Begin At The End

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I write to organise my thoughts. I write to understand my feelings. I write to learn which feelings are important enough to keep. I write to learn which feelings are misplaced so I should try to discard them.

The first time I wrote was at the end of two lives. One was a stillborn. The other was the young first-time-mother who never knew that her baby was stillborn.

I attended the same school as the young woman but was never particularly close to her. I was this insecure young girl who thought that the sophisticated girl was way out of my league. Naturally we didn’t have any kind of communication after we left school.

I was at work when I learned of her tragic passing. I couldn’t understand how it was possible that a mother could still die of childbirth in a modern hospital. I bawled my eyes out and had to take the rest of the day off. I was very surprised at my own reaction. It’s not like I was going to miss her. She was never really a part of my life in the first place.

So I wrote to understand my feelings. I learned that my feelings came from what I could potentially lose. She would never know the joy of carrying a child in her arms. She would never know the intense feeling of her suckling baby. She would never know the selfless love a mother could feel for her child. She would never see her life coming to a full circle.

Then I learned which feelings are important enough to keep. These are the values I must place on the blessings which are all round me. I learned to value my life’s blessings; not focus on what I can’t have. I learned that when our time comes, it is not a second sooner or a second later than what Allah has intended.

I learned that all those first thoughts about what that mother had missed were totally misplaced. What bigger blessing could possibly be than going straight to heaven?

So I closed that first chapter of my writing. No one read that chapter.

At some other phases in my life, I had written again for the same reasons. Each time, it was at the end of a life’s chapter. That’s how I now begin at the end of another significant chapter, a chapter significant enough to compel me to write again. Perhaps this time, it will be read by others. Perhaps not. Whichever the case, it would already serve my purpose.
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