by Zarqa Nawaz
I turned to Sami.
“When I die, do you promise to be at my funeral?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“What if you’re far away and don’t make it back in time?” I said with a lump in my throat.
Sami held my hand. “If anyone would miss a funeral, it would be you. I’ll die and you’ll be in Timbuktu shooting a movie or something.”
“I’d come back,” I said. I wouldn’t leave you, cold and abandoned like some poor mouse, I thought, but kept that to myself since it was still a sore point between us.
“Okay, no more speaking,” said Sami and we left the pews for the funeral prayer in the larger room.
The simple pine coffin sat in front of the congregation. We lined up in rows as if for a normal prayer at the mosque, but the janaza, the funeral prayer, was performed without any bowing. As we gave our condolences to the family and started to leave, I stared curiously at the closed coffin. Sometimes I wondered if open-casket funerals like Catholics hold gave mourners a stronger connection to the deceased.
“If we popped this open for a sec, do you think the family would mind?” I asked. Sami steered me quickly past the body, out of the funeral home and into the car.
When we were safely back at home, Sami sat me down. “Okay, what is it with you and death all of a sudden?”
“Muslim funerals are too simple,” I said. “If we speak about the dead, it would help give us closure. Bring more dignity to the death.”
“Muslims can have eulogies if they want,” said Sami. “But I like our simple funerals.” It was true. Muslims have a very basic three-part ritual: wash the dead, pray for the dead, bury the dead.
“Christians have open caskets and singing and speeches and fancy printed programs. It’s basically a gala,” I said. “Is it my fault if they’ve made their funerals so enjoyable?”
“I don’t think that’s what they were going for,” said Sami. “And besides, religion is not always supposed to be about having fun.”
Islam couldn’t be accused of that, I thought.
“I joined the DBWC at the mosque,” I announced the next day at dinner. “Faeeza said they were looking for volunteers.”
“What’s a DBWC?” asked Inaya.
“Dead body washing committee,” I said.
“They have a committee for washing dead bodies?” she asked.
“Yep. That way, there’s no running around finding volunteers at the last second. But they were having trouble finding volunteers because people were squeamish about washing the dead. So I signed up.”
It’s important to have a standby group of volunteers. Muslim bodies have to be washed immediately after death, so there isn’t a lot of time to talk people out of their reticence. The Muslim community in Regina was growing at a fast pace and many elderly parents who had joined their children in Canada were now passing away here. Back in their Muslim home countries, their death wouldn’t have posed a problem, but here it took a village to bury someone.
“Why would you want to wash dead bodies?” grimaced Maysa.
Good question. Weirdness aside, it was a good thing to volunteer in the community. But a tiny part of me felt that service in the DBWC would redeem me for not giving my mouse a good death. A few weeks later I got a call from Faeeza.
“Jameela’s mother just passed away.”
Neither of us knew Jameela very well. Faeeza, Ruby and I again entered the solemn Victoria Avenue Funeral Home. Jameela sat weeping, surrounded by friends who were consoling her. She was too distraught to speak so we quietly gave our salaams and entered the embalming room, which the Muslim community used for washing the dead. Aunty Nadia was waiting for us. She was in charge of the committee.
“There are some rules we should review before we begin. Everything you see today will be kept in the strictest confidence. No talking about anything to anyone ever. In fact, no talking at all. Understood?”
I didn’t know why she kept staring at me. But she was right: If you happened to die with a tattoo on your behind that read, “I Love Ahmed,” and Ahmed was not your husband, you were safe with the DBWC.
Jameela’s mother’s body was lying on the table, covered by a white sheet with just her face exposed. All my desire to view a dead body suddenly disappeared and I found myself frozen in my spot. Faeeza prompted me to move forward, and I willed my feet to take the few steps to reach the body. Because we don’t believe in embalming or making the deceased look more presentable with makeup, Muslims see the dead exactly as they looked when they passed away. Jameela’s mother had died of a heart attack and she was wearing a plain cotton shalwar kameez. She looked serene, but there was no colour in her face.
“Put on your latex gloves,” said Aunty Nadia as she took a pair of scissors and cut the clothes off of the deceased. To preserve her dignity, none of us were allowed to look at her naked body. We would wash the body with camphor-scented water while it lay underneath the sheet.
Aunty Nadia plugged the corpse’s ears and nostrils with cotton balls and then gently pushed on her stomach to expel anything that remained. Then she washed the body’s private parts, which continued to be covered by a piece of cloth. The hair was washed next, followed by wudu, which is a washing ritual Muslims perform before prayers. Lastly, we performed the ghusl, a general washing that starts with the right side of the body and then moves to the left.
The hardest part was lifting the body to wash her back side. Four of us heaved her onto her side as Aunty Nadia washed.
“Now we know where the term ‘dead weight’ comes from,” I said as I tried not to lose my grip on the wet body.
Aunty Nadia looked at me as she finished washing the back of the body.
“Jokes will not be tolerated at this time,” she said.
“I wasn’t joking, I was just commenting on how heavy the body is,” I replied, a little scared.
“We don’t comment about the body,” said Aunty Nadia. “Ever.”
