by Glenn Stout
It was not a fun trip. The town was pewter drab, the weather was awful, the wind sliced through my body. But then, on my final day, I drove out to Great Slave Lake, where a man named Anthony Foliot parked his camper and devoted himself to building majestic life-sized castles of snow and ice. He went by the moniker “Snowking” and featured a child’s smile hidden behind a brown bushy beard. It was truly one of the most magical sights I’d ever witnessed—using his own hands and imagination, Foliot created a café, an auditorium, a slide. All from ice and snow.
We spoke at length, and toward the end I asked about the icicles affixed to his facial hair. There were, oh, a half-dozen of them—jagged objects protruding at myriad angles. Snowking took hold of a yellow-ish white one dangling beneath a nostril.
“It’s not an icicle,” he said. “It’s a snotcicle!”
With that, he laughed and laughed and laughed.
It wasn’t actually all that funny. Giggle-worthy, maybe. But as I stood there, toes numb, cheeks peeling, staring at this hairy extraterrestrial and his snotcicles, I thought how beautifully weird my life had become.
No, writing isn’t easy. It beats you down and chews you up and leaves you open to an endless stream of criticism. You write something, hate it, start all over again, hate it even more. You lose sleep, gain weight, pull out your hair, curse at the television, wish you’d majored in accounting. Hell, I often find myself in the corner of some random coffee shop, talking aloud to Phantom Jeff (and my laptop) as other patrons stare bewilderingly.
But when I’m down—when you’re down—think of all the places you’ve been and all the places you’ll go. Think of the impact of the written word, and (genuinely) the power of the pen.
Think of snotcicles.
Jeff Pearlman
Tom Junod
The Greatest, at Rest
from ESPN: The Magazine
A week before her husband dies, Lonnie Ali changes the plans for his funeral. The funeral she had envisioned is too big, she thinks. It is too complicated. At her annual meeting with the man who has been doing most of the planning, she says, “Sit down. I have to talk to you about something.”
She is making changes because she believes she has time to make them. Her husband is not even sick. And besides . . . he’s Muhammad Ali. She began working on the plan a decade earlier in response to counsel, and she’s come to regard it as part of his routine upkeep, not so different from helping him with his meds. There are just some things you have to do, she says. She is not planning his funeral because she thinks he is going to die but because she has known him since she was a small child—and a part of her thinks he is going to live forever.
Her meeting with the man planning her husband’s funeral, Bob Gunnell, takes place right before Memorial Day weekend in 2016. When he goes back to the office on Tuesday, May 31, he tells members of his staff that they’re going to have to scrap a good part of the plan they’ve so painstakingly crafted. Then, after work, he gets a call from Lonnie. “Bob,” she says, “I just want to make you aware that Muhammad has got a little cold. It’s nothing to worry about, but as a precaution I’m going to take him to the hospital to get checked out.”
The sound Muhammad Ali hears as he dies is the sound that babies hear right after they’re born. It is just after 8:30 p.m. MT on June 3, 2016, a Friday. He is in Room 263, in the intensive care unit of the HonorHealth Scottsdale Osborn Medical Center, near his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona. He has been disconnected from the ventilator that has been keeping him strenuously alive, and the imam at his bedside has begun the call to prayer, as if ushering a newborn into the world.
The imam, whose name is Zaid Shakir, does not know why he has sung the familiar keening song; it is traditional to sing to those who are close to their first breath but not to those close to their last. But he has flown into Arizona from California, and he reached Ali’s room not long before what he calls “the paraphernalia of life support” was removed. Lonnie Ali is there. Ali’s nine children are there, along with many of his grandchildren, and after reciting supplications and reading from the Quran with them, Shakir suddenly finds himself in the grip of spontaneous necessity. He has been watching the pulse in Ali’s neck, watching it surge with life after he started breathing on his own and then watching it slowly ebb, and now he leans over and with his mouth close to Ali’s right ear, he sings, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.”
