An obituary for the greatest of all time: Muhammad Ali

Valar Morghulis.

All men must die.

Even Muhammad Ali.

I write these words while I feel my heart being ripped apart and smashed into a hundred pieces. 

For some, Ali was a boxer. An entertainer. A proud black and muslim activist. For me, he was a lot more than that; he was a torch of light in the darkness.

And I lived my whole life in the darkness.

Whenever I have one of those days -you know, the kind of days that make you feel like you no longer matter in this world. Days that make you feel that life’s moved on, and you were left behind. Broken. Defeated. Alone.

These days, I run back to my digital screen and watch boxing documentaries. I watch Rumble in the Jungle and Thrilla in Manila. I watch I Am Ali and The Greatest of All Time. I watch him throw his famous combos at the speed of light. I watch him dance under the spotlights. I watch him trash talk his opponents in sweet rhymes during the historical press-conferences.  

I watch him float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

I even watched him defeat the heaviest opponents of all time: the government of the United States of America.

This somehow gets me through the day; knowing that “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it.“

And he did change it. He changed everything.

While everyone else was a jet fighter, Ali was an astronaut. He was in a world of his own.

He fought. He bled. He won. Now he rests.

Goodbye Ali. Goodbye my hero, my champ.

God’s finally came for his champion.

Rumble young man, rumble!

“Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.” Muhammad Ali.

P.S. this blog-post was written on June 3rd, 2016, on the day Ali’s completed his earthly duties, and moved to another dimension of life. And as luck would have it, these words would see the light, whenever you read them, dear friend. Death, luck, . . we would never grasp the meaning of these things, because they come from another world; a different world than the one we know and live in.