After My Mother Passed, My Father’s Consistency in Religion Was an Anchor

A new period in my life started when Abu could no longer fast for Ramadan.

My father has always been consistent. To explain, let me share a story from the worst time in my life.

When I was in college, my mother fell into a coma for four months after a freak allergic reaction to her chemotherapy. My sisters and I dropped everything to be present for her waking, for her recovery, and for her eventual adjustment to life on disability, and then, decline and death.

My father, on the other hand, continued every obligation he had—he would drive four hours each day in order to split working his day-job and spending time with Ammi and us in the ICU. It seemed an exhausting, impossible schedule, but he managed it for nearly the entirety of Ammi’s sickness. We were upset with him, that he couldn’t slow down, even in this moment of severe family trauma.

On the day she died, he said he had a feeling and left work early. It was their thirty-third wedding anniversary. He brought home flowers. He arrived just in time to see her go.

I didn’t know this, but he had brought flowers home every year on their anniversary. My mother had complained he wasn’t more creative with present-giving. At least he has always been consistent.

A decade after his wife passed, my father noticed he was having unusual shortness of breath on the treadmill. My mother’s mother died of cancer, just like my mother; my father’s father had died young of a heart attack. For the last half-decade, I had begged him to go to a cardiologist. And so, finally, he went for the test. A day later, he was on an operating table, his chest cracked down the center for a triple bypass, and his three children were again flying home to care for a parent.

This parental emergency went much better than the last. Within four days, he was out of the hospital and walking. A few days after, he was entertaining guests in his home, with our assistance. Within the week, he was walking to his local cafe to chat with the afternoon coffee friends he made in his ten years as a widower. He was charming and sweet and a surprisingly good patient. He learned, in those ten hard years, to take it a bit easy. He never asks for anything he can’t do himself.

Visitors would often tell us that he looked good, like he was the exact same person he was before the surgery. But when Ramadan came around, it was clear something had changed.

In most interpretations of Islam, Muslims are allowed to miss fasting for Ramadan if they are ill, on a journey, menstruating, breastfeeding, or otherwise physically prevented from fulfilling the obligation in some way, provided they make it up later. This means the expectation of fulfilling religious ritual fell differently on men and women in my family. While I learned some of the deep spiritual mysticism of our tradition from my mother, I learned the value of consistency and fulfilling your obligations from my father.

He is the only person in our family who seems to pray every day and read Qur’an regularly. I was never great about praying, but I am decent at fasting, attending Friday prayers, and giving alms. I only miss a fast if, well, I’m traveling or sick. I learned that from watching my father.

My father is, and always has been, consistent.

And this is the year that, finally, Abu cannot fast. It is impossible. Last year, he was hospitalized for pneumonia during Ramadan and stopped fasting as he convalesced, suspecting that perhaps it was too risky to start again. At home, after the triple bypass this year, he said it to himself as a fact: “I can’t fast anymore.”

We agreed. There was no debate. We knew this was his new normal. I felt our family, for the first time, brushing up against the slow entropy of decline and death. Ammi, at fifty-eight, had been a tragedy. Abu, now sixty-seven, often reminds us of the fact that he will die one day, of the natural flow of life.

The surprising thing was I felt no sadness that he could not fast. I’ve always taken strength from my father anchoring us in his consistency. Didn’t not fasting mean grappling with his mortality?

I learned the value of consistency and fulfilling your obligations from my father.

I thought back to my mother and what happened when she left us. She was undoubtedly a gravitational force in our lives and the lives of many others. In our eyes, a writer, community activist, and last of all, a mother and physician: We shared her with many other causes and people. Losing such a complex, mercurial person when I was twenty-one meant that my grief was not just at death, but at the loss of a chance to get to know how to be like her, to really know her the way you know your parents as an adult.

When my mother went, I was lost at knowing what she’d want, whether she’d see my work as a journalist commenting on American Muslims as rigorous or frivolous.

When my father goes, I hope I will know what to do. But I do not know what to call it.

I keep coming back to the consistency. His lack of desire for worldly things. A few months ago, Abu finally moved after a decade of living in a space emptied of all the other people who made it what it was. His new apartment is like a mirror image of the old—full of things that remind me of her and of us. There is very little of him in the furniture or on the walls or in the kitchen. In the garage sits all the unfiltered storage, the most important of which was Ammi’s drawer of shawls, now transparent and abandoned in a clear box.

Ammi never let me use or touch them without her permission, saying I didn’t understand the quality of the pieces or how to take care of them. But they’ve sat there for a decade now, unused but not unloved. Finally taking the time to sort them with my sisters, I realized how the secrets hidden in the weave of the fabric and the hand-stitching of the embroidery act as a metaphor for my mother’s legacy in my life: her love for the arcane knowledge of knowing her culture, her religion, and her worth in life as a professional immigrant woman.

By contrast, the metaphor of my father is also something embodied in his personhood that will be lost when he dies: the way he responds to people and situations in a predictably moral and generous internal logic. Through telling the truth. Through praying. Through giving and giving and giving.