Shakir is tall and thin, nearly spindly, with a crooked smile and a beautiful voice, a voice that even when he’s speaking carries a hint of a jazz, a way of hanging behind the beat before finding all the right notes. He does not whisper to Ali. He does not sing softly. He sings out loud, so that everyone can hear, so that the words will fill Ali’s consciousness. Then he places in Ali’s right hand a string of prayer beads offered by one of his grandsons and closes Ali’s fingers around it. He begins talking to Ali, entreating him, exhorting him, telling him, “Muhammad Ali, this is what it means, God is one; say it, repeat it, you’ve inspired so many, paradise is waiting—”
When Shakir begins the call, Ali is alive. When he finishes, a doctor comes in, presses his stethoscope against Ali’s chest and gently closes Ali’s eyes. He lived for approximately 35 minutes after the disconnection of the ventilator, but now, at 9:10, Muhammad Ali, 74 years old, the three-time heavyweight champion of the world from Louisville, Kentucky, is pronounced dead, of septic shock.
Lonnie asks Imam Shakir to stay with her husband while the family files out of Room 263 and enters a new and diminished world—the world without Muhammad Ali in it. He does for a while, but the room begins to give way to professionals. There are nurses and hospital staff. There are two funeral directors who were literally hidden in another room when Ali was dying and now emerge from the shadows. And there are three men who wear hastily packed suits and faces of seen-it-all vigilance but who have never seen what they’re seeing now. Their names are Todd Kessinger, Brian Roggenkamp and Jon Lesher. They’re off-duty homicide detectives from the Louisville Metro Police Department, and they flew to Phoenix the day before on a private jet to provide security for the Ali family. They’re no strangers to death, horrible and unnatural. They’ve been around bodies in every possible condition. But the body in the bed is the body of Muhammad Ali. He is covered, at first; then, after the nurses have removed the tubes and disconnected the monitors that sustained him, uncovered. It is their job to secure the room against intrusion, and Ali against exploitation—they’ve heard rumors that a tabloid television show is offering a $200,000 bounty for the first photos of The Greatest on his deathbed. But now they wonder how easily a photograph of the gaunt and balding man on the bed could be recognized. They feel tremendously solicitous toward him yet also somehow ennobled, as if they have come into the presence of a force larger and stronger than themselves. It is not fame, exactly; it is history, and Lesher keeps thinking that no matter what happens to him in the course of his life, no one will ever be able to take this moment away from him. So many people had encounters with Ali when he was alive: chance meetings that became, by the force of Ali’s personality, indelibly personal, the stuff of stories told and retold. Lesher never did; neither did Kessinger or Roggenkamp. They encounter Ali dead, yet even with his life fled, his power persists, as if it’s part of the atmosphere around his body. They are in the room with Muhammad Ali for 45 minutes. They have responsibility for Muhammad Ali for 45 minutes, until Roggenkamp departs to drive Lonnie Ali home. But there is a problem as they go to leave; Ali was not admitted as Muhammad Ali. He was admitted under an alias, confusing one of the funeral home directors. Finally, Kessinger says, “Look, it’s Muhammad Ali. Let’s just go.”
When Lonnie goes home, she goes to a home absent of Ali. It is the singular advantage of living with an immobilized man—he is always there. Now he is not. She was his caregiver even before she was his wife, and she has been his wife for 30 years. People mistakenly assume that she has prepared for this eventuality, this
night; that she prepared to be his widow as soon as she married him. She did not. She is in shock. When she was—when they were—younger, she saw him snatch flies from the air. She saw him bleed from a cut one day and wake up the next morning with the cut nearly erased. She believed his blood was different from the blood of other humans. Even much later, when her husband was in exile from his body because of Parkinson’s disease, he was not in exile from himself—he was able to speak most mornings, and when he was finally silenced, he communicated through his touch and through the look in his eyes. He paid attention; he nodded; he squeezed her hand. And so now she does not feel as though she’s lost an old man with a terminal illness.
She feels as though she’s lost a child.
