Grief, they say has 5 stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. None of which is true. It has no stages, there is no time to process anything. It’s a train. A train that moves at speed of 500km per hour and it feels as if you’re running along. The only thing you desperately want is for it to stop for a moment, just so that you can catch your breath, even for just a minute, but there is no such mercy. The thing about this train is that it doesn’t go straight, because if it did, it would mean progress, if it did it would mean that there would come a point where you would ultimately just let go, instead it goes in circles, so that you don’t know where you’re headed, so that you don’t know when to stop running, when to let go, so that you keep running in hopes of station to arrive, but by the time you realize that there is no station you are just too worn out to move on, to exit that circle.
So now you just sit, you sit and watch that train of grief move around you in circles. No one puts an end to your grief if that’s what you are expecting, because no one would be prepared to run along an inhumane marathon along a train, because no one would to dare to enter a boundary that is being circled by a train moving at a speed of 500km per hour. Some don’t recognize the grief, some recognize it, but don’t understand it, those who do understand it don’t know how to help, and those who do know how to help won’t hang on long enough to make you let go but that doesn’t make it their fault since their understanding is partial. They can’t see how deep that grief has reached and sometimes they don’t even want to try. Instead, they want you to reach out and remove it because they want you to turn back to life, they want you to forget and forgive whoever you feel is responsible.
What no one realizes is that this war between the one holding the grief and the one watching from a distance, does more good than harm. The result of this is, the one with the grief would shelter their grief from those watching from a distance. They would do it for themselves and the people around them. The last thing they want to do is to cause nuisance, so they would stop speaking about it as often, they would return to life for the people around them, and that is the worst of recoveries. It’s the recovery that causes pent up emotions which ultimately silences them, and harms them. Initially, the harm is just emotional, but ultimately physical, and that’s when everyone else notices but by then it’s a scar even if it heals. So no, don’t expect the people around you to understand your grief and respond the way you want them to, because they are incapable. The extent of their incapability depends upon how much they know you and how much they don’t, but if one thing remains constant, it is that everyone is ultimately incapable of pulling you out of grief or wanting to put the effort to pull you out of grief, because it’s too much effort for a “creation”.
So, look for help in the Creator for all grief and happiness comes from Him. Many a times our grief comes from places that are our weakest of spots, which makes it more agonizing, which makes you respond in ways you never thought you would, which makes you want to rip out your heart just to rid you of the pain. For grief this great, you look for answers. You want the answer to the question “why”. Sometimes you recognize the answer as “divine decree” but sometimes it isn’t enough and so you want to know “why such a divine decree”, and the only answer to this is “If you could figure Him out, then He wouldn’t be God, would He”. You might be incapable of stopping the train, but He is. You might be too broken to walk out of that vicious circle but He can make you move. You can take your time, you can grieve. When you feel you can’t handle the grieving reach out, close your eyes and reach out, and He who loves you more than what your mother could be capable of would pick you up before you have even fully reached out.
But, if you think you will ever completely heal, you are delusional. You weren’t given immense pain by the Creator who looks out for you more than you look out for yourself, just for the sake of it. You were given the grief so that you could look at your scar, as a lesson. But most of all, so that you look at your scar as a sign of mortality, as an acknowledgment of your helplessness. Look at the mark as a sign of the test that this “Dunya” is. Remember for even the slightest of pain that the believer feels, his sins are expiated. Remember that this world that gave you grief isn’t forever, but where you are ultimately going is. And you most certainly need the expiation. Remember that the creation around you is too weak to carry the burden of your grieving heart. If you are preventing your fall from a cliff by the support of a thin log, you must know that it will ultimately break causing you to “break”. That is what the humans around you are, a weak log not designed to carry your weight of expectations and time of your recovery from grief. You can’t expect their support to last, and you can’t hold it as their fault, you put your weight on the wrong thing.
Know this, you will never understand why unfortunate events happen. Why are children ripped apart from their parents, returning to God when there are supposed to be many who go before them, a dilemma against the law of nature. You will never understand why doors close that you so desperately wanted to see open, you will never understand why those who weren’t at fault had to pay the price of so many occasions, you will want to understand but will never understand why the divine decree was designed to allow horrible things to happen to the creation God loves more than a mother could 70 times, which too is only metaphoric. But know, that you are not supposed to understand this.
It didn’t only happen to you, and it didn’t happen because nature conspired against you or that Allah didn’t love you. If he whom He loves the most, if he whom he created this Dunya for, his Habib Muhammad(s), had to see the loss of 5 children, a mother when he could hardly carry on his own, a father whom he never even saw, a grandfather who was all he had apparently left, a wife whom he loved the most, the martyrdom of his little grandsons flashed in in front of him in his lifetime and more. And he still had the ability, the strength and the devotion to get through this test of Dunya then you do too. The only thing you must do is cope, cope with your grief without feeling that it is your duty to cope for the sake of those around you, rather for yourself, and those who make an effort at coping don’t have to do it alone, the have their Creator by them.
