Anthony Taylor, known for his take-a-punch-to-give-a-punch ferocity, froze under the unforgiving lights of crisis care at St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, where a chorus of beeping monitors and exhaling respirators sang of lives at the precipice. He did not want to be here.
That is, he wanted to be here, and his coach told him that he should be here, but he was frightened. In his gloveless hands he carried the shield of a bouquet, bright yellow flowers that were like dandelions, only nicer.
A nurse asked if he needed help. Soon, a relative of the patient he had come to see invited him into a crowded room. There, in a small bed, with a white bandage wrapped around his head and a blue air tube running from his mouth, was the man Taylor had recently danced and fought with: Hamzah Aljahmi, 19, his eyes still closed.
Taylor handed the flowers to someone and sat in a chair near the foot of the bed, stunned. To think that less than 72 hours earlier, he and this person had each been paid a few hundred dollars to fight their first professional fight, a four-rounder in the hall of a Ukrainian church. To think how they had stared into each other’s eyes while engaged in a most violent form of intimacy.
It could be 24-year-old Anthony Taylor in that bed, not Hamzah Aljahmi. Now Anthony would be spending the holidays with his family, while Hamzah. …
Taylor began to cry.
Ali Aljahmi, a first cousin, was moved, even impressed, by the sight of this distraught stranger paying his respects. For you to step into this room of anger and grief, Aljahmi thought to himself. For you to come to be with us. Takes a lot of strength.
The cousin led Taylor into the hall to offer comforting perspective. Whatever was happening in that hospital room was Allah’s will, he said, and do not doubt that you helped Hamzah to realize his dream of becoming a professional boxer.
One more thing, Aljahmi said. “You have become family with me forever for this kind of gesture.”
Taylor returned to the room and, for the next hour, talked with the father, an uncle and a few cousins of the man laid out before them, the black of his eyebrows enhanced by an enveloping whiteness of bandages and blankets.
“They told me they wanted me to keep going,” Taylor recalled. “That he would want me to keep going, and that I have to honor him and keep him alive by continuing to box.”
The father, also named Ali Aljahmi, would only vaguely remember Taylor’s visit, so mind-blurring were his waves of grief. He had been at the fight. He had seen his beloved son, a determined fighter, crumple to the blue mat. Not in direct response to any punch, it seemed, but almost as an afterthought.
The elder Aljahmi had been here in this chilling, antiseptic environment ever since, save for when nurses would gently tell him it was time to leave for the night. He’d return to a hotel whose name he would not remember and try to avoid the many anxious telephone calls from family members and friends back in their hometown of Dearborn.
How is Hamzah? How is Hamzah? How is Hamzah?
The father did not want to answer. If he did respond, it was to tell a version of the truth: “Hamzah is sleeping.”
Finally, the father telephoned a nephew in Dearborn with the same name as his: Ali Aljahmi, Hamzah’s cousin. I need you to bring Hamzah’s mother here to Youngstown, Ali. She needs to see him.
The nephew understood what his uncle was not saying. He did as he was told. He packed Hamzah’s mother, Jamilah Aljahmi, and other relatives into a borrowed Chevy Cruze and began to drive, listening to them cry because Hamzah had been injured, but knowing that worse news awaited them in Youngstown.
The mother saw her child wrapped in white, as if already prepared for the coffin. She held his feet, felt warmth, and in her profound grief exclaimed that he was alive!
All this was too much for her health, it was decided. A relative drove Hamzah’s mother and the other women back to Dearborn. To wait for what was to be.
But the father clung to hope as his son had clung to the ropes. He arose one morning in that strange hotel feeling as though all would be well. These efficient people in lab coats and nursing outfits would find some high-tech equivalent of smelling salts, and his son’s eyes would open.
Finally, though, the father let go. Shedding his stoicism, he collapsed onto his son’s chest and begged between sobs that Hamzah rise and come with him to IHOP for another restorative meal. Please, Hamzah, he implored. Do not leave your best friend like this.
The shaken cousin, Ali Aljahmi, sought out the neurosurgeon and asked to be told straight, so that the family could prepare. “He said in 30 years he hadn’t seen a brain so damaged,” he remembered. “He told me flat-out: Start making arrangements.”
By this point, Anthony Taylor the boxer had said his hospital goodbyes and driven his dented Dodge Caravan the 20 miles back to the weathered white house he rented with his fiancee. Exhausted by it all, he fell asleep, only to awake an hour later to a text message aglow on his phone.
Hamzah Aljahmi was dead.
A tribute to a man who 'was everything'
After the autopsy, a Youngstown funeral home arranged to return Hamzah Aljahmi to Michigan, retracing his interstate journey past the deadened brown of a Rust Belt December, to a funeral home in Detroit, close to the Dearborn line.
A handful of relatives and friends, all men, prepared the young body for burial. They prayed as they tended to their somber task, while verses of the Quran emanated from a loudspeaker.
The dead young man was laid upon a table. Fingernails and toenails were clipped. The body was meticulously cleansed and gently rubbed with a scented oil that made the skin glisten — “The smell was very beautiful,” the cousin Ali Aljahmi said. Then it was wrapped in three sheets of white cloth.
The boxer was placed in a cloth-covered coffin made of fiberboard and cardboard, in keeping with an adherence to simplicity. A pleasant perfume was sprinkled over the burial cloth.
Late the next morning, a dark blue Dodge Caravan hearse carried the body the seven miles to the American Moslem Society mosque, a tan-brick building topped with a turquoise dome. Hundreds were already gathering in the parking lot.
Family members shelved their shoes and carried the modest coffin up the stairs,
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