The Sorrow Whale

I am that errant servant who has disobeyed You, ya Rabb. Cast from the ship, I am a bad luck charm, I now weep in the belly of the whale. In darkness upon darkness, hoping, praying, that my sincere call to You will slice through the darkness to reach the heavens and cause You to turn to me Your countenance, full of Grace and Mercy.
I know I am unworthy. I know I have wronged You just as I have wronged myself, but I ask in the words of Yunus from the belly of his whale, There is no Ilah save Thee. Glory be to Thee. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers.
My heart is shattered into a thousand dark pieces. And in my aloneness, I turn to You. In the words of Yaqub, I say, indeed, I complain of my grief and sorrow to Allah.
And I borrow from Zakariyya who refused to despair when even in old age, yearning for a child, He said, And never have I, my Lord, Been disappointed in supplicating to you.

And I take from My Beloved when cast from his home, hiding in a cave, he reminded his companion, Do not grieve. Indeed, Allah is with us.
And I know, Ya Rabb, you are with me in my grief and sorrow. You will make whole my tattered heart. You will save the ones who have brought me such grief from the tears I shed begging at your door and again in your court. For even now, as a mother whose heart has been destroyed by her own offspring, I wish goodness for these children. I wish for them no taste of my own pain.

Call me Home, my Lord, if this life has no merit left in it for me. I defer to Your perfect knowledge. And if, even now, in this brokenness, You choose to keep me here, then I trust that Goodness from You will follow.
Allah is sufficient for me. There is no Lord but Him. In Him do I trust completely and He is the Lord of the Great Arsh.

These are the words I poured onto paper, when in the depth of the night, overwhelmed by sorrow, weeping, praying, I could find no rest. Reading them back, I realise that even in the seething belly of the Sorrow Whale, I could find my Qiblah. My heart knew, even when my mind faltered. There had grown over me a tree bearing fruit. Sabr. And all I had to do was eat of it.

It’s been days since this disconsolate night. Many more tear-soaked nights have passed. The musallah has worn thin and my knees have grown creaky. I have passed through the shadow of a near mental breakdown, pulled from the abyss by the love of good friends and a loyal son and daughter. And now I sit in the cold light of day, ready to face the dark chapters that must surely come to pass. Armed with acceptance. Still broken hearted, but alive. And standing. And no longer weeping.
Mine is a grim acceptance. Necessarily so. The heartbreak is no longer about the future my daughter has chosen, in spite of knowing the fears I have regarding this choice. Rather, it is centered on the sure knowledge that my child, the child who was born on the 10th day of Muharram, when, I, heavily pregnant, started the day fasting and finished it at death’s door bleeding out on a gurney, that child, has no mercy in her heart for me.

The realization, at first a shock, has settled in my heart, heavy. A boulder. It was like death by freezing. Slow, agonizing. Or like death from bleeding out after childbirth.
Ibn Taymiyyah said, A calamity that makes you turn to Allah is better for you than a blessing which makes you forget Allah.
So this is better for me. I accept it. Allah has brought me to my knees, and finding myself there, I choose to pray.
Whatever heartache her future holds, for life always holds heartache, she will face it without me. And I will quieten the fears I will feel for her because I no longer have a right to feel them. She has chosen to be a stranger to me, inured to my pain. I will have to content myself with being a mother to her from afar.
Did not the Prophets too have to deal with errant children?

Imagine the grief Nuh AS must have felt, when seeing his son thrashing about in the rising waters, rain from above, a groundswell from below, he called to him. Oh my Son, he said. Pouring all the love he felt into those two words. But his son, blind to faith and deaf to his love, preferred the imagined safety of a mountain to the sanctuary of his father’s embrace.
Imagine the sorrow of Ya’qub AS when his sons, all ten of them, came to him late in the evening, the blood of a sheep on their brother’s shirt, false tears in their eyes, telling a bald-faced lie, because they had placed a higher value on their jealousy and insecurity than their father’s heart. And to Allah did he complain of his sorrow, until his sons’ actions stole the very light from his eyes.
I am not the first parent to endure this pain. Nor will I be the last. Perhaps this is how Allah gets us to the stages in Jannah that He wants for us.
So long as we don’t slip.