Heightened Senses

Whilst it’s erroneously attributed from everyone from Mawlana Rumi to Queen Elizabeth II, the quote above strikes me as true.

As an FYI, as it were, my wife passed away, after an unexpected illness, on our second wedding anniversary this past March. I miss her so utterly that my sinews, bones and the rest ache from grief, not merely because I found that she left me on her voyage towards the Sublime (S) Reality, bit that the sort of death which she experienced was nothing short of the Divine Outpur of Grace.

My beloved Isra died with my having recited the final testaments of faith over her, and given that we are Shi’is, as my one hand was desperately feeling for a pulse whilst she held my other, tightly, I recited ‘wa ashhadu ‘anna ‘Aliyyun waliyy Allah, wa wasiyy Rasulihi ‘ and just then, her heart sped up and then just stopped. Within a minute it was all over and I lament my spiritual impoverishment – I could not see what soul had left her, nor what it was to see her breathing at one moment and stop the next, asking – what left her?

What a state of desolation must I be in that I cannot fathom, and I mean that in terms of the firmly shut eyes of my heart, that I cannot ‘see’ that reality. What veils have overcome so-many of us that we cannot see that the sleep in which her body entered was the most profound of awakenings, where the veils that keep us from realising the Divine Beauty and Majesty, i.e. His Utter Unicity and Unity (S) are lifted finally.

Not for my Isra, al-hamdu li’Llah. She died an utter monotheist. In one of two of our final conversations, on the Monday before she passed, she asked me, after receiving a terminal diagnosis: “Imraan, what is this life?” To which I replied, “Go on, my love”…

“We come here…we suffer, work and then we go away.”

To which I replied, “sometimes I think of it as a waiting room, where we hope what comes next is more brilliant and glorious than we could imagine!” To which she replied: “So what is so wrong we me returning to my Lord?”

“These nurses…(she pointed to the staff in the ICU)…what can they do…they have no power….I have left everything in Allah’s Hands,” she said to me as if it was the most easily spoken sentences. We spoke a bit, I asked her how she felt knowing that she had at best months ahead. And truly, within minutes my eyes were swollen with tears. Isra said that she had no fear of dying, and that maybe as it was happening, she might be afraid, but other than that she said she was ready, and that she had recognised her entire reliance upon the Sublime. She asked me “why are you crying, my love?”

“Because you are my hero, hayati”