All the world's a stage

Assalamu Alaikum

I realise I haven't blogged for some time now. And I also realised recently that I hadn't mentioned what happened to my mum-in-law on the blog, when I bumped into a teacher at my son's school who reads this blog and she asked after my mum-in-law. Strangely I'd assumed that she had heard the news.

Well my mum-in-law passed away a few weeks after Eid ul Fitr.

I am typing this with my laptop on my mum-in-law's kitchen table. I'm writing notes as I study, using my father-in-law's fountain pen, wearing the ring that my father-in-law made with his own hands for me. But I am at home. Yesterday we finished the painstaking and exhausting job of clearing out my mum-in-laws house for her landlords. The experience has left me feeling kind of melancholy. Yes it is Iman increasing in many ways but it is also overwhelming at times. Maybe it seems strange I should be so affected since they were not my parents but my in-laws. I guess they were an essential and valued part of my world for a third of my life, during a crucial time of life. And their personalities were such that they embraced me as a daughter (as they had none) and really spoilt me. I loved them. My father-in-law along with my husband, was my best friend for so long. I looked forward to my weekly visits to their house and still remember his anecdotes and laugh as I recall his expression as he would tell any one of them. Clearing out their house has been like getting to know them in an even closer way. Seeing every stage of their lives in front of us in the countless photographs....some of my husband's grandfather and great grandparents even. The Chagtais had access to cameras in the 30s, at a time when my parents in working class India in the 50s didn't. They were so diligent in recording the photo-history of their family members. So many black-and-white photos. Most of those in the photos, looking so young and elegant, have now passed on or are elderly and frail. I've got my father-in-laws notebooks from University and his father's degree certificate from Manchester University...a photo of my mum-in-law as a teenager...and on her wedding day. It's all kind of surreal. What full lives they led! How enduring the love they left behind. I still have kebabs in the freezer that my mum-in-law made with her own hands. A parcel that she had ordered, arrived a few days after she passed away...it missed her. But it was meant to. It was written as someone elses rizq.

Anyhow. Maybe I will share some of the thoughts and reflections experienced during this time later.

Suffice it to say that life is extremely short. Each stage of life, gone in the blinking of an eye. Repentance is essential and needs to be immediate. We are only given our youth for a short while. Then it goes out of reach. I contrast in my mind the black and white images I've seen of my father-in-law as a handsome, trim, rugged, young man, rifle in hand, coming back with his mates from one of his hunting escapades. He looks like an Indian movie star...and then as I knew him, with his snowy white beard and huge smile and even bigger bear hugs, holding his grandchild in arms. And I remember how right at the end of his life, such an active person as he was, he was unable to walk and lost his appetite completely. Reminds me of the stages of man's life in Shakespeare's 'As you Like it':

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the canon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.