Courses › Carrying a loss
Grief and loss
Carrying a loss
Grief comes in waves and not in stages, and the tradition already gave you more room for it than you have been allowed.
Read this first. Some losses need a person and not a course. If you are thinking about ending your life, or about joining the person who died, tell somebody today and treat it as urgent. If the death was violent, sudden, by your own witnessing, or by suicide, or if images of it arrive without warning and will not stop, that goes to a clinician now rather than to a lesson, because this course does not do that work and will not attempt it. The same applies if you are not eating or sleeping, if you cannot keep yourself safe, or if you are drinking or using something to get through the day. This course is written for adults. A bereaved child needs different help, from someone who works with children.
Six short lessons for someone carrying a death. It describes what grief actually does, sets aside the five stages, and explains why a person can be steady on Tuesday and flattened on Wednesday without anything having gone wrong. It takes apart the idea that patience means dry eyes, using the Prophet's own tears, and gives back the words and the practices the tradition already provides. The last two lessons cover what makes grief harder and the smaller group for whom this has become something a course cannot hold.
Who this is for
Anyone who has lost someone and is being measured, by themselves or by other people, against a schedule that does not exist. Anyone who has been told that crying is a complaint against the decree. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This is not grief therapy and it does not try to be. It will never ask you to tell the story of the death, to write it out, to go back over the worst part, or to speak to the person who died as an exercise. Those are clinical techniques, some of them are part of a real treatment, and none of them belongs in a self guided course. It gives no timetable for clearing a room or visiting a grave. It gives no fatwa on mourning, burial or inheritance. It does not diagnose anything and it produces no score.
The lessons
6- What grief actually doesWhat it does to a body and a day, and the schedule you have been measuring yourself against that was never real.
- Why it comes back in wavesFine on Tuesday, flattened on Wednesday. Here is the shape underneath that.
- What sabr is, and what it is notThe Prophet wept at his son's death. That settles more than most of what you have been told.
- Living alongside itThe other half of grieving, which nobody gives you permission for, and the words the tradition already gave you.
- What makes it harderSudden loss, a difficult relationship, no funeral, and the things people say to you.
- When grief has become something elsePlain markers, what the treatment actually is, and why it is not in this course.
It is written and sourced and it has not yet been read by a scholar and a clinician. Read it as a draft, and if something in it is wrong please write to admin@inshirah.org so it can be corrected.
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:155 to 157, 2:234, 2:286, 3:185, 12:84, 12:86, 21:35, 93:1 to 8, 94:5 to 6. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 3:185 and 21:35 are used sparingly and named as the verses most often used to close a grieving person down. 39:53 is not used, because it addresses despair of mercy rather than sorrow and it is commonly misapplied to the bereaved. 2:286 is presented as a statement about what a person carries and not as an instruction to cope.
- Sahih al-Bukhari 1248, 1283, 1294, 1303, 5334, 5641, 6424; Sahih Muslim 918, 2632. Only reports graded sound or good are used, and each carries its grading and grader on its own entry. Bukhari 1303 and Bukhari 1294 are never presented apart, because 1294 read alone is used to prohibit ordinary tears. The widely circulated report about a miscarried child pleading for its parents is graded weak and is named as such rather than quoted. A second report on the same subject is graded differently by different graders and is held back pending a scholarly decision. The narration about the dead being punished by the weeping of the living is not cited, because no reference and grading were confirmed and its interpretation has been contested since the time of the Companions.