Eloquent Incoherence

This past Thursday, my cousin passed away at age 21. He was the eldest son of my mother’s younger sister. He and his family were pretty close to us, having lived in the same town as us since 1991. He was born with muscular dystrophy and had been confined to his room for most of the past few years, but that didn’t stop him from being active in whatever way he could. He illustrated a weekly comic strip that appeared on an Islamic website and in our local mosque’s newsletter. He took online classes in Islamic jurisprudence and was working towards a degree. He had a large network of online friends, all of whom he touched in some way. He was known on the Internet as NaseehaMan due to the helpful advice he often offered (Naseeha is Arabic for “advice”).

His condition wasn’t the only challenge he faced. In addition to being disabled, he was also an orphan. He lost his father to cancer in 1990 at the age of 6. He, his brother, and their mother lived with extended family until she remarried seven years later. And yet, through all the trials and tribulations he endured, he never once asked “Why me?”. If you were having a bad day and went to visit him, you would feel better not just because seeing him would remind you of how fortunate you are, but also because he would lift you up with his personality and positive outlook on life. His mother noted that whenever she would get depressed about his condition, he would make her feel better by reciting an ayah or hadith and reminding her that this was all a test from Allah. The fact that he had muscular dystrophy is the ultimate irony, because by Allah, I have never met a stronger person.

Because of the degenerative nature of his condition, we all knew this day would come. But that doesn’t make it any easier. The silver lining in all of this is that his suffering has now ended, and that his death seemed to have been fairly quick and painless. Subhan-Allah, his time came when he was literally in the middle of a sentence. May Allah grant him al-Firdous (the highest level of paradise), ameen.

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