Thoughts at the end of the world

On Gaza and survival

Note: This piece was originally published as a guest post in October 2024 on The Aram.

I think about the world ending at least a few times a week. My thoughts are sharp but vague. They take the shape of a mood in a horror movie, a ripple underwater, a monster you can’t quite see in the dark.

What does it mean for the world to have ended? Is it fire and brimstone? Loss? Lack of internet? Is it a feeling, an inconvenience, or a need unmet?

My husband, M, loves to track development in our city. I used to tell him he should run for council but now I keep it to myself in case he gets any ideas. We live in Ottawa, the town that doesn’t realize it’s a federal capital, the city that fun forgot.

M reads about new developments in progress, tracks the ups and downs of our Light Rail Transit system and pours over plans for mixed-use buildings and high-density corridors. As if his care is the water and sunlight our city needs to grow.

“Look, there’s more of a skyline now,” he says, as we drive along Carling or past Little Italy or near Parkdale. This poor big city boy, Cairo and Montreal in his history repeating the words like a mantra, willing them into reality.

But I’m not excited by growth. The towers he points to, glass and concrete rising to the sky like tendrils, scare me. Are they the symbols of our hubris? Daring the earth to tolerate yet more supposed growth in place of organic matter, acres of green disappearing?

High-rises assume elevators. Elevators assume electricity. And I think of the world ending. I think of the person on the 29th floor who bought the condo for the view and is now as good as stuck; Rapunzel with no hair to bring them up or down.

Photo by Thea Harrison on Unsplash

Sometimes, my thoughts are concrete. They take the shape of one terrifying scenario or another.

I think: the big, scary end could come and we could be apart. I don’t know the numbers or addresses of my parents or sisters by heart scattered across the globe as we are. I need to write these things on a piece of paper before the internet disappears and my phone is a brick.

I think: it’s only a matter of time before wildfires or hurricanes or mudslides or tsunamis touch me or the people I love.

I think: that tall building will be covered with ivy one day. Vegetation growing out through the cracks in the concrete, a jungle re-consuming the city, swallowing it whole, like all those dystopian movies I have to stop watching.

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Anishinaabe author Waubgeshig Rice, starts in the aftermath of the apocalypse on a reserve in northern Ontario. Not much has changed for the community, even after the world ends. They’ve been long forgotten by their government after the theft of their land and are so used to losing power that they already have generators in place.

These were the children and grandchildren of genocide survivors. All the horrors I imagine, they have already endured: losing family and loved ones, losing comforts, losing safety.

Some books change your basic thinking, rewire your brain. Moon Of The Crusted Snow was one of these for me. It helped me to realize that the world I take for granted does not exist for the majority of the world’s population. One that has never existed.

This world of backyards and drive-throughs and easy parking spaces and next-day delivery. This world of immediate access to everything I want.

Every morning and every night, I check my phone for photos and videos of Gaza. I worry about Bisan, about Hind, about Hossam Shbat. I worried about Motaz before he left to protect his family and his life and about Hamza Dahdouh before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike targeting his car. I scroll through photos of concrete reduced to rubble. Roads and buildings bombed out, only their shells remaining.

Sometimes, I scroll on my phone with one hand while my other hand presses the buttons of the espresso machine in our kitchen, making my double shot.

Sometimes, I scroll while I pull the barista-style oat milk (steams and froths like regular milk!) out of the double-door fridge.

Sometimes, I scroll while I slice pears and peel clementines for my 11-year-old, ask him if his indoor shoes are in his backpack, if today is library day, “Do you want cucumbers or carrots for your lunch, habibi?”

Indoor shoes. Have you ever stopped to consider how ridiculous a thought like indoor shoes must be to a person who has leaflets falling from the sky every few days telling them to run? Indoor shoes. To a person who has run so many times now, they have lost every pair of shoes but the tattered ones they never take off? To a person who wakes up each morning shocked at the breath they inhale, pressed immediately into the need to find water?

Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash

The end of the world I have been imagining is absolute. A single bang is not a steady sequence of whimpers ignored by the powers until there is no one left to whimper.

But the world has already ended a hundred times over for the families I look at on my phone in Gaza. The world is ending daily for the displaced parents of starving children in Sudan, for the daughter of Philando Castille, and for the sister of Breonna Taylor. And yet each of them has no choice but to continue.

It is a luxury, considering some hypothetical disaster on which I fixate, from the safety of my cocooned life.

And why am I so obsessed with the end of the world, anyway? Isn’t death the only certainty of life? My faith teaches me that this world we hold so tightly will appear as a dream in the afterlife. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) would encourage his people to visit the grave, to contemplate the reality of death.

We could say that I think of death often but I doubt that this is what the teaching meant. I’m not supposed to think about it to run from it but rather to accept it. To recognize the true nature of this world as fleeting. To recognize that my physical self is the least significant aspect of my being.

Lately, I find myself thinking of the words that The Angel Gabriel said one day to the Prophet:

“Live as you like for you will still die, and love what you like for you will still part with it, and do what you like, for you will still meet the consequences of your deeds.”¹

Despite my anxieties, these words are both comforting and clarifying. The world has ended for some already and will end for each of us, one day.

So I let out a breath and I pray. And I let my husband look at the skyline with hope rather than trepidation. And I settle into looking inward, at the daily decisions that are in my hands, knowing that one day, I will meet the consequences of my deeds.

Perhaps, if everyone considered the eventual reaping, the world would be a safer place.

Every week I publish reflections from my lived experience as a visible minority. People like

Forest Hoag

and

Jade Sarah

made today’s essay possible.

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