A Day Later

When my mum died, Salma was with her.

I was in boarding school.

I didn't get the news until a day later — a whole day of living in a world where she was still alive to me, while at home everything had already broken. By the time I understood what people were trying to tell me, she was already being prepared for the ground. That delay still sits in my chest like a door I can never walk back through. Salma held the ending. I arrived after the sentence was finished.

I didn't believe she had died.

Not really. Not in the way belief settles into bone. Not until she was in the ground. Even then, some part of me kept waiting for the correction — for someone to say it had been a mistake, for her voice in the kitchen, for the ordinary miracle of her walking into a room. It still feels like yesterday. Grief does that. It refuses to age on schedule.

After the burial, Salma refused to go back home.

She stayed with cousins instead. The house without Mum in it was too sharp, too empty, too much like a place that had already decided we were alone. I understood that refusal in my body even when I didn't have words for it. Home had changed shape. Salma chose a doorway that still felt survivable.

I remember my dad saying, Just leave me here, or you will bring me back in a casket too.

He meant it. The man who once climbed through a ceiling to get back to her could not imagine a house without her in it. Thirty days later, we learned how true that sentence was.

When he died, it was just me and him in the hospital.

No crowded room. No sister beside me this time. Just a daughter and a father, and the quiet machinery of an ending I still wasn't ready to believe. Salma had been with Mum. I was with Dad. Grief split us into different rooms of the same loss.

I was so angry.

Angry like they had both chosen to leave us by ourselves. Angry at the locked door of heaven. Angry that love could be that fierce between them and still take them away from their daughters in the same breath of a month. It wasn't fair logic. It was fifteen-year-old logic — the only kind available when the people who built your world step out of it together.

My mum had taught us to love the Lord.

In that moment, I questioned the love of a God who had left me an orphan.

I need to say that plainly, because faith stories that skip the questioning aren't true enough to keep. I had been raised on prayer and presence and the idea that love holds. Then love looked like a burial, a sister who wouldn't come home, a hospital room with only me in the chair, and another burial after that. Questioning wasn't rebellion. It was grief telling the truth out loud.

I don't tidy that season into a neat lesson. Some days the kitchen still feels like the softest place I know how to build. Some days I still arrive a day later to my own memories. Salma and I kept going; differently, imperfectly, side by side. And the faith my mother planted in us did not die with her, even when I could not feel it. It went quiet. It waited. It let me be angry without disappearing entirely.

If you have ever gotten the worst news too late, or stood at a grave still arguing with reality, or asked God a question you were told not to ask — you are not alone in that room.

I am still learning that love can survive the asking.