inner_rihla

There is another memory this building holds.

For years, I spent endless hours in its prayer room making dua for my father.

So many times we thought we were losing him.

And so many times I begged Allah that, when his time eventually came, we would be there.

That he would not leave this world alone.

That his family would surround him.

That we would be praying for him as he returned to Allah.

I had imagined that ending so many times.

Yet when my father's time came, it wasn't there.

He died at home.

And when my mother entered that hospital years later, death was the furthest thing from my mind.

I never sat in that prayer room asking Allah for that ending for her.

And yet...

when her time came, we were there.

Around her bedside.

Praying.

Making dua.

Accompanying her as she returned to her Rabb.

Almost exactly as I had once pleaded with Allah for my father.

And that realisation has stayed with me.

Perhaps some duas are not unanswered.

Perhaps the answer travels a road we could never have imagined.

Perhaps it arrives later.

Differently.

In circumstances we would never have chosen.

And perhaps that is another illusion we have to surrender—the belief that because we can imagine the answer, we somehow know what Allah's answer should look like.

I still don't walk into that building without feeling it.

But I'm beginning to remember that those walls did not only witness my loss.

They witnessed my hope.

My fear.

My service to my parents.

And countless hours of turning to Allah when I had nowhere else to turn.

Maybe I don't need to reclaim the building from grief.

Maybe I simply need to stop allowing one memory to own all the others.

Because even there...

Allah heard me.

The answer may have been delayed.

The recipient may not have been the one I imagined.

But the dua was never lost.

Allah had heard it all along.

The Yardstick Series | PLACE
What happens when one painful chapter becomes the measure of the whole story?