Death is the door to illumination. As those of us left behind, struck with sorrow, disbelief, regret, and much more, we touch our own death by losing people we deeply love.
Death is a reminder that we hold so much in our hearts, and when we swim in these deep waters, sometimes all we can do is hold on tight to the edge of a long rope to keep from drowning.
Death is the gasping of air, when our bodies forget how to breathe, because the one we have lost was as close to us as our own arms and legs.
Death is the final goodbye in this realm, pushing us to seek beyond what is here and what we can see.
In this past week I have lost two people that I love. One friend left so unexpectedly that as I read the texts from across the world, I could barely keep myself from falling. The tears, sharp and jagged, ripped through a long list of regrets. How caught I am in my self-absorbed web of life that I can forget over and over again: how precious today is, how beautiful life is, and that all this is not forever.
Yet we forget. We are humans, and it is one of our most embedded conditions. My Sufi teachers taught that we must practice remembrance of God to be truly alive. Remembrance is not just a pathway to presence, but also a practice to see beyond what is here. To submit to the plans of the One who is in charge of the entire affair. And as my dear friend and teacher depart from this world, I will submit, in face of all inner resistance, and recite Inna lil lahi wa inna elaihi rajioon, “We belong to Allah, and to Him is our Return.”
Reciting, chanting, and gathering in a community to pray and bid farewell are universal rituals which help those grieving to move through their hours and days. We keep vigil and we support one another, not by showing our best faces, but by holding space for grief. We know if the grief is buried with our loved one it would become our poison. There is a deep abiding respect for the process of grief, and the rituals that mark our loss.
Often, it is taught that a Muslim will never stay in despair. A Muslim translates to: “the one who submits.” All the practices of the faith are engineered to practice submission. The five daily prayers remind us to submit our plans to the prescribed rhythm of the day. Praying as a discipline, as a physical expression, and as a way to remember each day is sacred. The yearly practice of Ramadan, a month of fasting from sunrise to sunset without food and drink, helps us practice submission by teaching our animal-self patience and compassion for the millions who do not have regular access to food and drink.
This practice is not aiming for perfection. In fact, the practice of submission is accepting our most intense vulnerability, that at any given moment we have one foot in this world, and one in the next. How little we can know and how little we can control. These deep veins of uncertainty that flow through all our lives terrify and paralyze most of us. When those we love die, it reminds us that nothing has changed about being alive.
In this age of great forgetfulness and fixation on what we can see and accumulate, death is a burden of fear people carry to their graves. Carrying our impermanence as a burden dulls our perception of life. We cannot submit, because we hold tight to everything we have or want. When things change, we resist. The illusion of control brings us to a new day, unconsciously believing that if we just do the right things that this terrible fear and this terrible discomfort of dying will be resolved.
Yet all traditions and all inward paths approach death with great honor, and sensitivity of its rightful place in life. Death is illumination, it is not destruction. Its strength and its presence, most palpable when we experience immense loss, can be a transformative invitation into ourselves, asking, “are you really alive while you have the chance?”
There are those of us who have been graced with witnessing a death that is not resisted and when dying is unconditionally accepted. I have these treasures: humans who left without fear; humans who left in gratitude and submission. As I bid farewell to another teacher, I experience an intense collision in my heart of sorrow and indebtedness to her and God. My teacher Shaykha Shahbano Aliani who left this world on Feb. 8 2019, wrote in a poem, “when death arrives this is what I want to say: I’ve done what I came here to do, there are no unsung songs left in me.”