His Last Days
Lady Blomfield, The Chosen Highway, (1940), Bahá'í Publishing Trust
When in Bahá'í history
A retelling based on The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield, which preserves the family's own account of these days.
By November 1921, 'Abdu'l-Bahá was tired in body. He had carried the weight of the Cause for nearly thirty years — exile, imprisonment, the long journeys to the West, and an endless stream of visitors and letters from every corner of the earth. Those close to Him could see that He was weary. Yet to the very end He went on being exactly who He had always been.
On His last Friday, as He had done for as long as anyone could remember, He saw to the poor of Haifa. The needy gathered, as they always did, and He gave to them with His own hands, knowing many of them by name, asking after their families. To the end, the friend of the poor remained their friend.
In those final days He was unhurried and serene. He received visitors. He spoke with His family with great tenderness. There was about Him a kind of quiet readiness, as though He had set everything in order and was at peace. He spoke, gently, of His own passing — not with fear, but almost as one speaks of a journey home.
On the night that would be His last, He rested as usual. In the small hours of the morning of the twenty-eighth of November, 1921, surrounded by His family, with His sister — the Greatest Holy Leaf — and His daughters near Him, 'Abdu'l-Bahá quietly breathed His last. He did not struggle. He simply went, as gently as a child falling asleep.
By the next day the news had flashed across the world by cable, and in city after city His friends — and many who were not yet His friends — wept for the Master who had shown them, in a single human life, what the love of God looks like when it walks among us.
On the anniversary of His ascension we remember not only how He left, but how He spent His last strength: praying, giving, and loving, right up to the final hour. He taught with His dying days the very thing He had taught with all the others — that a life poured out for others is never wasted, and never truly ends.
This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Chosen Highway by Lady Blomfield.
Cite this story
Blomfield, L.. (1940). *The Chosen Highway*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust.
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