Jeff Gardner wears a suit and tie for the embalming. It’s a Saturday morning, and there is very little traffic, human or automotive, stirring the desert calm of Mesa, Arizona. It doesn’t matter that no one is likely to see him. Over the past 30 years, Gardner has embalmed, by his estimate, some 5,000 bodies, and he has worn a suit and tie for all of them that have not presented a risk of infection. He is a stout man, fastidious, with a contemplative manner, a bass note in his voice, and a taste for somber suits and splendid shoes. He wears the clothes he wears as a matter of reverence—because, as he sometimes says, you never know when you’ll go from looking at the body to meeting the family.
Gardner is Catholic; he is about to embalm a Muslim at the Bunker Family Funeral Home, which is owned by a family of Mormons; but his trade has a way of erasing distinctions. The day before, he flew in from Louisville, the only passenger on a private jet, carrying the case of embalming fluid that would allow Ali’s body to be preserved in a way not forbidden to Muslims. Gardner had learned about this necessity about eight years earlier, when he and Woody Porter, his associate at the A. D. Porter and Sons Funeral Home, were summoned to meet with the Alis at their house in Louisville. It was the meeting that set Muhammad Ali on the course of which today represents the first fulfillment—the planning of his own death and burial. Ali was in attendance; so was Lonnie; so were their lawyers and their accountant; and so were Zaid Shakir and Timothy Gianotti, an Islamic studies professor called in to advise the Alis. Ali was well into what Gianotti calls his “purification,” his humbling at the hands of Allah. But at the time, he still had his good days. And even at his sickest—even at his last—he never stopped knowing exactly who he was. He was, in Shakir’s description, “a praying man” who understood he belonged to Allah. But he also knew he was Muhammad Ali, and so belonged to the world.
It is desirable for a Muslim to be buried within a day of dying rather than be embalmed. It is desirable for a Muslim to go straight into the ground rather than be casketed, so that the ground can have him. But Muhammad Ali wanted to be laid out in Yankee Stadium. He wanted an open casket, so the world could see he was still so pretty! He had dreams about them—the crowds. So he sought compromise. According to Shakir and Gianotti, embalming is not strictly forbidden; an embalming solution containing alcohol or formaldehyde is. Not only are those elements poison, but they are the manifestation of a desire to attain immortality of the body rather than the soul. The body should rot, at the bottom of a hole in the ground, while the soul goes on to paradise.
Gardner invested in a case of “green” embalming fluid that contained no substance offensive to God. For the next eight years, he wore a dedicated pager as dutifully as he wore his jackets, his ties, and his alligator shoes . . . and now that he has gotten the call, he is ready to embalm Muhammad Ali, who came from the hospital last night and this morning is laid out in the basement of the Bunker Funeral Home. It is the most extraordinary circumstance of Gardner’s earthly existence, but the job he has to do is anything but extraordinary; he has done it thousands of times. He embalmed his mother; he embalmed his father; now his touch falls upon a man who has touched so many, and whose message went around the world. It is an honor and privilege for Jeff Gardner to have been chosen to serve Muhammad Ali. Yet he has no choice but to start the way he always has, the way he was taught: He thinks. He breathes. He goes to work.
After Ahmad Ewais eats breakfast with his family, he drives to the Bunker Funeral Home. He is calm. He wears what he usually wears, a polo shirt and khakis. He is a tall man in his midforties, with close-cropped hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, and it is impossible to meet him without looking at his hands. They are large and very clean. They are never balled in fists; he holds them as if he were holding a large bowl, and they shape themselves into imploring gestures when Ewais, as is his habit, turns his eyes toward heaven. He is a devout man who has turned his simplest movements into prayers. His fingernails are the color of pearls.
When Ewais gets to the funeral home, Jeff Gardner is waiting for him. Gardner has finished his work, but he wants to make sure Ewais has the linen wrappings he brought with him on the private jet from Louisville—the linen Ali bought for himself years ago. Ewais has brought linen of his own, some of it cut into long strips he uses for tying. He has brought two plastic pitchers, one of them red and the other purple. He has brought a bottle of liquid Dial soap. He has brought towels he bought at Costco. He has brought a mask and gloves and cotton, in case he needs them. He has brought sticks of incense. From Saudi Arabia he has brought water said to be from the spring that bubbled up under the son of Abraham, and a bagful of lotus leaves. He has brought several kinds of perfume. He has brought camphor, which he ground himself in a coffee mill. He has also brought a friend from his mosque in Tempe, who will assist him, along with Zaid Shakir and Timothy Gianotti when they arrive. At approximately 10 o’clock, they do, and Gardner leads them into the room where Ali lies under a sheet. He watches for a while, until Ewais starts washing the body.
