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    The details of June 3 blur. Mostly Rasheda Ali remembers the sting of grief, dull then sharp from one moment to next. “I never thought this would happen to us. I thought Daddy was superhuman,” she says. “Even though he had Parkinson’s, I thought he would never die. I know it’s silly.” In the Phoenix hospital, she remembers leaning over her father and whispering into his ear, “I give you permission to leave. I want you to stay here but I know you’re struggling.” Then she whispered again, this time a send-off that would make the champ smile if he could: “I know now you’re young and you’re fast, you’re handsome and you’re pretty,” she said.

    Rasheda, an author, motivational speaker and Parkinson’s disease advocate, is one of Muhammad’s eldest daughters. The family’s sobs filled the quiet after life support machines were turned off. Then, a peculiar, persistent noise. “A dialysis machine or something,” Rasheda recalls. “It interrupted our crying. It started — ding, ding, ding. And it stopped all of us in our tracks. It sounded like the bell from his fights and we all kind of stopped and froze and we started breaking up laughing. We thought Daddy interrupted us from crying because he didn’t want us to cry. He wants us to celebrate his life and not mourn.”

    As Rasheda, her husband and two teenage sons, along with Mike Tyson’s son, piled into a car for the procession, sadness loosened its grip. She couldn’t believe the thousands of people lining the streets, all longing to share in this public farewell. “I’ve never seen anyone with a send-off as beautiful as my dad’s,” Rasheda says. “If you looked at the people, it was exactly what Daddy would’ve wanted. It was every single race, every single religion was represented, every single skin color, every single age. We had tiny babies with Ali shirts on. I saw a man in a hospital gown with an IV — he must have walked out of the hospital and stood.”

    Rasheda rolled the windows down in the car to wave and greet her father’s fans. “One person said, ‘Thank you.’ And I said, ‘Why are they thanking me?’ Then someone else said it. And I kept thinking: Why are they thanking us? And I realized they are thanking us because we shared him,” Rasheda says, pausing to sob at the memory. “They were thanking us because we let them borrow him.”

    During the procession, Rasheda’s sister, Hana Ali, remembered a story her father would tell. She sent it out in a tweet as the line of black cars and SUVs rolled toward Cave Hill Cemetery: “We just left the funeral home and are in the car now following our beautiful father en route to his final resting place, as his recurring dream is realized. When he was younger he said, ‘I used to dream that I was running down Broadway in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, and all of the people were gathered in the street waving at me and clapping and cheering my name. I waved back, then all of a sudden I just took off flying.’”

    Rasheda spotted the tweet later that day. “Chills went down my spine because that’s exactly what happened,” she says. “He was there in the moment, and I believe he flew up to heaven that day.”

     

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