said ‘never is life more beautiful than when surrounded by death’, and the Holy Prophet ﷺ himself instructed us to frequently remember that which brings pleasure to an end, death. Death has a habit of reducing the petty concerns of daily life to grains of sand on a beach of insignificance. Nothing is a better tool for accessing accurate perception as regards the priorities one has in one’s life than death. Death poses difficult questions: Who am I? How have I lived? How will I be remembered? Am I prepared to give it all away? Have I done my existence justice? Was it all worth it? The Holy Prophet ﷺ encouraged us to visit the graves, to consider how hours, months, decades, and lives have passed, leaving behind them only memories and gravestones.
Inherent in everything that Allah Almighty creates is the potential for human awakening. Nothing is definitively beneficial or detrimental, except according to the lesson weaned from it. He who unexpectedly finds himself the inheritor of a fortune can fall before his Lord in gratitude, or use the wealth as a means of strengthening his ego. Similarly, he who is confronted by the possibility of death, illness, or the passing of a loved one can employ this gift as a means of humbling himself before the Almighty, magnifying the blessings that he had previously overlooked, and causing him to cherish every breath that he is permitted to take. It is difficult for the young to understand that they too will one day die. But the realisation of that reality is a potent tool for gratitude, a tremendous blessing from The One that returns the mundane to its original technicolour, and fights off complaint and discontent. And He knows best.
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