To Every Mother and Father Who Lost a Child
There are some calamities(!) whose being good or evil is understood only later. At first, they are perceived as if they were a great evil, and despite all the vastness of the earth, there are moments when the world feels narrow to those who experience this calamity(!). The case I witnessed is exactly of this kind.
It was during the years when I was doing my residency in Edirne. I was close to finishing my specialization and had come to the final stages of my psychiatry rotation.
A Mother’s Grief
The only child of my daughter’s classroom teacher had been involved in a traffic accident while going to school, and while the child was lying on the ground covered with newspapers, the mother was informed. When the mother saw her child—over whom she had doted for so many years—in that state, she fell into a great breakdown. This incident was published at length in Edirne’s local newspapers. After this event, although the mother and father went to many psychologists and psychiatrists in order to restore their deteriorated mental health, instead of improving, they became even worse. As their condition continued to worsen, one day my daughter’s teacher sent me a message through my daughter. She told my daughter that if I was available, she wanted to meet with me urgently.
Even though we did not meet very often, my daughter’s teacher and I would occasionally get in touch to ask about my daughter’s situation. Despite having different worldly views and occasionally debating these matters, I liked her honesty and straightforwardness. As far as I knew, she was a warm, friendly, and idealistic teacher who was loved by all the students and teachers at the school. These qualities had led me to feel respect and affection for her. She was a very compassionate person who did her job well and took personal interest in her students and their problems. For this reason, despite being very busy, I conveyed through my daughter that we could meet outside working hours whenever she wished. Two days later, during the lunch break, she came to visit me at Trakya University Faculty of Medicine. When I saw her, I was momentarily very surprised. That lively, smiling, warm woman was gone; in her place stood someone with sunken cheeks, a bent back, the light in her eyes extinguished, and a vacant, frozen gaze.
After a brief exchange of greetings, without prolonging the conversation, she went straight to the point:
“Doctor, I know your time is limited. I also apologize for keeping you from your lunch. But I am very bad, doctor, very bad. You know that my daughter died as a result of a traffic accident. Because of this, I have been going to psychologists and psychiatrists for a long time, but in vain. Every psychologist I go to says things like, ‘this is the law of nature; one day we will all surely die…’ and tells me that I need to get used to this situation. And every psychiatrist gives me different antidepressant medications. I have not benefited from either psychologists or psychiatrists. I beg you, show me a way out. I am very bad, doctor; if this continues, I will go mad—please help me. I came to you as a last resort. Otherwise, I am afraid of what I might do…”
For a moment, I wanted to explain something to the person in front of me using my own references, but that could have been disrespectful to her. It might have meant taking advantage of her difficult moment and imposing my own ideas on her. Therefore, I gave up on what I had been thinking of doing.
“God forbid, Ms. Devrim. I will try to do what I can. If you wish, I can speak with one of the professors working in the Department of Psychiatry and arrange for you to see them. What do you think?”
“Do you mean Prof. …… ……..?”
“Yes, him or anyone else. If you wish, of course.”
“I went to him as well, doctor, I went to him too. He prescribed me Xanax 1 mg and Lustral 50 mg tablets. Those medications did nothing but numb me. After taking them, I just started wandering around in a daze, that’s all. Doctor, you are a devout person; I know this from your daughter. I often find myself involuntarily asking this question:
If there is God, why did He take my daughter, why doctor, why?
While there are so many thieves, scoundrels, and immoral people in the world, why didn’t He take one of them instead—why did He take my daughter? Is this justice, doctor? Whom have we harmed? Whom did my daughter ever harm, doctor?
Why my daughter?
What is she doing now under that soil? Does she feel cold in cold weather? Do you know, doctor, in cold weather I go to ‘the cemetery on Buçuk Hill’ and cover her grave with a blanket so she won’t get cold. At night, when there was lightning and thunder, she couldn’t sleep and would come to lie next to me and my husband. Now, when lightning strikes, what is she doing, I wonder? I have lost my daughter forever, doctor; I will never see my hennaed lamb, my cypress-tall one again.
How can I live with this pain?
