This Story Should Not Have Ended This Way Qusay Hussein was assumed dead, twice. He came back fighting each time.

In 1988, he is born. In Abujna, a village outside Mosul in northern Iraq. Too small to show up on a map, Abujna is traditional, tight-knit, and contained. But he can see the Zagros Mountains in the distance, their green mist somehow cooling the hard-baked orange earth beneath his bare feet.

He has five brothers and one sister. He, Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari, is a middle kid, a fixer, lit with curiosity and always tinkering. When the other kids make fun of the birthmark on his friend’s face, Qusay stands next to him and declares, “He is a creation of God!” Someday, Qusay promises himself, he will become a plastic surgeon and take away that birthmark.

In 2003, when he is fifteen, the U.S. invades Iraq. Fighter planes make a different sound, their engines whiny and rough. The missiles scream, shaking his family’s house, which is made from mud. He digs a hole in the ground for his family to take shelter. One day he sees an American airplane shooting Iraqi soldiers and runs to see if he can help. He finds his friend bleeding— shrapnel cut his leg as he was taking his cow out to pasture. Qusay and his brothers help him to the hospital.

People stream out of their village, refugees of the war. Food is hard to get and crazily expensive. When the gunfire subsides, drought strips the Husseins’ farm of livelihood and leaves the animals thirsty. Finally Qusay’s father sells everything—the sheep, the camels, the horses, the cows—and moves his family to the ancient city of Hatra. Destroyed in the third century, it holds the ruins of the Parthian Empire and has been restored by Saddam Hussein. Its artifacts will soon be in danger from ISIS.

At fifteen, though, Qusay is not worrying about ancient artifacts. Noticing that a kid his age lives two doors down, he walks over and introduces himself. The other boy, Abrahim, likes fixing things, too. Together, they repair the car Abrahim’s brother has left sitting outside for months. By the time the engine turns over, they know they have similar personalities, interests, and ideas about life. Abrahim is a little quieter, though, not as athletic. Rather than join Qusay when he starts playing volleyball after school, Abrahim comes to the games to cheer him on.

At first, the players tie the ends of a rope to two poles, stretching it across a patch of sandy ground. They wad clothes into a tight, round ball and, awkward at first, try to bump, set, and spike, laughing at the clumsiness of it all. But soon they have saved enough money for a real net and ball. With strategic choreography, they start setting up Qusay, the tallest, to spike the ball hard. People of all ages begin showing up to watch the games. “It became beautiful,” he will say later, remembering.

•  •  •

Qusay’s days take on a rhythm: work in the morning, school in the afternoon, volleyball afterward. On August 3, 2006, the boys are playing, hard, with bursts of clapping from the crowd, when a truck chugs across the sand toward them. Probably carrying wheat to be ground into flour at the factory behind them, Qusay figures. As the truck gets closer, its wheels sink into the sand and spin. The driver revs the engine, and the truck shoots into the middle of the volleyball game. Standing three or four feet away, ready to spike the ball, Qusay sees their precious net splay across the windshield. Through it, he sees the driver, a dark-skinned man about fifty years old. After looking left and right, the man looks straight at Qusay and smiles. Then he lays his hand on the horn.

Instead of a honk, there is a whoosh, like a vacuum cleaner, and a tornado of sand whirls up. The horn—Qusay does not yet know this—was wired to detonate a bomb. A grisly ballet begins, with boys flying into the air “like human birds,” he will say later. Aloft, he sees only dirt and hot streaks of fire. Then he crashes to the ground and the world goes dark as night. Gasping for air, he scrambles to his feet, blood streaming from his nose, and tries to run. A piece of shrapnel hits his skull, slicing off his nose and right cheek.

The village is not like America, where if someone gets injured, no one is allowed to touch them for fear of doing damage. People pick up the wounded and stumble toward cars. Qusay’s father is there—Qusay hears his voice—but he does not recognize his son. How can he? His son has no face.

•  •  •

“Dad, don’t leave me!” Qusay calls. “I will die!” His father hears his son and shouts for help. Someone drives them to the clinic. One doctor, a few nurses, fifty-six injured, sixteen already dead.

“Go,” the doctor tells Qusay’s father, voice grim. “Take care of your other sons. In half an hour, this one will be dead.”

Reeling, Qusay’s father leaves. One of Qusay’s brothers was the game’s referee; he has lost an eye and has shrapnel wounds all over his body. Another brother, there to watch, had his foot injured and his belly slashed open, organs spilling out. The boys’ mother managed to tuck them back inside before he was taken to the hospital.

Left alone, Qusay starts praying. He cannot see—the explosion damaged the nerves in both eyes, though he does not know this yet, either. He is carried to a concrete room where he can sense the dead bodies surrounding him.

In Iraq, the dead are buried as soon as possible, so his father returns in the evening for his son’s body. When he hears Qusay call out again, he blurts, “Oh my God! My son is still alive!” He begs a neighbor to drive them eighty miles to the hospital in Mosul.

On the way, they are stopped by American soldiers. “We will take care of him,” one of the soldiers promises. Qusay feels a sharp needle pierce his back. They slide him into a sleeve bag he thinks must be his coffin. “I’m still alive!” he shouts again, and he hears the interpreter laugh. Then comes the whir of helicopter blades.

When they land at a U.S. field hospital, he feels himself being rolled across bumpy ground. Despite the hundred-degree heat, he shudders with cold. “One, two,” somebody says, and there is only air beneath him, and then a bed.

Qusay raises one hand to his bandaged face: “I need to see!”