After the body was washed and dried, we wrapped it in three pieces of plain white cotton.
We gently lifted Jameela’s mother into a simple pine coffin. Traditionally Muslims don’t use coffins, so that the body quickly returns to the earth, but since most cemeteries require a container by law, we pick the simplest one possible, which is usually a pine box.
When we were done, Jameela’s family came in to see their mother for the last time. I took off my latex gloves and sat in the waiting room. Aunty Nadia sat down beside me.
“Perhaps the DBWC isn’t the best place for you,” she said.
“What?” I said. “But why?”
“Because you say inappropriate things during a very solemn occasion.”
“I just have a bad habit of blurting out stuff that I’m thinking.”
“And that’s exactly the kind of person we don’t need,” said Aunty Nadia. “I think you should join the social committee instead. It suits your personality.”
I went home desolate.
“You got kicked off the DBWC?” said Sami. “That’s a first.”
“Aunty Nadia was very intimidating,” I replied. “And not a lot of fun.”
“Like I said before, you really need to take the ‘fun’ out of ‘funeral.’”
“I don’t want Aunty Nadia in charge of my body when I’m dead. Will you wash me when the time comes?”
“No, I think I’ll be too busy grieving to do that,” said Sami. “I imagine Aunty Nadia will be able to get through fine though.”
“But she’ll be no-nonsense and dictatorial and won’t let anyone crack a few jokes or question God’s alleged view on things.”
“Sounds like the kind of woman I’d like,” said Sami.
I looked at him.
“To wash your body,” he finished.
A year later, Inaya came home one Saturday afternoon from visiting with her grandfather.
“Dadu’s looking a little yellow,” she said.
Sami’s father seemed fine, a little tired, but he was s
eventy-seven and still working full-time as an ear, nose and throat and allergy specialist. He went to the doctor that Monday and found out why he was turning yellow: There was an obstruction in his bile duct. It was biopsied and found to be cancerous. A CT scan revealed stage 4 cancer, which meant it was inoperable. In the space of a few days he went from a happy if tired grandfather of eleven to a man with six to eight months left. He shut down his practice the following week and started a steep decline in health. The year before, Sabreena and Munir, Sami’s sister and brother, had moved back to Regina, and we were grateful that we could be together.
Just before he learned about his illness, my father-in-law had planned to take all of his grandkids for umrah, the lesser hajj. With his youngest grandchild, Medyna, turning seven, he wanted to show them the religious sites himself. The plane tickets and hotels were all booked and paid for. The evening he told us about his illness, we knew the trip would be cancelled. He cried more about not being able to take his grandkids on the pilgrimage than about getting cancer. It was the only thing he wanted to do before he died, he told us, visibly upset.
“Should we still go?” I asked.
“No,” said my mother-in-law, wiping her eyes with a Kleenex. “We all need to be together now.”
We made the decision to keep him at home for palliative care instead of taking him to the hospital. Each of his grandkids took turns spending time with him. The older ones read from the Qur’an, particularly sura Yaseen, which traditionally is read to the dying for comfort. The younger ones talked to him, massaged his legs, which were starting to hurt, and rubbed his fingers, which he enjoyed. Eventually he was too weak to even walk and needed to use a wheelchair. Sami, Munir and Amir, Sabreena’s husband, were strong enough to carry him, and took turns taking him to the washroom to bathe him. My mother-in-law never left his side, always reading his favourite prayers to him.
When it became difficult for him to eat, Sabreena would try to coax him to drink a liquid meal replacement to keep his strength up, but he protested that it would elevate his blood sugar. It was the only thing he had control over anymore and no one had the heart to tell him that it didn’t matter. He had always been very health-conscious.
My mother-in-law asked us to keep to our normal routines, so I cooked the food for our open house on Eid, the end of Ramadan. By now, it was tradition. The community looked forward to my chaotic dinners and I never disappointed. Samira, my sister-in-law, put out the invitation on Facebook.
But on Thursday, two days before Eid, my father-in-law was no longer able to eat at all. He stopped being able to communicate so his children had to guess what he needed. We quietly cancelled our Eid plans. On Friday, to keep him hydrated, my mother-in-law gave him a sponge dipped in Zam Zam water, which he was able to suck. That evening, on the last day of Ramadan, four months into his illness, we gathered in his bedroom to exchange presents. Our family has a tradition where we put everyone’s name in a bowl and each person pulls out a name—kind of like a secret Santa, if Santa were brown, Muslim and lived in Mecca instead of the North Pole. My father-in-law loved watching the great Eid gift exchange, and so we all exchanged our twenty-dollar gifts on the floor of his room, kneeling beside his bed and hoping he could at least hear the laughter of his family.
“Really?” said Maysa, looking at the e-reader cover I had bought her. She had requested that it be hand-decorated and I had taken two colourful postcards with a cow and a giraffe, cut them to fit the front and back of the cover and attached them with rubber bands.
All of us bantered back and forth about our gifts while my father-in-law lay in his bed, looking like he wanted to speak but unable to say anything.