And why should I even live? What should I live for, doctor? Please, find me a remedy. You are one of those who can understand me best. You also have a daughter; you are also a parent…”
As the grieving mother spoke, my heart was breaking. Feelings this clear and this sincere could only be expressed by a mother, and before me stood a grieving mother. Regardless of belief, I believe that the feelings mothers have for their children are universal. I believe that all the mothers of the world therefore harbor their purest, most selfless, and most sincere feelings toward their children. That is why neither an instrument nor a statistical method has been found in this world that can measure maternal compassion. Their love is not a love that can be shown or measured. A mother’s love is selfless; it contains no expectation, it is innate, not acquired later, it is sincere, it contains no hypocrisy. In short, the love they feel for their children is a love without bargaining. That is why there is no beloved like a mother. This I know…
“Ms. Devrim, from your point of view, it is very natural for you to be this upset and to feel this bad. If a person loses the being they love most in life and believes that they will never see them again, of course they cannot find a justified reason to live. But if you can look at the event from a different angle, then even if these troubles you are experiencing do not end, they will lessen, and you will be able to cope with them. Actually…”
“Wait a moment, doctor—are you implying now that I can be reunited with my daughter, but that this is not possible with my way of looking at things?”
It was clear that the person in front of me was very intelligent. However, this could be either an advantage or a disadvantage for me. This largely depended on my approach. It could be an advantage, because there was someone very intelligent before me who could understand what I meant without difficulty. It could also be a disadvantage, because there was someone before me who was very unfamiliar with what I was going to say and who did not believe in the references I believed in. With the slightest wrong word or sentence, I might not be able to convey the message I was trying to explain, the message I was trying to give. I was aware that trying to seek a solution for her through the approach style of modern(!) psychiatry would be like pouring water into a mortar. She herself was already saying that she had not benefited from this approach. In a short period of time, she had gone to almost all the psychologists and psychiatrists in Edirne. She had even been examined by …… …….., one of the professors of the Department of Psychiatry at Trakya University Faculty of Medicine, the highest authority she could turn to in Edirne. Feeling a bit uneasy and a bit hesitant, I thought of approaching her through a different channel. In fact, what I was trying to do was very risky; if she understood the example I would try to give in that moment, all the better. Because at that time, this was all my knowledge on the matter amounted to. Saying “Bismillah” to myself, I began to speak:
“Ms. Devrim, if you allow me, I would like to explain this experience you are going through and the way out of it to you through a metaphor. Or rather, I would like to read you a passage, and then we can interpret the story I read together, if you wish.”
“Of course, doctor.”
Knowing why Ms. Devrim would be coming to see me, I had brought with me the small booklet that explains The Child’s Condolence Treatise, one of the red-covered books. I took it out and, as best as my tongue could manage, I began to half read and half narrate it.
A Consolation from the Risale-i Nur Collection
“Once upon a time, a man fell into a dungeon. He had a lovable child, and they sent the child to him in the dungeon as well. That helpless man was bearing his own hardship, and at the same time he was distressed by the burden of his child, because he could not provide the child with comfort. Then a merciful Sultan sent him a messenger and addressed the man, saying: ‘This child is indeed your offspring, but he is also under my rule. I will take him and have him raised in a beautiful palace.’ Faced with his child being taken from the dungeon and brought to the palace, the man cried and grieved and insisted, saying: ‘I will not give up my child, who is my source of consolation.’ His companions said to him: ‘Your sorrow is meaningless. If you pity the child, the child will go to a palace far more comfortable than this filthy, dirty, dark dungeon. If you grieve for yourself, then if the child stays here, together with your temporary and dubious benefit, you will suffer more hardship and pain because of the child’s suffering. If he goes to the Sultan’s palace, it will bring you a thousand benefits. For it will become a means for the Sultan’s mercy; your child will intercede for you. The Sultan will let him meet with you. Surely, in order for you to meet, he will not send the child back to the dungeon; rather, he will take you out of the dungeon and send you to the palace where your child is, and let you meet your child. But he will do this on one condition: that you have trust in and obedience to the Sultan…’”
From time to time, I was checking out of the corner of my eye whether Ms. Devrim was affected by the part I was reading. But the neutral state of her face did not allow me to understand this. Probably because of the suffering she had endured, it was hardly possible to find any facial expressions on her face that indicated any emotion. While I was in these thoughts, it was time to move on to the explanation of the passage I had read:
Just as described in this story, Ms. Devrim, people whose children have died—like you—should think in this way: My deceased child is innocent. And the One who created her is Most Forgiving and Most Protective. That Being, who loves my child and shows her mercy far more than my own love and compassion, took my child to Himself. He removed her from the distressing, toilsome dungeon of this world and sent her to the highest rank of Paradise. How fortunate my child is! Had she remained in this world, who knows what hardships she would have continued to endure? …
“Wait, wait, doctor, wait a moment! Are you now saying that my child did not become soil, did not go into nothingness or nonexistence, but went to the presence of Someone who loves and protects her more than I do? So are you saying that I will be able to meet her again?”
