The Pain of Losing My Mother
Faizel Patel
Have you ever felt the pain of losing a mother? It is excruciating, something that you never would have felt in your life.
In this opinion piece, I try to share my pain of losing my mother, but these words will never truly portray what I’m going through. I hope that my thoughts reflected here will ignite the journey, albeit even slowly, in assisting me into coming to terms with the loss of someone who I regarded as the single most important person in my life.
You see, my mother was my life, she was my everything, she was my paradise. She was the one who I turned to for advice because her words of wisdom were gold.
While I have two other siblings, this opinion piece will focus on my pain as I would never be able to fathom what my brothers Yusuf and Ebrahim are going through, so I will focus on my trials and tribulations.
Like all mothers, my mother was a phenomenal woman who had such strength bestowed upon her by Allah that no human would be able to decipher.
I don’t want to go into how she raised three little kids after her husband was murdered more than 37 years ago or how she struggled to raise us earning a meager R400 a month. What I do want to share is that after her demise my heart slowly started calcifying and I never realized this because this pain was bottled up and now it has exploded.
You may think I’m exaggerating, but it was her duas, her love and her caring that made my heart beat. While I know death is inevitable as Allah says in the Quran “every soul shall taste death”, I was hoping that my duas would allow her to be a little longer among us.
Obviously, Allah knows best and do not get me wrong, I am not questioning His will because He is the Most Kind and the Most Merciful, but imagine your mother passing away in your arms. My mother did, taking her last breath in my arms. The pain was like a thousand knives all stabbing me at once.
My mother passed away on the 16 June 2021 and my time with her had just come to an end. Like one companion of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was reported to have said: “The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was hardly long in his grave and already we felt our hearts turning.”
This is how I felt and if you knew the days and nights since that tragic day, the strife I have been making to find solace, you may get a glimmer of the pain that I am going through.
The hardening of my heart and the bottled-up pain has caused me to make impulsive decisions and enveloped me with a character that is clearly not Faizel. I wish I could undo some of the things that I have said or done, but I can’t and can only seek forgiveness and retribution.
I must add, I realize that the pain of losing my mother, and it took me a while to realize this, has affected a lot of people around me, including my family, but now that I have found the source, I have sought to make amends with the hope that I can better myself.
The passing of my mum Ferida has hit me harder than what I expected. Her death jolted an impulsive character which I regret.
I am sorry for many things which I am not going to list here, but hope that if I have affected you in any way that you find it in your heart to forgive me.
When Marhoom Ebrahim Gangat passed away Mufti Muhammed Saeed Motara said: “Death is like a bridge that joins the lover with the beloved and we should look forward to it.”
Mufti Motara said that death is with proper precision, not one moment behind, not one moment forward. It happens at the exact time and we aught to prepare for it.
