A Mother's Dua: Asking Allah for Something Better

I had been discharged, but my daughter was still in the NICU.

My ustazah called and said she would like to come, just to drop off dinner for our family. When she arrived, I told her how my heart broke to see my baby wired all over, needing help to breathe because she couldn't breathe on her own. The tears came. She put her arms around me. She looked sad, but she was calm. She told me to call her if I needed anything.

And then she taught me a dua.

It is the dua the Prophet ﷺ taught to a companion who had lost someone she loved, recorded in Sahih Muslim 918. He taught her to say:

إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ

اللَّهُمَّ أْجُرْنِي فِي مُصِيبَتِي وَأَخْلِفْ لِي خَيْرًا مِنْهَا

Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Allah we will return.O Allah, reward me in my affliction and replace it for me with something better.

I held on to it, but I didn't understand it. In my heart, "better" meant one thing: that my daughter would be normal.

I had imagined raising a righteous daughter, like her three sisters and her brother, who would grow up pleasing Allah and make dua for me when I died. In the NICU I had bargained, "O Allah, I'll do anything for You, if You take this away from her."

Instead, my baby had trouble breathing. She couldn't suck, let alone swallow.Then the seizures came. Everything in me struggled to accept it.

At three months, I noticed her eyes didn't follow me. She didn't smile back. That was when I knew, in a way I couldn't argue with anymore, that she was different, and it confirmed my devastation. At six months, her body was stiff. She couldn't roll or sit. By her first birthday, her muscles were stiff, she was fed through a nasogastric tube, and she could only lie down.

I will always be grateful that I had more than one person who saw the good in Muji before I could. My ustazah held me while I cried. A friend came to the hospital a couple of days after Muji was born, sat beside my bed, and told me I was special, that Allah loved me, and that this was why He tested me. I couldn't feel it then. But I never forgot it. They were already seeing the child Allah had sent while I was still grieving the one I had imagined, and they held that for me until I could hold it myself.

I can't tell you the exact day I accepted her as she is. There wasn't one. But I remember what it was tied to. It was when I understood that she would never call me mama the way my other children do. It hurt to think of her locked in a world I couldn't enter, with no way to tell me in words what was inside it.

And yet that was where acceptance began. Because she cannot speak, because she is not accountable the way the rest of us are, Allah made her a person of Jannah. The better I had asked for was already in my arms. Allah trusted me with a person of Jannah. The hope I had lost, a child who would make dua for me, was not erased. It was answered in a way I never imagined. I just couldn't recognize it at first.

The grief has not fully ended. It still comes back when I compare her with my other children, who have lived what the world calls a normal life. They are married now, with children of their own, continuing the legacy. I am grateful for them, and I still ache for what Muji will never have in this world. The hurt and the peace live side by side.

If you are still in the part where it feels like only loss, you don't have to understand the dua yet. I didn't. Say it anyway, and let someone hold the good for you until you can.

I wrote about the day Muji was born here, and about patience and the test of this life here.

Carry a little light today. Until we share light again. Nur, Muji's mum