I thought I was strong. I thought grief would knock me down for a while, let me gasp, then loosen up. I thought being her daughter for thirty-two years was savings I could draw on. When she died, the balance read zero. Just like that.
I thought I'd prepared for this. Isn't that what we're taught, death comes for everyone, this world isn't forever. But the day she died, the ground didn't just close over her body. Part of me went in too. No verse, no hadith, no barzakh lecture stopped the dirt from filling my chest.
People said inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un. I said it too, lips shaking, the way I've said it at every funeral since I was a kid. This time it tore something. She returned. I stayed. I don't know what to do with that sentence.
Time doesn't heal, not that I've noticed. It just stretches. Gets quieter and louder at the same time somehow. Doesn't bring her back, doesn't stitch anything. Some days it just feels like salt getting rubbed in deeper, and I'm stewing in it.
I know the lectures. I've listened to the barzakh series by Imam Omar Suleiman, I know the angels come, the questions get asked, a believer answers clean, the grave opens up into light. I know her faith was strong. I know she passed the test. My heart never got the memo though.
My heart hasn’t caught up.
First few weeks everyone said I was strong, functioning, reasonable. I took it like a compliment I hadn't earned. Answered emails. Laughed on cue. Then somewhere around day thirty the scenes I'd kept at arm's length slid through the barrier and hit. The feeling caught up to the fact, and I discovered I was more broken than I had thought possible.
Because at 10 p.m., I am not a theology student. I am a daughter clutching my phone, scrolling through her WhatsApp messages like scripture, pressing play on voice notes as if they were revelation. And when that isn't enough, I open the gallery folder where her face still lives. Hundreds of photos, some blurry, some casual, all unbearable. I zoom in on her hands, her smile, the wrinkles around her eyes. My phone has become my inheritance, not money, not land, but pixels and sound waves. This is what she left me, fragments too heavy for my chest, too sacred to delete.
And yet none of those images compare to what I carry in my body, the sound of the shovel striking earth. There was no coffin, only her body wrapped in white kain kafan, lowered gently into the ground. Then the soil began to fall, every thud said gone. Gone. Gone. My best friend's arms locked around me as I cried until my throat burned raw. That sound is lodged in my ribs, no theology has ever drowned it out. Because how do you return someone to Allah when I never agreed to let her go?
Grief is gravity. It pins me down, drags me closer to the floor. I don't move on from it, I stagger under it. For thirty-two years, I lived for one goal, to make my mother proud. Every achievement, every decision, every night I broke myself at work, it was all to see her smile. That was the deal. I'd climb, and she'd be the reason. Now the reason is gone. The scaffolding collapses every time I try to lean on it.
What do I fear now? Nothing. What else is left to lose? Fire me. Leave me. Betray me. Nothing will register the same way. I don't know how to feel threatened by anything anymore, and that's not freedom, it's just a different kind of stuck. I walk around like I already dropped once and I'm just waiting to see what else can break.
The cruelest part of grief isn't just losing her. It's losing the version of myself that only existed with her. With my mother, I was a daughter. Someone's first call, someone's pride, someone's soft place to land. Without her, that version of me evaporates. Now I am just a wife who feels misunderstood, an employee pretending to care, a body pretending to live.
I reach for her when I argue with my husband, when I want advice, when I need to cry without someone telling me to stop. I reach for her when the world feels too heavy. But I find nothing. Just an empty chair. Just silence. And silence, in its own cruel way, is kinder than the living.
I sit in meetings. People laugh about deadlines, complain about traffic, gossip about diets. And I want to scream, Don't you know my mother is gone? Don't you understand the world has ended? How dare you keep going like nothing happened? The world should've paused. At least for a second. But it didn't. The cruelty of life is its indifference.
Faith tells me she's in a better place. Grief tells me I want her to answer my phone call. Faith tells me she's at rest. Grief tells me I am restless. Faith tells me we will reunite on the Day of Judgment. Grief says, how do I even survive sunrise without her?
They tell me sabr. I don't know what that word means anymore except: I cried until my ribs hurt and I lifted my hands anyway. Not because I felt peaceful. Because I didn't have anywhere else to go. Back to the prayer mat, collapsed, out of breath, "Ya Allah, please forgive her," and then just quiet. Not calm. Just out of fuel.
I know the hadith, when a person dies, their deeds end except three, ongoing charity, beneficial knowledge, or a righteous child who prays for them. I know I am that child. I know my du'a matters. But some nights I can't even open my mouth. Some nights my prayer is only, Ya Allah, I miss her. Ya Allah, don't let her be alone. Some nights I wonder, are broken prayers still delivered? Do tears count as dzikr?
I picture her answering the angels fine. Grave full of light. Resting. And then memory just cuts back to the shovel anyway, or my dad wiping his face, or my niece screaming with nobody holding her. None of the theory erases the smell of dirt still stuck to my fingers.
People tell me she's with Allah, and I nod. But at night I confess, "Ya Allah, I don't want her with You. I want her with me." And then guilt swallows me, because isn't that selfish? Isn't faith supposed to surrender? And yet isn't love supposed to cling?
This is the delay I live in: my brain knows the theory, my heart hasn't caught up.
My brain says: she is in barzakh, she is safe, she is waiting.
My heart says: I am still pounding on the door that won't open.
My brain says: one day you will reunite in Jannah.
My heart says: I can't make it through this week.
What remains are fragments, her recipes; her handwriting on du'a lists, proof she once shaped the world with her hands; the way she said my name, a melody no one else can mimic. I guard them like inheritance. They don't comfort me. They stab me. But they also prove that love existed strong enough to ruin me.
I'll stay in this. Not because I'm strong, don't call me that, please. Don't tell me time heals, don't tell me to have a baby so I can move on. If I keep showing up it's not courage. I just don't know how to stop.
I don't want to heal from this, and I don't really know what that would look like anyway. If staying like this makes me useless, fine, I'm useless. I'm just tired. There's nothing noble in it, I checked.
The theories are still there in the background, barzakh, angels, gardens, all of it. I know them. My heart's still in the dirt though, hands out, not even reaching for anything specific anymore. Just reaching.
Maybe one day it'll feel real instead of theoretical. I don't know. Until then I'll keep saying Al-Fatihah into nothing, keep whispering her name into my hands like it goes somewhere. Maybe it does. I genuinely don't know.
Nobody told me this doesn't end. It just becomes the shape you live inside. You don't get over the person you loved most. You just learn to breathe with the weight still sitting on your chest. I don't know if that's healing or just what Tuesday is now.
So don't tell me to let go. I'm not doing that. I don't know what else to do except keep carrying it.
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