A Tribute to Raihan Dakhil
The losses of Raihan, Yousef, and Omar were not in vain. The community that she was a part of — the community that I am proud to say raised me — has drawn upon a well of strength I did not know that it possessed. The young women in our community — the ones I am proud to say I grew up with — sprung to Raihan’s bedside with medical expertise and a compassionate presence. Our household can finally say “I love you” effortlessly with Raihan’s help carrying the words from person to person, cracking a code that had remained unlocked my entire life. We now move on with a renewed sense of purpose and a duty to do justice to the warmth that Raihan, Yousef, and Omar emanated. We live with a tearful reminder that every moment is a precious gift, and every interaction is one that should be cherished.
It was halfway through the summer of 2007 when I reached out to my friend’s sister for a summer job. I had already wasted away the first six weeks of that summer, and had made no progress on traditional resume-building activities — unpaid internships, design projects, engineering workshops, etc. With six weeks left, I knew that it was time to give up on that pursuit and look for a side hustle just to save up a little spending money before the start of my sophomore year. It wasn’t going to be easy to find a temp job for six weeks, but thankfully, my sister’s friend was a manager at the local Edwards Cinemas 18. Her name was Raihan Dakhil.
I had to swallow my pride as I shoveled popcorn into the buckets of entitled teenagers. People who had seen me collect various high school accolades were surprised to see a person who was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” behind the counter asking them if they would like cheese with their pretzel. It wasn’t pleasant, but it paid me a hefty wage of $8.50 an hour. Thankfully, I wasn’t entirely alone on my shifts. Raihan was above working concessions — she had been promoted to working with film reels and did not have to deal with the drudgery of cleaning up after moviegoers. We would take breaks together and crack jokes about the hilarity of our workplace and management. She knew more about rap than I had assumed, and she would tip me off to tracks I should download off of Limewire. I had found a work buddy in Raihan, and that is the only reason that job was ever tolerable.
A few nights ago on Halloween, Raihan, her husband Yousef, and their three-year old son, Omar, were innocent bystanders in a drunk driving accident on the sidewalk in front of their home after they returned from Omar’s first trick or treating excursion. Yousef passed shortly after impact, and Omar & Raihan bravely fought until they succumbed to their injuries a couple of days later. The holes in the ground that carry their remains are dwarfed by the holes they leave behind in our families and communities.
While Raihan and I had drifted apart in the years since that summer, she had remained an integral part of our local Muslim community and had become one of my sister’s favorite girlfriends. Less than a month before the tragedy, Raihan reached out to my sister on a lark to catch up with her over the phone. That phone call turned into a serendipitous meeting just a few days later in the Bay Area. Raihan’s interjection into my sister’s life was timely, as my sister was in a transitional stage of her life where situations were in flux and circumstances were fluid. It should come as no surprise that Raihan was a social worker — her innate sense of helping others found my sister at a critical juncture of her life, and that moment is one that my sister will cherish for the rest of her days. Raihan had gone from delivering cinematic magic to delivering… plain magic.
This horrific sequence of events begets a lot of questions — about the punishment that the perpetrator will face, about how we can prevent future drunk driving accidents, about how our community can band together to support two families that are shouldering an unbearable amount of pain. But one question has plagued my mind since I was alerted to these events on Friday morning: why does it take something so tragic so close to us to wake us up to the fragility of life?
Drunk driving claimed the lives of nearly 11,000 people in the United States in 2018. That means we lose a life every 75 minutes to a completely preventable cause. But the sad and horrible truth about this fact is that it was merely a statistic to me before this past Thursday. In the information age, we endure a constant barrage of statistics that diminish the gravity of these lived experiences. Statistics aggregate each individual story of adversity and anonymizes them in a way that deprives them of their humanity. Millions of people die from cancer every year. Ethnic groups are being subjected to genocidal measures by their governments all over the world. Natural disasters wipe out thousands of people that find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when that statistic becomes your reality, you are consumed by a wave of hopelessness and sorrow that you are almost always unprepared for.
Statistics have another side effect. Statistics depersonalize tragedy in a way that diminishes their effect with the passage of time. We feel agony when we see a horrible catastrophe that we don’t identify with in the news, but within days and weeks, we resume the mundane cadence of life. At face value, this is a good thing — time heals all wounds, and if we are encumbered by sorrow indefinitely, we will never be able to move on from the pain of loss. But the downside of this human tendency is that tragedy in which we don’t have a stake will never create meaningful change in our lives, and we cannot use non-personal tragedy as a motivating force to increase our gratitude for life.
Does this mean that we must wait for personal tragedy to strike to renew our sense of purpose? I do not ask this question because I have an answer, but because I think it’s a question worth pondering. You can wax poetically about how life can be taken away in the blink of an eye but you will never know until it happens to you. There is no way to prepare for the unexpected, but by making it a practice to live intentionally and approach every interaction you have with someone like it’s the last time you see them, you will find that the moment that calamity strikes, you will be much better equipped to handle the despair.
The losses of Raihan, Yousef, and Omar were not in vain. The community that she was a part of — the community that I am proud to say raised me — has drawn upon a well of strength I did not know that it possessed. The young women in our community — the ones I am proud to say I grew up with — sprung to Raihan’s bedside with medical expertise and a compassionate presence. Our household can finally say “I love you” effortlessly with Raihan’s help carrying the words from person to person, cracking a code that had remained unlocked my entire life. We now move on with a renewed sense of purpose and a duty to do justice to the warmth that Raihan, Yousef, and Omar emanated. We live with a tearful reminder that every moment is a precious gift, and every interaction is one that should be cherished.
A reminder that when we dine with our colleagues, we savor the taste a little more.
A reminder that when we laugh with our friends, we laugh a little harder.
A reminder that when we spend time with our partners, we linger a little longer.
A reminder that when we hold our children, we hold a little closer.
A reminder that when we we embrace our parents, we embrace a little tighter.
Please consider donating in the link here to support the various costs of the victim’s families. These are people that I grew up with — I could not imagine a more deserving family of your support.