The thing is: The obligation of fasting never goes away, even if you have an excuse from it. After all, fasting is a form of self-denial, of re-balancing any excess or of re-centering of the spirit. And Islamic law has the answer. The fasting obligation transforms into fidyah, feeding another person, preferably needy. This is not new for Abu either. Whenever we go to the masjid or even out for a walk in New York, my father makes sure to set aside bills to feed and to give to anyone who remotely appears to need it. Islamic Law gave a certain kind of consistency to the disjuncture of sickness. He knew what to do.

The things he taught me are things I will not forget because we had time together. Because I got to know him and see him move and act.

This denial of the ego continues in the rest of his religiosity. Usually, the person who knows the most Qur’an leads prayer. But, my entire life, Abu has always insisted young people lead and give the call to prayer. I shared about half of the leading duties in our house. When Ammi died, my sisters started leading as well. Once I left home, I realized the gift we’d been given of agency over our own spiritual life. It occurs to me that Abu has probably read more Qur’an than the rest of us have combined. His iPad is now his most used tool for reading and the Qur’an his favorite book (though hardly his only). And yet he never insists he knows more. Unlike my mother, who always knew more.

The thing is, I have never found prayer easy. But this year, watching the elements of his life rearrange itself around newfound illness, while the contents stay the same, it feels easier to be consistent.

When we pray together after his surgery, Abu pulls up a chair, while the rest of us stand. The same way I’ve seen elders do in the past. Intellectually, he is fully capable of leading prayer, but since the surgery, he has never once led us. He is not weaker, just as those of us who are chronically ill or disabled are not weaker for being unable to fast. But it does mark a transition.

My Arabic is rusty and the sounds and rhythms I used to feel comfortable in now get caught on my tongue. He corrects me when I fail. I think of how much he loves to go to a Sufi masjid that holds a Thursday night dhikr, wherein groups of believers repeat phrases glorifying God to bring their whole selves closer to the truth. I never felt comfortable there and he never told me why he goes. But I know I can, one day, if I want to.

My father is, and always has been, consistent. And he does that by showing me the way.

Whenever we visit home after the surgery, he asks us, gently, that we do not cook too much food. That we do not acquire more than we can use. And inevitably, we fail. Our intentions are good; we want to cook healthy and fresh food for him, perhaps evoking our mother’s own gastronomic joy. And then the trays arrive. Giant tins of rice and meats and breads, groaning at the middle with the weight of community love. And suddenly the fruits and fresh greens we bought seem very foolish indeed in the face of kababs and biryani and yogurt with cucumbers and mint.

In the middle of the day, when we are only halfway through our fast, he asks me to warm dal and rice brought by a family he helped immigrate to America nearly thirty years ago. We do not ask him if he wants something fancier. We do not complain that he is eating when we are not yet able to. Dal and rice has been his favorite, always.

I’ll never understand his lack of love for food or music, much like he never understood my joy in them. But he never gave me reason to doubt his truth. He is consistent.

People ask what gifts they can bring him. They worry if he is doing well. And I, speaking in his voice, relate what he always says to me: “I do not need anything. I have more than enough.” I suggest well-wishers donate to a charity in his name or perhaps bring some fruit and certainly not flowers, because those will always end up in the trash within the week. But they do bring flowers and he accepts them with grace. We put them in water and try to preserve them for as long as possible, but they always die as all living things cut from their source do.

My father is, and always has been, consistent. And he does that by showing me the way.

When a day of receiving guests is over, I instinctively find myself online, looking for some small purchase to buy. I always do this when I’m stressed. The release of consumption gives me a bit of joy. But then I think of all the things I’ve bought that have gone to waste. And I think of how Abu, consistently, has never asked us for any material thing. Of how much he hates waste.

My father is, and always has been, consistent.

I struggle to make sense, this year, of the ways that I am not. Abu spent most of my childhood working, arriving at home after dinner exhausted and irritable and sleeping through the weekends he wasn’t on call. When Ammi died, I learned that you cannot plan for the life you want, because God, or whatever fantastic agent of joyous chaos and ordered sadness that exists in the world, always has other plans. I decided to focus on the things and people I love, rather than single-mindedly grinding like my parents.

Miraculously, Abu has always done both, while I am barely managing one. But. Ammi’s death did change him. For all the time he didn’t have the time to talk with me as a child, he has made up in spades as we have become friends as adults. He is a confidant and a peer. He has opened up emotionally. He has made me believe people can own up to their mistakes and become better. He makes me believe I can become better.

My father is, and always has been, consistent.

I struggle to make sense, this year, of how I will be when he is not always there. My mother had an outsized influence in my first 21 years of life, teaching me how to speak and debate as a Muslim son amongst three women. And quietly, Abu has been demonstrating a model of how a Muslim father should act. I will not emulate everything, but there are pathways that he has laid out for me that I can walk whenever I wish, for as long as I live, even if I too grapple with illness and with disability and with death.

My father is, and always has been, consistent. And may God give him a long life.