I thought Heaven can wait
A letter to one of the souls in Eternity.
All my life, I’ve been prepared myself for any kind of worst scenarios that potentially could’ve happened to me. I mean it, any kind. But well — poor me, I never had a single thought of this one to cross my mind.
This year, last April, one of my family members just passed away. He said good bye to us at the age of 27. An age known as prime age for some people.
He’s my brother, my Mom and Dad’s only son. This is my first time — also my family at home, to go through this kind of loss and grief. At first, I don’t have a thing in my head on how to handle this twinge yet harmful loss.
Crying my heart out is the only possible way. Not only that, I keep telling myself that he’s in a better place now only to appease me for a while. But again, that emotional waves still haunts me.
Somewhere in my mind, I have many questions ready to be served to God. The first five seconds after I heard the news, all I can do is just stare blankly at nowhere to be stared. There’s a collision between what I just heard and what I’ve been praying for the last few weeks, they’re colliding.
It happened in the same week where I’ll be graduated from college, I almost decided not to go there. The first two weeks is the worst, many what-ifs followed behind my back. Yet, I still have no idea how to appease the whole thing.
It will be a month since he left by the time this writing was published. I started to gather the missing pieces that I lost from that day and make peace with the prolonged grief. This whole situation led me to one of the writings that I’ve read last March in Medium.
It’s one of the best writing by Kak Rakean, entitled “Grief, It Lingers”. The writing tell a story that exactly almost the same as what happened to me. Through the writing, there’s a part where it validates to how I feel over the past month.
Kak Rakean mentioned something about Lois Tonkin’s theory, “Growing Around Grief” (1996). The theory tells us that grief will stay the same size, but life will grow bigger around it. I know it’s still a month for me to experience this grief but I couldn’t agree more to this theory.
I started to wonder that I don’t think some people — including me, will forget or get over any kind of grief. A kind of grief that gave a profound impact to our lives is hardly to forget, it will follow us wherever we go. It becomes inseparable to us.
It’s only the matter of time, I choose to believe it that way. Time will heal us and put everything back to its place slowly, one by one. The soul that long away to Eternity will be fine, and so are we.
This profound experience also taught me not to debate what God has decided. Good or bad, I’ll take it with a heart that full of love. At the end, this is His way to love His creature.
If God give me a longer life to live in this brief world, I promise not to doubt or blame every choice He made. Instead, I’ll make myself believe that this is the way God show to us that He yearned for the long-lost soul that used to belong in Heaven. It must be the chosen people to be welcomed in His palace.
I thought Heaven can wait for a little more time, but I guess Heaven doesn’t want to disappoint its people by delaying their time. He’s in a better place, indeed. We, as His creature, the only way to overcome this experience is being Ikhlāṣ.
For every soul that was chosen by God, fly higher and He will take care the rest up there.
So long and till we meet again in Jannah,
ʾIn shāʾ Allāh.
