On September 11, Welsh actor Andy Whitfield died of lymphoma.\u00a0 He was survived by his wife, Vashti, and their two children.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t die when a plane crashed or when a building collapsed.\u00a0 He passed away at a hospice care facility after chemotherapy efforts proved unsuccessful against a very aggressive non-Hodgkins lymphoma.\u00a0 I know about his death, and a tiny bit about his life, because I googled around to find out who, besides those in New York and DC and Pennsylvania, died on September 11.<\/p>\n
Many people died on 9\/11.\u00a0 Statistically, about 250,000 to 300,000 people die every day around the world.\u00a0 Unless they perish in some spectacular fashion, their deaths go largely unremarked.\u00a0 Because he was an actor, probably more people than usual followed his life and remarked on his death, even overshadowed as it was by the events of that day.<\/p>\n
I always think about the people who died in the terrorist attacks of 9\/11.\u00a0 Not the killers, not the politics and news and prognosticating behind all that went on that day and in the years since.\u00a0 The people who died were normal human beings.\u00a0 Men and women going to work.\u00a0 Tourists checking out lower Manhattan.\u00a0 Firefighters, police, paramedics, and other first responders running towards danger while others were running away.\u00a0 Fathers and mothers, sons, daughters, favorite aunts and barely-tolerated brothers-in-law.\u00a0 People living exactly as long as was preordained for them.\u00a0 What was important, their deaths, or their lives?<\/p>\n
Totally unrelated, I think about a little boy named Mattie Stepanek, a remarkable young man who lived exactly as long as was preordained for him and who died in 2004 at the age of \u201calmost fourteen\u201d from Dysautonomic Mitochondrial Myopathy.<\/p>\n
I think about the times I was pregnant and gave birth to beautiful, healthy children, and the times I was pregnant and had painful miscarriages, babies unborn who lived exactly as long as was preordained for them.<\/p>\n
I think about starving children in Africa, bombed-out families in Gaza, mothers and babies buried under rubble in Syria, teenagers gunned down in Chicago, all the lives and deaths that happen every day on this planet, most ignored, some remarked on in passing, mourned locally and ignored globally.\u00a0 Which lives are important, and which are unimportant?<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s a silly question.\u00a0 Every life is important.\u00a0 Every death is a sadness, but I won\u2019t say every death is a tragedy.\u00a0 Death has to happen.\u00a0 It\u2019s something that is going to happen to every single one of us without exception.\u00a0 We try to ignore this fact and live as if death was going to come to someone else, but it is indeed the great leveler.\u00a0 One day, a second or a minute or a year or a decade or more from now, you and I will be gone.\u00a0 We will live exactly as long as was preordained for us.<\/p>\n
The people in New York, and DC, and Pennsylvania had no idea they were going to die, or the manner of their deaths.\u00a0 The date and time of our death is something that Allah mercifully keeps from us.\u00a0 But we are warned; we are warned to live each day as if it were our last, because we do not know when our death will come.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know when a car will crash, or a mugger will attack, or a bacteria will invade, or some freak accident that is captured by someone\u2019s cellphone will bring us down.\u00a0 So we are warned:\u00a0 Be ready, for tomorrow is not promised to you.<\/p>\n
A friend of mine lost her father a few days ago.\u00a0 She was very close to him; she watched his slow decline from the strong mountain of a man he was when she was a little girl, to the fragile husk that finally let go and returned his soul to Allah.\u00a0 Some would say he lived a good life, a long life, and those who loved him were comforted by the fact that they had him in their lives for so long.\u00a0 Another friend lost her brother, who died at the age of thirty-four.\u00a0 Though his life was shorter, it was just as worthy and worthwhile, and no more a tragedy simply because of its brevity.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m rambling, I know.\u00a0 What I\u2019m trying to say is this:\u00a0 Death is only a tragedy when the life the person was living was one of forgetfulness, ignorance, and rebellion against Allah.\u00a0 A tragic death is the death of an elderly rich man who enjoyed every comfort in life and died surrounded by his loved ones, but he died with no belief in his heart.\u00a0 I tell you, a man in the fullness of his youth who died saving lives at the Pentagon or at the Towers or rescuing a drowning child in a flash flood or a mom who died giving birth or a child who died from a muscular wasting disease who died believing in Allah and the Last Day, those deaths are not tragedies.\u00a0 Yes, they are a shock.\u00a0 Yes, we are broken-hearted and grief-stricken.\u00a0 Yes, we will always have a hole in our hearts and will never pass a day without remembering those who have gone before us.\u00a0 But if we maintain our belief, if we are strong in our hearts and really, truly believe in a resurrection, a Day of Judgment, and the eternal peace of Jannah, then we will have the understanding that death itself is not a tragedy, but rather a transition, one that will happen for each and every one of us.\u00a0 The tragedy would be if we allowed death to make us disbelievers and cut us off from our loved ones in the life to come.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On September 11, Welsh actor Andy Whitfield died of lymphoma.\u00a0 He was survived by his wife, Vashti, and their two children.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t die when a plane crashed or when a building collapsed.\u00a0 He passed away at a hospice care facility after chemotherapy efforts proved unsuccessful against a very aggressive non-Hodgkins lymphoma.\u00a0 I know about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n