The Medicine of Death: Choosing to Remember and Awaken

On resisting resistance - and moving toward the call the soul avoids.

To return before you return. To die before you die. [Image by the talented Jalal Sepehr]

Today, I made a journey not towards achievement, but toward absence - toward the penumbra of death that quietly haunts the horizon of every soul.

Because something inside me had started to feel brittle. Not broken - just thin.
Like a part of my soul had gone quiet.

It wasn’t one big thing. It was the slow ache of weeks. Of performing life instead of living it. Smiling while hollow. Scrolling while numb. Speaking, but not truly present.

Then came the message.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un - Indeed we belong to Allah, and to Him we shall return.

Someone had died.

And while the world moved on - as it always does - something in me did not.

I sat with it.
Not exactly with their death, but with mine.
The quiet one I’ve been dying over time - the one with no janāzah, no prayer, no closure.

So I left.

I departed from London, that feverish metropolis whose arteries pulse with the restlessness of consumption and becoming. I left behind my laptop, my digital tetherings, my curated ambitions. I drove to Leicester - not in pursuit of utility, but in pursuit of futility, that blessed futility which reveals al-Ḥaqq - The Real.

For news had arrived, as it always does, of a departure. One more soul had crossed the veil. And I had made a promise, somewhere in the still hours of a past self: when death knocks at the door of my attention, I will follow it - like a mourner follows the janazah - not for the sake of the deceased alone, but for the redemption of my own heart.

---

That was it. No explanation. No backstory. Just the stillness of a sentence that carries the weight of a world.

I didn’t know him well - not anymore. We had exchanged salām once long ago at a distant family members gathering. His name hadn’t passed through my mouth in years.

But his death felt near - not because of proximity, but because it mirrored my own quiet disconnection.

I sat there, phone in hand, heart suddenly stilled.
Not devastated. Not emotional. Just... alert.

"كُلُّ نَفْسٍ ذَائِقَةُ الْمَوْتِ"

“Kullu nafsin dhā’iqat al-mawt”

Every soul shall taste of death. (Qur’an 3:185)

But we taste it not only in dying. We taste it when we relinquish illusion, when we stare into the metaphysical finality of the grave and feel, for a moment, the scales of this dunya lift from our sight.

Leicester, on this day, was no longer a city of Midlands red-brick and immigrant tales. It became a waystation on the road to the End.

Our blessed Prophet PBUH said:

"زوروا القبور فإنها تذكركم الآخرة"
“Visit the graves, for they extinguish the flame of worldliness and remind you of the hereafter.”

I went as a faqir - a beggar before God.

No podcast in the car.

No plans afterward.

Not even a proper jacket.

Just the cold, and the wind, and a sense that something in me had died long before the person we were burying.

I didn’t go seeking answers.

I went in search of an interruption.

A jolt.

A grief not entirely mine, but necessary.

Something in me needed to shake loose.

"إِنَّ إِلَىٰ رَبِّكَ الرُّجْعَىٰ"

“Inna ilá Rabbika al-ruj‘ā”

Verily, to thy Lord is the final return. (Qur’an 96:8)

How many times must we return before we truly Return?

---

You see, my dearest sisters, I’ve noticed a pattern in my soul:

Whenever there’s resistance, I’ve learned to move towards it.

Not blindly. Not recklessly - but with a sense that what nafs al-ammārah - the commanding self - avoids, the heart often needs.

Right now, that resistance is around death - not fear of it, but the usual heedless pull away from the remembrance that softens the heart and sobers the soul.

I tell myself I’m not afraid of death.
But when the WhatsApp message comes - "inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un"-
I feel the constriction.

I scroll past it.
I say a quick duʿāʾ.
Then I move on.

That is my resistance.

And in this path of purification, this work with al-Qalb (the spiritual heart), I’ve come to know something deeply: every spiritual disease has a precise medicine.

And for me, one of those diseases is ghaflah - heedlessness.

It’s the fog that dulls the soul.
The seduction of noise.
The illusion that there’s still time.

And the medicine?

Dhikr al-mawt - the remembrance of death.

The graveyard.
The janāzah.
The silence after the soil is laid.

So I’ve made an intention: to no longer wait for death to find me.

I want to seek it out.

Not morbidly, but mindfully.

I want to stare it in the face.

To sit with it. To walk beside it.

To remind myself that I am not of this world.

That I’m just passing through.

And to let that awareness sharpen the way I live and sober me.

I’m even exploring the possibility of working in a funeral home.

Yes, really.

I want to serve in that space.
To be near the end - in hopes of beginning again.
More awake.
More real.
More alive.

And if Allāh ʿAzza wa Jall opens that door, I will walk through it, bi’idhnillāh.
I’m still paving the path.

I share this because Mawaddah is not a space for passive inspiration.

It’s a space for radical honesty.
For sincerity.
For transformation.
For choosing to wake up.

So here I am - choosing to walk toward the very thing my soul wants to turn away from.

Because maybe that’s where I’ll find the truth I’ve been searching for.

And maybe - just maybe - the way back to life
isn’t through more doing, more proving, more noise…

But through remembering death.

In stillness. In presence. In surrender.

With love and longing for The Divine, Zara - your sister in the path of the heart. I pray Allah opens within you a door to Him that no dunya can close. Allahumma Ameen.