On Death, and Return

“Every soul shall taste death.” — Qur’an, Surah Al-Imran (3:185)

I’ve been thinking about death lately. Not just the event of it or the rupture, but the aftertaste. The slow evaporation of someone from the world and the way their absence grows a second spine inside you, like a phantom limb. How it makes the air feel thicker, your breath shallower, and your chest tighter.

How it makes life more alive in its stubbornness.

In Islam, we say Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un—to God we belong and to God we return. It’s a phrase for funerals, heartbreaks, and for news of destruction. But I’ve started to hear it in quiet places too. In the way my chest tightens in the dark. In the way my grandmother folds a dupatta before handing it to me. In the way a friend walks ahead, not knowing I’m lagging behind. We are always returning. Not just to God, but to memory, wounds, and to the small deaths that accumulate in a lifetime.

There are many kinds of death.

The kind you bury in a graveyard. The kind you carry in your body. The kind where someone is still alive but unreachable—estranged parent, ex-lover, someone who ghosted you after you told the truth. There’s the death of a version of you—the child who believed, the teenager who rebelled, the adult who swallowed rage like it was holy. There’s the slow death of idealism in a bureaucracy. The death of comfort in exile. The death of familiarity when the country you once called home becomes foreign to your tongue.

And then there’s the death that is collective: a homeland slowly suffocating under fascism, the cities being drowned by apocalyptic flooding, the oceans warming like fever, the forests catching on fire, and Gaza burning again, and again, and again. Judith Butler reminds us that not all lives are considered equally grievable. Some deaths spark vigils. Others disappear into hashtags, headlines, and silence. In this world, mourning itself becomes a form of resistance.

Still, we keep going. We eat. We text. We wash our faces. We joke. We grieve in group chats and laugh in kitchens. What else can we do?

Last month, I stood at two graves in one week—my grandfather’s, then my father-in-law’s. The Karachi sun was cruel and gold and disinterested. The Islamabad sun was equally hot and unforgiving. We offered fatiha, placed rose petals, and left quietly. My father, between bites of chicken karahi later that evening, joked about how he might be next. It wasn’t cruel. It was his way of coping. I swallowed my laughter with my grief. That same day, my husband and I met my nani together for the first time. She told us about how her husband—my nana—had died suddenly in his 50s. Her voice didn’t tremble, but something in the room did. “He just collapsed,” she said. “He was still young.”

Sometimes I think of barzakh—the Islamic liminal space between death and the Day of Judgment. A place of waiting. Not quite here, not quite gone. I wonder if this is what life is too. A barzakh. A test. A hallway where we are handed pain to see how we hold it. Where we are asked to love people knowing they will leave or we will. Where we are not promised justice in this life, but reminded that every atom of good and evil will be weighed one day.

There’s something terrifying about that promise. And something exquisite too.

The Qur’an says: Every soul shall taste death. Not face, not endure—taste. As if death is not a punishment but a flavour. A secret. A key. Maybe the soul doesn’t die at all. Maybe it simply sheds what it no longer needs. Maybe what we call death is just returning to a home we forgot.

Still, I have not made peace with death. I don’t know if we’re supposed to. Peace implies understanding, and death is not something you understand. It’s something you witness. Something you feel before language arrives. As Lacan might say, death exists in the Real—that which ruptures language, defies symbolization. This is why grief stutters. Why it silences us mid-prayer.

And as Freud writes in Mourning and Melancholia, grief can become internalized, tangled with the self. The one we lose doesn’t disappear—they take residence inside us. A phantom, a shadow, a sensation just beneath the skin. Sometimes, we forget who is speaking—our voice or theirs.

And then there’s the work of writing through it. Derrida called mourning a form of writing in absence. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here—trying to write around the outline of what’s gone. Trying to leave a trace.

Death makes you new. After someone dies, you are no longer the same. You become someone who knows. Who carries. Who listens for voices that will never return your call. I used to fear death as erasure. Now I fear it as a mirror. What if it reflects back everything I didn’t say, the people I didn’t forgive, the gifts I returned unopened? What if, when I die, I am shown the version of me I could’ve been if I had let go of ego and chosen softness and love sooner?

Sometimes I get so caught up in the fear of death that it hardens me. It doesn’t make me wise or gentle or grateful—it makes me angry. Cold. Suspicious of every ache in my body, every silence in a conversation, every moment of beauty that might be taken too soon. I become obsessive, hypervigilant, scanning the horizon for loss before it arrives, as if I can outthink grief, outrun fate.

And the cruel irony is that in trying to avoid death, I stop living. I numb. I detach. I hoard my love instead of offering it freely. I prepare for endings instead of showing up for the middle. Fear of death can masquerade as logic, but sometimes it’s just grief in advance—grief that hasn’t found a language yet.

But maybe that’s what this life is for. A slow softening. A long surrender. A learning to live with both palms open—holding joy and sorrow at once, not tightly, just enough to feel their weight.

In the West, death is often sterilized—shoved into white rooms and funeral homes. In South Asia, death is everywhere but still strangely male. Men pray. Women weep. They often don’t get to lead the prayer. Grief is gendered. In some families, it’s even performative. You wail because it is expected. You silence yourself because it is required. And somewhere in that split, I wonder where my grief is allowed to go. But underneath all of that, something real pulses—grief as love’s final performance.

My dado used to say that when a pious person dies, even the walls cry. I believe her. I think the air remembers. I think grief echoes in architecture. In the cracked tiles of the house they left behind. In the calligraphy above the doorway. In the pots they used to water the basil.

bell hooks once wrote, “To love is to risk loss. To love is to know the inevitability of death.” I think of this often. And I wonder if the work is not to avoid grief, but to build a life that can hold it when it comes.

I believe in death as reunion. That the dead are not far. That they hover, unseen but felt. Like wind. Like scent. I think of my grandfather when I hear Iqbal. I think of my husband’s father when I see the sun setting behind the sea. I don’t talk to the dead, but I think they listen. I think they witness our stumbling, our beauty, our ugliness, and our defiance.

And I believe in the mercy of God. Not a God of fire and punishment, but of infinite understanding. A God who knows why we screamed, why we hid, why we failed. A God who meets us not with a ledger, but with love.

There’s a hadith that says: When a believer dies, their soul is welcomed by the souls of the other believers like a long-awaited guest. I like to imagine it: my grandfather shaking hands with prophets. My husband’s father sitting with his ancestors. Our unborn children waiting for us, unafraid.

Still, death has left its fingerprints on me.

I now cry more easily. I talk to the moon. I write things down like they matter. I kiss slower. I forgive reluctantly but more often. I want to hold grudges with less grip, and dress like someone who might die tonight. Not in sadness, but in honour. I want to leave the world wearing something I love.

Some days I resent death. I want more time. More mornings. More mess. More health. But most days, I understand that death is the only thing keeping us awake. It reminds us to love hard. To say I’m sorry. To try again. To leave places and people better than we found them.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.”
And maybe that’s the point.

We are not meant to stay. And still, we are asked to live like it matters.

So I light incense. I send voice notes to friends I’ve neglected. I cherish the sun. I look at my husband sleeping and think: yes, I will mourn you one day. But today, you are here. And I vow to love you as if the world were ending tomorrow.

And if the only thing I leave behind is kindness—then maybe I died well.

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