Ahmad Ewais is a body washer. He has washed nearly 1,000. It is his vocation, and it has seeped into him, all the way to his fingertips. He believes it is a mercy, and therefore an obligation. He believes that for every body he washes, 40 of his sins are forgiven. He believes that Allah commands the faithful to help the helpless, and he knows from experience that there is nothing in creation as helpless as a dead body, even when the body belongs to Muhammad Ali.
Ewais lights a stick of incense. With soap and water, he washes Ali’s hands and arms up to the elbow, as if Ali were alive, preparing for prayer. Then he cleans Ali’s privates, sliding his hands under a towel. At no time is Ali uncovered or exposed; the towel extends from his belly to his knees, and Ewais lifts it with his left hand and washes with his right, pouring water from the plastic pitchers. It is quiet in the room, Shakir and Gianotti helping turn the body when Ewais asks them to, and the quiet is sacramental. They are transfixed, watching Ewais—how much care he takes, how unhurried are his movements and how certain his hands—and Shakir thinks to himself that Muhammad Ali is being washed by the Muhammad Ali of body washers. But Ewais is transfixed by Ali himself. It is not that the great champion is more than a man; it is that he is precisely a man, and so has wound up here, on the table with him.
He washes him three times, as tradition prescribes, the first time with soap; the second time with the ground lotus leaves, which foam like soap when he adds water; and the third time with camphor and perfume. He covers him with three sheets, stretching from his shoulders to his knees, from his waist to his feet, and then from head to toe. But he also talks to him, and prays for him, thinking the thoughts instead of speaking the words. “Here you are, Muhammad Ali, no matter what you do in life, this is the final destination! You were The Greatest—may God make you The Purest!” As a Muslim, he believes that when humans die, their souls leave their bodies but linger, unable to respond but hearing and seeing and feeling, until their bodies are put to rest. Ewais is working to bring Ali’s soul back to God. It takes him 45 minutes, maybe an hour, to finish, to reach the point where he is tying Ali’s wrappings up with the long strips of linen. He is about to apply perfume to Ali’s face when he calls Shakir and Gianotti over to look. Ali is wearing a linen turban; hi
s face is all that shows, and Shakir and Gianotti are both struck by how regal he looks, like an African king. But there is something else: he gleams. All through the course of his life, people asked if they could touch his face, because it was so smooth and so unmarked and so shiny. Now some of that luster has been restored, and the man who washes him says to his assistants, “Look—his face is as bright as the moon.”
Late that night, Timothy Gianotti goes for a walk to contemplate what he has seen. He remembers when he first met Ali, years before—how shorn he was of all that made him great, yet how great he still was. He lacked physical power, yet it was as though Gianotti had encountered a purified soul sitting in a chair. Now he has seen Ali in death, laid out on a table. Here was a man who never declined God’s call. Called upon to fight, he poured his genius into fighting, and once or twice fought nearly to the death. Called upon to make peace, he made peace at the cost of his athletic prime. Called upon by crowds of people all over the world, he gave himself to them, and moved among them. Called upon to endure the mortification of his body, he surrendered without sacrificing his spirit. He never complained, never lost his faith, and this morning, there it was, returned to him: the shine on his face.
Gianotti has lost track of time and place, and goes outside to regain his sense of purchase under the desert sky. It is Saturday night, June 4. In the morning, he will get on the plane that is taking Ali back to Louisville. But right now he is walking around the Arizona resort where he is staying. This is reality enough. A woman approaches. She is African American. He has never seen her before, but she knows him. She says, “You’re here for Muhammad Ali.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You know,” she says, “he belonged to us.”
