I live across the street from a hospice care hospital. It is a place where people go to die.
For the past many years, I have occupied a home with expansive, panoramic windows. I like to gaze out at the world around me. My eyes catch the subtle changes in Lake Michigan’s waves from day to day. I study the starlings that honor one of my ledges by nestling their growing family’s home precariously onto it. And I watch people die.
I think it is very easy to forget that people die every day. The old me liked to pretend they don’t, that it’s just some bizarre hiccup when someone stops existing in this place. But in this chapter of my life, I have found it very difficult not to be acutely aware of the nearness of death. I look out to examine the leaves swaying in the wind and see a still body that once belonged to someone being wheeled out on a gurney for what is the last time. I hear the laughter of children chasing each other down the sidewalk and smile out at them, only to see what was somebody’s—waiter, maybe? Maybe he was mine. Now he’s in a bag in the parking lot. Without exaggeration, I often see multiple dead bodies a day without even looking for them and I am reminded that we are all going to die.
This is not a thing I should need to be prompted to recall. I have had my fair share, if there is such a thing, of death. My dearest friend from high school Alex, when his profound exhaustion with this ugly world overcame his valiant effort to keep living. My friend and co-conspirator Ella, when she felt a mysterious discomfort visiting her mother two Christmases ago and suddenly departed on the way to the hospital. My grandfather, who greeted death with the sincere peace I pray you have when you die. Because, beloved, you will die.
When I was working in Title I schools across the city, and this is true, a student I knew would die on average once a month. I’ve never spoken about this publicly, but I remember the constant stream of tears and agony slowly, then not so slowly, transforming into utter numbness over the years. I would hear the news and silently nod. I was incapable of anything else.
After years of shame about this, I told my therapist I feared I was a bad and hardened person. I could no longer externally emote when another life I loved was gone in an act of senseless systemic violence, whether that was a lack of healthcare, a lack of gun control, or the stronghold of anti-Blackness.
With the gentleness and firmness I am grateful to have in a therapist, they told me about the phenomenon of Secondary Traumatic Stress disorder that plagues American teachers. Secondary traumatic stress (or STS) is the emotional distress that comes when someone vicariously experiences the trauma of another individual. Sometimes called compassion fatigue, the toll of tending to someone's painful experiences can create very real symptoms in caregivers, including teachers. One of the most common symptoms is your body refusing you the hormones to activate the feelings your mind and heart know you should be feeling, or “emotional detachment”. As my therapist explained, your body does this to protect you. It does not do this because you are not feeling anything. It does this when you are feeling too much, too often.
All this to say, I have had my fair share of death, if there is such a thing. My fair share of tears at the injustice or heartbreak at the all too soon or the survivor’s guilt of what could I have done or the sadness at losing someone who had a good, long, beautiful life. Because people die every day, that does not make me special.
I don’t like to think about dying so I think we should talk about dying more often. I want to be prepared for the moment I become something else because one day, it will be me.
As I’ve shared before on this platform, Arab culture is quite macabre and obsessed with death. The most American thing that has become of me since immigrating at a young age is that I would now much rather live in denial of death. When I was a small child I would lie next to my mom in bed and tell her I hoped I died before anyone I loved, because I couldn’t imagine living without them. The thought was too scary. It still is. But now, my childlike purity long gone, I am also so afraid to die.
At first, it presented as a transformation of my bedtime thoughts. Instead of hoping I’d never have to face loss, I started fixating on the concept of eternity. While the adults around me were celebratorily teaching me that we would all go to heaven forever, eager smiles on their faces and believing it was a comfort, I wasn’t so sure. Forever seemed like a really, really long time. I’d stare at the glow-in-the-dark stickers from my top bunk bed and make myself sweat, repeating the phrase “forever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ever, and ev-” until I finally fell asleep, the puzzle of time having to wait another day to be solved.
Eventually, I began a thought experiment of the alternative. Nothing? Was being nothing better or worse? Finally, I tried to stop thinking about death altogether and just hoped it would go away.
I grew up around elders who, when I asked them if we could do something together in the future (Can we go to Disneyland? Will you visit me when I graduate from college? Will you come chase the ice cream truck with me tomorrow?) would reply in Arabic: if we are still living. It used to make me so angry. Stop reminding me that we are going to die and that it could be tomorrow! Just say yes! Now my parents have started to say it, and it makes me even angrier because I know it is true.
A few weeks ago, one of my dearest and wisest friends Makkah was generously helping me enter a new chapter of my life when she looked out my window and for some reason, I decided to tell her my secret about living across from the dying people. After a long and thoughtful conversation, she told me she believed one of the best things one can do for their relationship with God is to have proximity to death. And, as Makkah usually is (I think she’d prefer I say always is), she was right.
Islam often reminds us that this is not the main event; we are not physical beings having a temporary spiritual experience on earth, we are spiritual beings having a temporary physical experience on earth. It is much easier to say those words than it is to behave as if you believe them. In fact, it is Islamically required for all adults to have a will- a thing many of us put off as long as possible even though we know this is impermanent.
