In Pursuit of Spiritual Closure and Peace for a Loved One

• By: Malak ElKaddadi – Managing Features Editor

Under the unforgiving Riyadh sun, my mother pleads with the sky to grant her the patience to endure her son’s departure, whispering every prayer her heart can still recognize at grief’s mercy.

With a lapsed lifetime and a fence separating my mother from ever seeing her son finally laid to rest, a man’s voice orders her to put as much distance between her and her son as possible. He warns that her emotions could deafen what religion has called for.

In the reserve of her prayer, she resents the man for disrupting her son’s peace. And yet his demand was so impassionate, it almost challenged her grief, and left me to wonder why he had the legal privilege of crossing the fence into the cemetery while the women remained banished.

Despite the abuse, she reasons with him. She says she cannot leave … that her son’s body is not even cold yet.

He dares her to not make this sinful insistence her son’s burden to bear.

From the first sound of the ambulance’s siren to the roaring anguish battling itself in my chest, my mother has not expressed an emotion as loud as the man’s hypocrisy.

I resent the law for assuming her grief would somehow derail her son’s final journey to his creator. I resent the law for assuming a loud self-righteous man could ensure my brother’s final peace any better than the woman who bore him.

His reaction is an absolute rejection of pragmatism, despite bearing witness to my mother’s resilience.

Here, in Egypt, where people take for granted visiting their loved ones’ graves, I find myself aching for a seat at my brother’s, desperate for closure.

Unable to fathom my brother as white-clothed and restful, I am left to confront the trials of his immobile body being the last form I will ever remember.

Even remembering him dallying around the house does not serve to temper my denial.

A couple of years later, more family members passed away and found their last resting place. In Egypt, I felt spoiled. I could say goodbye a hundred times at their gravesites. I could mourn as candidly as I might. I could cross the fence.

At home, grieving allows for a vocal expression even against the head of a grave. In some corners, women lead rituals, wailing for their loved ones.

But, I have yet to hear a woman prove the man right and scream.