The Questions

Why did You allow famine?
Why did You permit the rape and abuse of innocents?
Why did You build rooms inside of which creation might plan and later execute genocide?

These are not the questions which concern me, because the answers are reflected in the existence of the questions themselves. Choosing to harm is one expression of Free Will (and Allah has made clear that this is a world of trial, while the next is of Justice).

My questions have as their epicentre the spaces where I cannot choose. I cannot choose the depth of love I carry for my parents but understand that their loss will shatter whoever I am when the time comes. Truth is, and with the knowledge that we can die of a broken heart, I’m uncertain I will survive the losses. (Time will tell if this is foreshadowing.)

Sidebar: Though unexperienced, I believe that the depth of love most hold for their children is even greater.

Certainly, whomever I become after they go Home is not someone I will have met before.

Why, then?

Why create a bond from which I cannot choose to turn, and then rupture this bond? This is not romantic love wherein there is always choice to turn away (kindly leave silly romantic ideals at my door, please and thank you), but rather it is a thing over which I have zero power. No doubt that circumstances – being single, and without a family of my own. Not having siblings. My mother never remarrying. Always living in the same city, etc. – have made the links, needs, and relationships deeper, but they were never shallow to begin with.

So then, Why?

Every once in a while, my heart stutters over her own thoughts. Days when I am incapable of controlling the conversation she has with my mind. Or, on days such as today when I am a short time away from seeing Baba to the airport and hugging him goodbye for four months, after having him here for near three years, seeing him weekly, and speaking to him daily.

Days when I edge too close to asking that He take me first, so that I do not have to live in dunya without them. So that I do not have to learn what it means to loose 95% of the love I feel at present. So that I never discover what will become of me when I am fully without their arms to hold me.

Until I acknowledge that though I might survive their loss, I am not selfish enough to ask that my parents carry the weight of my loss so that I am without the grief that will be caused by theirs.

I might survive. I might survive. I might survive.

They would not.

Today, my heart woke me ruminating on what little time she has left with both Baba and Momma.
Today, she woke me breaking as she begged Allah to take care of them, to keep them with her for as long as possible, and to hold her together when He decides that that time has found it’s end.
Because in the absence of His answer to her Why?, this is all I have.


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