Sunday, January 17, 2016

Obituary: Jack Nelson, my brother, friend and professor al-salaam alikum

   
For Jack Adolph Nelson

Jack Adolph Nelson my brother, friend and professor Jack: al-salaam alikum: peace be upon you.  That term: alslaam alikum has been and will continue to be our sacred transcript. I am here not to say goodbye because there are not and they will not to be final goodbyes as long as we are going to celebrate your life. Your great death migiht have done an interruption in a way but it has done a return as well. So, your return, has already started moving about knocking with all the pleasure on things that swing and thrill our lives.

Now it is August 2015. Another August 1990, my family; Souad, Ahmed, Azza, Shiraz and I arrived Provo. It was early in the morning. While we were getting there,  the more we got deeper into what seems more and more isolated from my comfort distinguished imagination, the more I feel how serious the lack of knowledge and experience that could help me to reconstitute and explain by means of thought what could expose what we are going to face in the coming future. Nothing could warm the soul more than Wasatch sunrise. Nevertheless, I was going through the quite I -15 that morning with a heavy heart asking my self, where am I taking my family to?

I called you Jack at 8:00 AM and a deep, warm welcoming soul came welcoming us to a new place and a new experience through the phone. I will be with you in a minute you said. While I was waiting outside the Royal Inn Motel, it rained. Within the Sudanese sense of expectation, that was a good omen.  You arrived. That was a beginning of a blend of the most extraordinary experience and promise of our lives. You introduced us to Pat, Willow, lacy and Jed. Since that day, they, in particular, and your other friends became our family of association in Diaspora. Yours, and their kindness and generosity of heart filled our life with the most profound feelings of human togetherness and pleasure. Pat told me one day that when she saw Souad, my wife, first she told a friend I saw the most beautiful women in the world but I do not know what she has seen in that Abdullahi.  I did not return the compliment at that day, Pat, but through time I discovered what the most noble person, in the world, Jack, has seen and found in you.

You took that day Jack to see the Provo River. It was silly of me say to you when we were there: is this the river you are talking about? Of course, you understand that At that moment I was nostalgic the mighty and majestic Nile. But that was an introduction to conversation that we ever start we get so passionate about that particular river. A river you "never saw although it was closely akin to as you as one half of your senses." when never we talk about that, you visualize those Pyramids on its banks for centuries with their distant silence and glory. We were so passionate about the the desert, the trees and the ancient theories assumptions of early histories about the sources of the Nile. Was he coming from the mountains of the moon or from Paradise as one of the Sudanese poets claims. But our biggest dream was to be there one day and walk you through the corridors of the civilizations of ancient Sudan, the temples, the churches, monasteries and mosques of the place. To show you also how Sudanese people kept for centuries custom of baptizing life by washing by the water of the Nile the faces of new born children, circumcised boys, bride grooms, pregnant ladies, and their dead and would let them go and be not the least surprised but to see them all happy and cheerful. It saddens me the most this moment, and let me lament that I was not able honor that promise.

Every single Christmas Eve, we were at your home. Even after we left Utah, we kept that tradition by talking over the phone. We have always came together. Although we came to this life from different physics, metaphors and metaphysics but through each one's of us spirituality we did not only narrowed those differences but we came to the conclusion, once and for all, that god is one, the religion is one and humanity is one.
This is the song which I will always sing while celebrating your life because this song is existence.

Jack Adolf Nelson, my brother, friend and professor al-salaam alikum.
       

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