I said to myself, “Subhanallah.” I had read this example many times, consulted dictionaries, and asked someone knowledgeable in order to understand it in the way it was meant. Yet she grasped immediately what was being meant at the very first reading.
“Yes, exactly as you said, but…”
“So will I be able to see my child again?
Will I be able to smell her and kiss her, doctor? You are not saying all this just to console me, are you?”
“Ms. Devrim, I can understand your excitement, but I am not the one saying these things. These are said by Allah, who neither deceives nor is deceived, who is the most merciful toward the servant He has created, who created you, your daughter, and me, the Lord of the worlds. However, if you pay attention to the sentence, it does not say, ‘No matter what, I will reunite you.’ This is the most important point to notice here. The One who created us ties this reunion, this meeting, to a condition.”
“What was that condition, doctor? What was the condition for seeing my daughter again?”
“If you wish, let us begin by explaining this short allegorical example, and at the end we can answer your question. Here, the dungeon corresponds to worldly life. The hardships endured in the dungeon point to the hardships of worldly life. The man sent by the Sultan is our Prophet—that is, Muhammad al-Amin, the most truthful and the most trustworthy of people. The Sultan, on the other hand, is Allah (glorified and exalted be He), the creator of the entire universe, its administrator, lawgiver, and the One who demands obedience to the laws He has set. The Sultan’s taking the child from the dungeon and placing him in the palace, allowing him to benefit from all the blessings there, points to the life of the hereafter and the blessings of Paradise. And the Sultan’s reuniting the child with the parents when the time comes points to the child’s interceding for the mother and father and being together with them in Paradise. Now let us come to the answer to the question you asked; of course, the Exalted Creator has tied all of this to a condition. And that condition is that the mother and father whose child has been taken must have absolute trust in and obedience to the Sultan—that is, to the Exalted Creator. Because God is Just. His justice acts; He does not commit injustice. He is All-Wise; all His acts are based on wisdom; He does nothing in vain. He is Most Merciful. He deals with His servants with mercy; He does not oppress…”
While I was explaining these things, I realized that Ms. Devrim had drifted off somewhere far away. Rather than what I was explaining, she had become fixated on a particular point I mentioned. This was evident in every aspect of her demeanor. At one point she paused and, in a barely audible tone, almost murmuring,
“So I can see my daughter again. But there is a condition to this, is there!
If only these things were true, if only I could believe, if only—ah, if only…”
At one point, a silence fell between us. She was clearly weighing within herself the truth of what had been told. As for me, I was praying inwardly that she would be content with what I had explained. I had only one shot, and I had used it. If she pressed further and asked questions, I had nothing in my hands other than scientific data and modern psychiatric methods. After a short while, she turned to me and said:
“Where can I obtain the book you read from? Could you write its title and author on this paper?” She took a pen and paper out of her bag.
I then extended the book I had read to her:
“Let this be my gift to you, please.”
“I absolutely cannot accept it; it is enough for you to tell me where I can find it. I have already burdened you enough…”
“Ms. Devrim, it is important for me—not for you—that you take this book, because according to my belief, giving a gift to someone is a Sunnah, that is, a practice that our Prophet frequently did and recommended. In this way, I will have fulfilled a Sunnah and earned reward in return, and you will have given me the opportunity to practice a Sunnah.”
“Oh, is that so? Well then, I will take it! Thank you very much for sparing your time for me. Most importantly, you listened to me in this state of mind without judging or condemning me. Thank you very much.”
After parting from Ms. Devrim that day, for quite a long time we did not have the opportunity to meet again. My intense on-call duties and workload had an effect on this, but the main reason was that I wanted her to call me—and indeed, that is what happened.
From Despair to Faith and Hope
About two and a half months had passed. One Saturday, while I was sitting at home, a man I learned was Ms. Devrim’s husband, Mr. Haydar, called me on the phone and said that they were expecting me for tea in the evening. I practically counted the hours until that evening. I was very curious about Ms. Devrim’s current state. The answers I received from the questions I occasionally asked my daughter did not satisfy me.
