The final illness begins

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

When the Prophet ﷺ came back from the Farewell Ḥajj he settled again into the rhythm of his wives' houses. It was ʿĀʾishah's night, and the following day was Maymūnah's, and it was in the house of Maymūnah, around the first or second of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, though we do not know the exact date, that the fever first took hold of him.

❧He kept his turn until he no longer could

For the first days he still moved from one house to the next, dragging himself around the circle of his wives to keep his fairness, though the fever was climbing. Only when he had grown very weak did he ask them whether they would permit him to stay in a single place and be nursed there, the house of ʿĀʾishah. Notice: the Sharīʿah placed no such duty upon him. In this matter a prophet stands a level above every other man, and he was under no obligation to seek their leave. And yet, to the very end, he would not simply take it; he asked, "would you mind if I spent these days in the house of ʿĀʾishah?", and every one of them agreed, and so his final days came to be spent in her room. Fair to the last breath.

❧A fever with no cure

We have forgotten what a fever meant in a world that had nothing to treat it. The Prophet ﷺ himself called fever "one of the punishments of Hellfire in this world", and there was no relief for it. The painkillers we swallow like candy and take utterly for granted are a thing of the last century; before that a fever was simply borne, bare, and people died of the pain of it alone, not the illness, the sheer burning pain. There was no medicine, nothing to reach for; you endured it, and our Prophet ﷺ endured it. As he lay sick ʿĀʾishah would recite over him the very duʿāʾs he had taught her, and breathe upon him, and keep a vessel of water beside him to pour over him and draw the heat down. His fever, one Companion said, was as heavy as the fever of ten ordinary men.

❧"Rather: O my head"

At least a week into this, on a day we cannot fix exactly, ʿĀʾishah herself came in with a splitting headache, pressing her head and saying وَا رَأْسَاهْ, the Arabic cry, "oh, my head, my head." From beneath a pain immeasurably greater than her own, he still found it in him to smile and tease her back: بَلْ أَنَا وَا رَأْسَاهْ, "rather, oh, my head." As if to say: your pain is nothing, mine is the greater. Then, gently, he began to prepare her for what she could not yet let herself see: "and what would it cost you, ʿĀʾishah, were you to die now, before me? I would wash your body with my own hands, and wrap you in the shroud, and pray over you, and lay you in the grave, what better end could you hope for?" He understands, now, that this is the end; no one else does; so he eases the inevitable toward her, wrapped as a joke. But she took none of it that way, her jealousy answered him at once: "I see how it is, you would like that, so that on your way back from burying me you could spend the evening with one of your other wives, and no one left to keep watch on you as I do." She is teasing back, of course; she knows he would not be pleased. And he only smiled. To the very last he was laughing with ʿĀʾishah, easing her toward what was coming one soft word at a time.