Iranian Mother Goes Viral: “I Combed Her Hair That Morning – JESUS Showed Me They Are With Him”
My father Rea Karimi was a fisherman.
He woke up every day before dawn when the sky was still black over the Persian Gulf and the air had the damp freshness that only exists in those hours.
He would go out in a blue painted wooden boat that he maintained with the same care my mother maintained the house, applying paint whenever it peeled, reinforcing the planks every season.
He would return in the early afternoon, smelling of salt and engine oil, his feet soaked, his arms marked by ropes and nets.
His hands were always calloused and cracked.
In the winter, the cracks would bleed and he would wrap his fingers in burlap without making a move to complain.
I never saw my father complain.
He was a man of few words and direct gestures.
He didn’t say, “I love you,” with his voice.
He said it with every fish he brought home, with every bank note he placed in my mother’s hand on Fridays, with the way he looked at the five of us sitting at the dinner table as if our mere existence was proof that life was worth the effort.
I am the oldest of the five.
Three girls, two boys.
I learned very early that love can be silent and yet enormous.
My mother, Nargas Ahmedi, never worked outside the home.
She married my father at 15, as was common in our corner of Iran in our generation, in our class.
She had five children.
She raised all of us in a three-bedroom apartment with windows overlooking an alley.
She was deeply religious in a way that was stitched into every minute of her day, every gesture, every word.
She prayed five times a day without fail, adjusting the timing of meals, visits, everything around the prayer schedule.
She read the Quran every afternoon, sitting in a weaker chair near the living room window.
Her voice low and her lips moving slowly, rocking slightly back and forth in a rhythm I memorized even before I understood what it meant.
She fasted during Ramadan with a devotion that not even the headache of hunger could break.
She taught me the prayers as soon as I could pronounce the words.
She told me that Allah saw everything, that he rewarded the faithful in life and in paradise, that a good woman was one who cared for her family and kept the faith.
I believed her completely.
There was no reason to doubt.
In Minab, faith wasn’t a choice.
It was the air we breathed.
There was no other option to consider, no window open to another perspective.
Islam was the ground I walked on since I learned to crawl.
And it never occurred to me to ask if that ground was solid until the day it disappeared from under my feet.
What happened three nights after the burial of my children changed everything I believed about life, about death, and about God.