When evening came and I rang the doorbell of Ms. Devrim’s home, her husband—whom I was seeing for the first time—opened the door. Mr. Haydar invited me inside in a very modest manner. When I entered, instead of a woman whose eyes had lost their light and whose shoulders had slumped from hopelessness, I encountered a woman whose eyes were sparkling and who was self-confident. As we talked, I could see that this positive physical change in Ms. Devrim was also reflected in her state of mind. At a moment when our conversation had deepened and we were sipping our tea, Ms. Devrim said to me:
“Doctor, I want to show you something.”
We placed our tea glasses on the coffee table, and all moved together from the sitting room into the living room. It was clear that the living room was furnished very simply yet tastefully. When I saw, on the widest wall of the room, a photograph of her daughter in frames made of extremely high-quality wood, and next to it The Child’s Condolence Treatise, carefully written in neat handwriting, I suddenly became very emotional. These two frames were so large that they immediately caught the attention of anyone who entered the living room.
“Doctor, may God be pleased with you. The day I came to see you, I was at the peak of despair—pardon me, we were at the peak of despair. My husband and I had decided to commit suicide. You know Stefan Zweig—the Austrian writer of Jewish origin. He committed suicide together with his wife at the age of 61, you know. They chose suicide as a way out of the anguished life they were living. He is one of the writers my husband and I love most. And I suppose there is no need for me to mention Sigmund Freud. The famous neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis—he too committed suicide. In fact, I think he did it with the help of a doctor; I believe you call it euthanasia. After losing our daughter, we too had decided that the life we were living was utterly meaningless. And the solution, to us, was obvious of course: to get rid of this suffering. We had decided to do this just as our favorite writers had done. Where there is no hope, life consists of nothing but torment, doctor—you know that, don’t you? But that day, in the Child’s Condolence Treatise you read to me, you showed us a way to be reunited with our child, whom we thought we had lost forever and would never see again. As soon as I got home that day, I told my husband about this, and I also read to him the book you gave me as a gift. That night, for the first time, we slept until morning without nightmares, in tears—and I even saw my daughter in my dream. I cannot recall the dream in full detail, but my daughter was very cheerful in the dream.”
From that day on, every morning before going to work and after returning from work, we read this Child’s Condolence Treatise, which I wrote out by hand. While my husband and I were thinking of committing suicide in order to be reunited with our daughter eternally, you showed us that this was an eternal separation. When I asked you what the necessary condition was for reuniting with her, you told me that it was trust in and obedience to the Sultan, if you remember. While buying the book you gave me, I saw at the bookstore that the author had other books as well. I bought all of that author’s books. You probably call it a “corpus,” don’t you? The fact that my main field is philosophy made it easier for me to understand the language of these books. Within a month and a half, I read all of them. And I realized this: “Trust in the Sultan is a necessary condition for reuniting with my daughter, but it is not a sufficient condition.” After that, my husband and I discussed and reviewed what we read every evening after work. Do you know, doctor, my husband and I started praying a week ago. Trust in the Sultan then inevitably compelled us toward obedience. But please do not misunderstand this compulsion. My husband and I have long believed that “every idea has an honor, and that honor is realized only by living in accordance with what you believe.” For this reason, my husband and I made a decision a week ago and began to pray. If we were going to trust the One who created us, then we had to obey His commands as well—and that is what we did.
As Ms. Devrim was telling all this, I became emotional and could not hold back my tears. How sincerely and genuinely she was speaking. At one point she said:
“After everything we have been through, we realized that we could not stay here in Edirne, doctor. Everywhere here carries the memory of our daughter, and this inevitably hurts both me and my husband deeply. Therefore, we requested a transfer. Our transfer was approved for Burdur. God willing, we will move next month. We invited you to thank you and to ask for your forgiveness. And we also want to give you this small gift—just a humble token of appreciation.”
At first, I did not want to accept the wrapped gift that was handed to me, but when Ms. Devrim said,
“Exchanging gifts is a Sunnah, doctor—don’t forget!”
I had to accept their gift without much resistance.
When I got home, the first thing I did was open the gift package that had been given to me. Inside was a copy of The Flashes (Lemalar). On the first page, the following words were carefully written:
“We are grateful to you for introducing us to these works that changed our lives. With our most sincere feelings, to our dear doctor who taught us that the true secret of life is ‘trust and obedience.’”
Devrim–Haydar Çalışkan.
The author of this article and the doctor in the story is the late Prof. Dr. Kenan Taştan.
May his abode be Paradise.
The text titled “Child’s Condolence Treatise (Çocuk Taziyenamesi)” mentioned in this article is a passage taken from the Risale-i Nur collection by the great scholar Said Nursi, and the examples narrated by the doctor throughout the article are also taken from these works.
