HOW I WOULD LOVE TO DIE

 

One of the things I learnt from my early childhood is the inevitability of death. I remember the times I was extremely scared of listening to people talk about death. With time, I resigned myself to faith and made the resolve to make death a reminder for me to indulge in good and refrain from evil. There’s not a day that passes without me thinking about death. It’s become second nature to me, which brings me to the theme for today, how I would love to die.

In all my life, I’ve had a pathological fear of asking people for help. I am allergic to begging. I would prefer to die than to beg for money. This factors into my preferred path to leaving this world. I wouldn’t want to burden my loved ones by becoming a manifestation of a test they can’t pass. I would prefer to die after a few days of illness. This is because a chronic and severe disease like cancer would cripple my family economically and even emotionally. But dying from a short illness would be a win-win. I get to have some of my sins expiated and my family get to escape a potentially unpassable test.

I have always though out my moves before the time arrives. And as I live one day at a time at the moment, I have planned out the way I would hope to exit this world as this is something inevitable. One may ask, what about your life goals? My reply would be that apart from the ultimate goal of exiting this world and attaining Jannah, none of those goals actually matter in the grand scheme of things. I find that I am extremely hard on myself when it comes to asking for help. I detest begging. Ultimately, I don’t have control over how I die, since the only path that leads to some sort of control (suicide) is forbidden in Islam.

Though, I think about death almost all the time, I don’t live a particularly boring life. I had to pause my reading an exciting historical romance novel just to pen this down. In addition, I find that zikr helps in bringing tranquillity to the heart. I am by no means perfect but I strive to be a faithful muslim in a corrupted world. Naturally, I fail sometimes, but failure just makes me much more resolute in my struggle towards achieving my ultimate target of leaving this world in a state where Allah is most pleased with me.

If I would be brutally honest, my most preferred method of death is a sudden death. But I find that it may be something unwanted Islamically. Hence, the compromise I explained above. My thinking is that with a sudden death, I don’t really have to bother in the least about economic burdens to my immediate family, and by keeping an updated wasiyya, I wouldn’t have to worry much because death has been factored into my everyday life. I trust that my family loves me enough to care for me regardless of the direness of the situation, but it all boils down to my inability to depend completely on others. In the end, this world is temporary. I would prefer to sacrifice my worldly comforts for the true unending eternal comforts of the hereafter.

In conclusion, I would love to die after a brief illness due to the reasons elucidated above. May Almighty Allah keep me steadfast upon the deen and take my life at a time when He is most pleased with me. Ameen.