A hadith narrated by Abdullah Ibn Umar says: The Messenger of Allah (SallaAllahu ‘alayhi wasallam) took me by the shoulder and said,
“Be in this world as though you were a stranger or a wayfarer.”
And Ibn Umar (RahiyAllahu ‘anhuma) used to say,
“In the evening do not expect to live until the morning, and in the morning do not expect to live until the evening. Take advantage of your health before times of sickness, and take advantage of your life before your death.”
And I know. I know this can all feel like a lot. To simultaneously make this place our home, the only one we’ve got in this realm, and also treat it as if we are just passing through— the tension of it all can be supremely daunting. But I’d like to strive to leave every place I sit (no matter how temporary) as beautiful as I can for the other wayfarers stopping through for a rest.
And now: how to die.
When my grandfather, Allah Yerhamhu, was rounding the bend of his 85th year, he and I were laughing on his Tripolitan balcony swing retelling our favorite stories when he told me he was ready to die. I panicked, worried he was depressed or ill or battling some vague discontent and I immediately tried to find a solution. I could not begin to imagine what it meant to be ready to die. When my unwise twenty-something self fretted at him, he said, “Arij, I love being alive. I have done everything I wanted to do. I have lived a long and beautiful life and I never hurt another person doing it.” That was very hard to argue with, because it was so maddeningly inspiring, especially considering that this man had lived through colonization, a civil war, a financial collapse, and the pain that more generally comes with being a person. Maybe he had done everything he wanted to do- but he hadn’t done everything I wanted him to do. He might never dance at my wedding, he might never hold my baby, he might never taste that recipe I’ve been meaning to perfect. He was ready to go, but I wasn’t ready to let him.
Years later, I went to Lebanon to celebrate my grandfather’s 90th spin around the sun with him and many other people who loved (and still love) him. He was the kind of man who, much like me, was a collector of stories from the very beginning until the very end. He was one of the first to invest in a video camera in the latter half of the 1900s. My father once brought home a garbage bag full of reels that we were able to digitally convert. It is such a gift at my age to see my father and the way he moved as a little boy, to see my grandfather swing my grandmother around with the kind of adoration that is hard to find. At his birthday party, myself and a few cousins presented him with a video message that included every single one of his 15 grandchildren, bookended by videos of him beaming as a spry man who was yet to build this family.
When I finally had to return to America, our goodbye was more difficult than usual. I don’t know how we knew, but we did. Between wiping his tears and mine, my jeddo whispered to me:
“Habibti, the key to a beautiful life is to remember the good things and forget the bad. There is a first time for everything and a last time for everything”
I didn’t want it to be the last time I spoke to my grandfather in person, but it was.
Some time passed, and he did die. It was heartbreaking. He never danced at my yet-to-materialize wedding, he never held my non-existent baby, and he never got to try the recipe I have yet to perfect. But it was not a tragedy. It was a life well-lived, and then it ended so something new for him could begin.
When my grandfather was on what would become his death-bed, I booked a ticket to Lebanon right away. He died before I could get on the plane. I will always have a pang of regret about that- that I couldn’t see the future and didn’t know when time would betray us. But my aunts were there, alhamdulillah. Alongside their mother and his wife of over seven decades, they courageously stood by him while he transitioned to a new realm.
There are two things about this story that have stuck in my heart. First, that as my grandfather wavered between here and there, barely able to communicate, my grandmother asked him if he knew who she was. Alert and as if a light had been switched on, he said to her:
“You? Habibti, of course I know who you are. You are the love of my life, the mother of my children, my partner in this world, and the best of women.” Even in his dying moments, he led with love, comforting and clarifying for those around him that their bond was eternal. May we all have such a love.
Second, as he was closer to passing through the curtain, my jeddo saw his mother and father come for him. He cried out to them for comfort and help to overcome the apprehension of going someplace new. “I need to go, but I just can’t place my foot down,” he would say, with his daughters telling him it was okay. It was okay to go, to rest his feet in this new place with these familiar souls. It is a beautiful and aching reminder that every single one of us is someone’s baby, and we always remain someone’s baby. That in our most magical, terrifying, and uncertain moments, we will cry out for our mothers and fathers. And, if we are lucky enough, our children, biological or not, will softly usher us back into the old gentleness of being held by the people who watched us grow.
We don’t know how or when death is coming. We only know that it will. Surrounded by loved ones, living and dead on either side, knowing that I have done everything I would like to do without harming a single soul and ready to meet God—this is how I would like to die.
That tells me everything I need to know about how I would like to live.
Al-Fatihah.
😭 What a beautiful, reflective piece of writing. I'm really touched. May your grandfather enjoy the gardens of jannatul firdaws and may He be reunited with those he loves. Ameen.
Reading this made me want to be a softer Mom, a more nurturing mom that has the rapport with her children that they would seek to be with forever and ever.
I pray this very quality you are discovering in yourself (thinking of death often) is something that really does strengthen your relationship with Allah ❤️