An Old Friend

Quarantine has certainly taken a toll on all of us. One of the beautiful (and perhaps ugliest) things about quarantine is how its removal of the distractions in our lives has left us time for reflection. Beautiful because of the opportunity to reflect. Ugly because of how we might stumble into that reflection. Over the summer, I had an overwhelming experience. I was sitting in my apartment, talking to my older sister, when I began feeling light headed. It was bothering me, but I couldn’t bring myself to get off the couch to take anything for it. Maybe I was just being lazy. My sister continued speaking, but oddly, her voice began to fade. Then the lights began to fade. Then she began moving slower, and slower, and slower. The room got darker, and darker, and darker. Suddenly, the room froze, and I fell over slowly as the entire room went black. I couldn’t breathe. I had chest pain. Then… nothing. Silence. Black.

Is that it?

Somehow, I knew I had died. I was definitely dead. There were no two ways about it: I was dead. And I (in the form of what I presumed to be my ethereal soul now divorced from my body) began to have an ethereal panic attack. I no longer had lungs, but I was suffocating. I no longer had a heart, but it was fighting its hardest to escape the confines of my nonexistent chest. I was nowhere, but the walls were most definitely closing in.

Then I woke up in my parents’ house in Rockford, 89 miles away from where I had seemingly died, and found myself in the very spot where I had gone to sleep the night before. I was in fact, not dead. I was under my blanket, sweating profusely and gasping for air. I glanced at the clock. 3:27 AM. A bizarre mix of relief, disappointment, and sheer, unmitigated terror washed over me. I was quickly talking myself down, trying to let myself know it was just a dream. But it could not have just been a dream, and I well knew that. It felt far too real to be a concoction of my own twisted imagination. I just had to lie to myself so that I would not die a second time. And then I began having yet another panic attack (this time inside my body), brought on by the fact that I could not feel my left leg at all. I definitely saw it, but there was no sensation. I tried grabbing it, but my hand couldn’t feel it either. I started shaking. I instinctively scrambled to find the nearest copy of the Quran and turned to the 67th chapter, Surat al-Mulk, and recited to myself out loud. I relaxed a bit. I settled down. I kept reading and rereading that chapter over and over to myself through my tears until I was still. I glanced back at the clock. 6:01 AM.

I didn’t sleep for the next two nights.

I distinctly remember turning to that specific chapter because it is a tradition in Islam that whoever reads this chapter of the Quran before dying is protected from the torment of the grave. I also remember that while I was reading this chapter that night, which I read frequently (usually with a supplementary translation), it was not the same experience. I read without a translation. I understood every word. I didn’t just understand the translation of every word, but the meaning of every word. The purpose of every word. More importantly, every word understood me. Every verse came alive and spoke to me directly. It was the most intimate experience with scripture I have ever had. I had never understood Quran the way I did that night, nor have I since that night. The fact that I immediately turned to that chapter without thought, knowing the tradition of the protection it gives access to, is very telling. In that moment, I was not afraid of death. I was afraid of not being ready to die. It was not merely life that I had not appreciated… I hadn’t appreciated death.

Life is certainly valuable, and its finitude, its pain, and its bleakness are what make it so valuable. They lend weight and meaning to all the joys and successes in life. But I don’t believe this life to be the be-all and end-all. It is extremely valuable because of its scarcity, but as a Muslim, I understand it to be a bridge that takes me to a final destination. A reunion with God. That to me is something beautiful. I want to be ready to meet God.

Of course I should make the most of what this life has to offer. I should definitely live life in its own context. I do want to get married and grow old. I do want to experience life in all its wonder. I love life. Even when I hate it, I can’t help but love it. But at the same time, I am not just my body. I am my soul. It needs attention, just as much as, if not more than, my physical body does. My body is for now, my soul is forever. I want to be ready to meet my maker. I want to care for my soul so well, that the next time death calls my number, I give him a big hug as if we were old friends. My goal is to get to a point where I love life, but am not afraid to bid it farewell. That is the happy medium I think everyone strives for. When people want to “fulfill their purpose”, is it not because we want to be ready to die? Is it not because on some fundamental level, we all want to be satisfied with how we lived our lives? We’re all afraid of missing out on things. We all want to live a life we don’t regret. All of us feel this need. All of us want to be unafraid of death. My way of confronting this need is informed by Islam. Other people find other ways to confront it. I think we all need one.

But I don’t appreciate death. I don’t appreciate life either. You cannot appreciate one without the other. In the dream, I did not get run over by a car. I wasn’t mugged. I was not murdered. I was having a normal conversation, and then just died. That is the scary part: its abruptness. Death sneaks up on us, and in order to appreciate life, you have to appreciate that it can end at literally any given moment for seemingly no reason. In order to appreciate death, I need to appreciate the time life grants me to prepare myself. Will I ever find that happy medium? Maybe not. But to me, it’s a responsibility to try. The goal isn’t to want death. The goal is to be prepared. Maybe that’s the function of religion and spirituality: to teach us how to greet our old friend Death.