That night while my mother-in-law slept fitfully beside him, Munir, who was sitting vigil on a chair near the bed, noticed his father nod slightly and then stop breathing. Muhammad Anwarul Haque died peacefully in his bed at 3 a.m., August 18, 2012, on the thirtieth day of Ramadan.
Sami, Munir and Amir washed their father’s body along with other male members of the community that afternoon. They tried to arrange the funeral and burial for that evening, but it was Saturday and the cemetery needed twenty-four hours’ notice to prepare the plot. These circumstances beyond our control delayed the funeral by a day, which gave time for relatives, including my parents, to arrive.
The next day was Eid, and his janaza was conducted after the Eid prayers. Almost five thousand people prayed for my father-in-law that day in Evraz Place, a massive events complex. Afterwards, we drove in a caravan to the cemetery.
It quickly became clear that our imam was worried that certain male community members wouldn’t want the women to take part in the funeral. But my father-in-law was a deeply religious man and would never have accepted this double standard. And so the imam was told that all the women in the family would be participating completely in the burial and that anyone who objected wasn’t welcome. My father-in-law would have approved. In some respects he had been traditional and in other, more surprising, ways he hadn’t. He had enrolled his wife in two universities—McGill and the University of Manitoba—when he married her in Bangladesh, because he didn’t know in which province he’d settle and he didn’t want her to miss out on her education.
As we stood watching my father-in-law’s simple coffin being lowered into the hole, I pictured him as he was when he was healthy, looking after his beloved plants in his greenhouse, always teaching his grandkids how to nurture flowers and vegetables in Saskatchewan’s very short growing season. I remembered the blueberry plant he had just received from the nursery. He had asked me to look after it because he was too sick to do it himself. I had, of course, killed it instantly, panicked and planted an imposter in its place. I had the kids bring him the fake blueberries.
I wonder if he knew, I thought to myself as his pine box reached the floor of the grave. Sami lowered himself into the hole, opened the box and gently rolled his father onto his side so he faced Mecca. His father had wanted to make sure he was facing northeast in his grave and had asked Sami, his eldest son, to perform this final task. Munir helped pull his brother out.
I looked around the cemetery at the other Muslim headstones in the same row. When my father-in-law had moved to Regina, he had purchased plots for himself, his wife and their three kids. It occurred to me, standing there with my two fellow in-laws, Samira and Amir, that there weren’t plots for the three of us. Would it be in bad taste to talk about this now? In fairness to my father-in-law, he had purchased the plots when his three kids were children and probably hadn’t been thinking about their future spouses. I stared covetously at the four remaining spots.
“It should be first come, first bury,” I told Samira. I knew I was out of line, but I was bursting with so many tumultuous emotions, one of them needed to come out.
“I don’t think we should discuss this right now,” she said, trying to move away from me. I remembered Aunty Nadia’s reprimand and behaved myself for the rest of the funeral.
The next day I asked the family if I could write an obituary for the Regina Leader-Post. I wanted a chance to capture and celebrate this man I had come to know and love so well. I wrote about how the Islamic Association of Saskatchewan had been created at the home of my in-laws. Back then, the community consisted of a handful of Muslim families, and he and my mother-in-law used to host community potlucks in their home until a tiny mosque was purchased. It was a room above a hairdressing salon and had been affectionately referred to as the “Mosque above Murphy’s.” The family contributed their edits and the obituary made the paper.
A few days after it was published, a freelance reporter for the Globe and Mail called. The reporter felt that my father-in-law had been a pioneer in the Regina Muslim community and wanted to write a longer piece about him. She interviewed Sabreena and two weeks later, there it was. The obituary was the longest one I had ever read in the paper and took up nearly an entire page. As I spread it out on the breakfast table that morning, I knew it was better than the
eulogy we hadn’t had a chance to give him.
A few days later, Sami and I lay in bed.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Sad, but you know, he lived a full life, lived long enough to see all his kids get married to partners, some nuttier than others … And he got to know all his grandchildren as well.” Maysa, now eighteen, was the oldest grandchild, and he had lived long enough to know that she was about to leave for McMaster University.
“I’m glad our kids were able to grow up with their grandfather and to help take care of him,” I said. Immigration to a new land had separated us from the chance to really know our own grandparents. We lay there quietly for a bit.
My father-in-law’s death had been so sudden. I hadn’t even believed it when he told me he was sick. But he had been loved and cherished by his entire family. I hoped for the same experience when my time came. Death teaches us to value life, and now I had two losses that taught me to value the people we love and never take them for granted: my father-in-law, who loved family above all, and a tiny mouse who loved chocolate.
“I forgive you for the mouse,” I said to Sami as I hugged him tight.
“What mouse?” asked Sami.
I didn’t press the matter.
Photos with White Men
You want to know my greatest humiliation? Ever? I’ll tell you. It was the summer of 1992 and I was standing beside Stuart McLean, my beloved journalism professor, glowing with pride because I had just won the most coveted prize in student journalism, the Chairman’s Award at the annual Ontario Telefest Awards. Just before the photographer snapped the picture, my mother yanked me away and put another student in my place. Stuart looked surprised, I looked furious and the replacement student looked startled—three unhappy deer in headlights.