Khadeejah bint Khuwaylid (RA) and the woman he never stopped missing

The story

'Aa'ishah noticed it more than anyone — how, years into their own marriage, her husband would still bring up Khadeejah without warning, some old memory or kindness surfacing in the middle of an ordinary day. One time it needled her enough that she said, without thinking it through, "Was she not just an old woman, that Allah has replaced her with someone better for you?" He turned on her with real anger. "No — by Allah, Allah did not replace her with anyone better. She believed in me when everyone else called me a liar. She stood by me with everything she owned when everyone else turned their money away from me. And Allah gave me children through her, when He gave me none through anyone else." 'Aa'ishah never brought it up again.

Some time later, a woman named Khawlah bint Hakeem asked him gently whether he'd been going without, ever since Khadeejah had died. "Yes," he told her. "She was the mother of this household. She was the one who held it together." Nobody who heard him say it needed to ask what he meant.

What he was still carrying went back to the years the clan had cut off trade and supplies to his family, shutting them into the narrow alleys near Abu Talib's home. Khadeejah had spent almost everything she owned during that time keeping the people around her fed. She never tallied what she gave and never mentioned it afterward — it simply went, year after year, until there was very little of her wealth left to speak of.

By the time the boycott finally ended, something in her had already given out. She grew sick, and stayed sick, cared for constantly by her husband and daughters, who tried everything they knew and watched none of it work. She died with her family around her — and years later, it was still her name that surfaced first, in the middle of ordinary days, whenever he let his guard down.