“No!” someone yells, and now there are worms in his body, itching everywhere. Anesthesia, he will learn later. He hears a metal snip and feels cold scissors glide across his skin as they cut off his clothes. Then he sleeps.

The coma lasts twelve days, during which time his family holds a funeral for him. They have heard no news, and they are used to assuming the worst. When the hospital finally calls, Qusay’s father does not believe them; he thinks it is a ruse, Al-Qaeda wanting to take him hostage. Finally, Qusay gives a nurse his uncle’s number, and the uncle calls the father and says, “I think this is real.”

The next time the hospital calls Qusay’s father, he makes them describe what is on his son’s right forearm. A tattoo of his name in Arabic, they say, and the father’s breath catches. Qusay is alive.

•  •  •

“How is Abrahim—did he get hurt?” Qusay keeps asking. His parents and Abrahim’s parents all assure him that his friend is fine.

Knowing how much the boys loved each other, they are carefully hiding the fact that Abrahim is dead. Shards from the explosion sliced through his neck, severing his head from his body.

Why would anybody want to kill a bunch of sweaty teenage boys and their fans? “I don’t know,” Qusay will tell me later. “And I need to know. God said, ‘If you kill one human being, you kill the entire world. God sent us to be useful for each other.” He talks about the civil war that broke out in Iraq, the indiscriminate killing whose only purpose seemed to be destabilizing the country.

What happened to the bomber, I ask, too naïve and jolted to remember how these things work. “He was destroyed,” Qusay says quietly. “A suicidal sickness in his brain. Or maybe people gave him some medicine to make him do that.”

Medicine? It takes me a minute to remember that drugs are indeed used to calm terrorists before their mission. “Jihad pills,” they are called. Boko Haram stuffed Tramadol, a synthetic opioid, into dates, then fed them to children before sending them off, strapped with explosives, to their deaths.

•  •  •

“Oh, my God. I wish this person had died,” the visitor says, his voice shaky with compassion. Lying in a hospital tent, unable to see, Qusay thinks he recognizes the voice. It draws nearer and asks him politely, “Do you know where Qusay Hussein is?”

The visitor is his brother. When he hears Qusay answer, he faints, and a nurse has to splash water on his face. Their father comes in, sees Qusay, and starts to cry.

The staff are more sanguine. “After fourteen days, bring him back,” the doctor instructs. “We’re waiting for equipment, and then we will do surgery.” The doctor pauses, then adds, “Take care of him! He’s very smart, and he has a high tolerance, talks right through the pain. And he’s funny!” Qusay has been teasing the nurses that if they want to change his dressing, it will cost them five dollars.

When they reach home, Qusay’s father goes in first. “If anyone shows shock, I will slap them,” he warns his wife and daughter.

Qusay’s mother reaches gingerly around the tubes that have replaced her son’s face. She can see the bones beneath what was once his nose and his cheek. She holds him and weeps as quietly as she can. “At least,” he tells her, “I didn’t lose my teeth!”

Two weeks later, he returns to the field hospital and stays three months, having surgery after surgery. He makes friends there: John, Jamie, Sean, Angela. When the nurses finish their evening shift, they come to take him for a walk. A surgeon comes from another base to talk with him and take his photograph. The interpreter says, “He wants to know how you are not sad.”

Qusay shrugs: “I have faith in God. He chose for me.”

After three months, he is to go home, then return in six months. But now there is killing everywhere, and his father is afraid to drive him to the base. For the next two years, Qusay lives at home, breathing through tubes. At first, he eats through a tube, too, but slowly his jaw strengthens, and he can chew a little. Then infection seeps under the plates in his skull, and the pain keeps him awake in the vulnerable hours after midnight. He dozes during the day, a routine that at least helps him avoid curious friends and neighbors. Nights, he talks with his father and fixes things—their radio, washing machine, and generator; a Nokia cell phone—without being able to see them.

A year passes. One day, he is drinking tea with Abrahim’s sister, and as is their custom after someone dies, she swears to God “by the soul of Abrahim.”

“Wait—what did you say?” Qusay asks sharply. He cuts across her flurry of denials: “You have all been lying to me.” Then he starts to cry. “Why did you not tell me, so I could make a prayer for him?”

•  •  •

Another year passes. One day, half-listening to the TV, Qusay hears a commercial about Doctors Without Borders. They are looking for people who have been seriously injured and need reconstructive surgery. He calls their hospital in Amman, Jordan, and is told to first see a doctor in Mosul, so they can decide if he is eligible.

Eleven days later, Qusay’s sister reads aloud a text message congratulating him on being approved for the program. Giddy with joy and relief, his father—who has been urging patience for two solid years—cannot stop laughing.

Two months later, father and son leave Iraq for the first time in their lives.

•  •  •

Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari (Photo courtesy of Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari)

“Doctor, can you send me to an ophthalmologist?” This is Qusay’s first question when he lands in Jordan. He has asked and asked for the bandages to be taken from his eyes, and no one has obliged.

The doctor replies, his voice tight, “I’m so sorry. The nerves were damaged, so they were cut to prevent infection. It’s—not reversible.”

People have been stringing him along, keeping his hope alive. Now it all drains away at once. Why even live? Alone in his room, Qusay thinks about suicide. He cries until there are no more tears. He prays. I’m in a test, he tells himself. This is the big, difficult moment, so I will pray, and then I wish to pass the test.

The following morning, he is so calm, the doctor is awed. Such acceptance, in one night?

Qusay spends three years at the hospital in Amman. The infected plates are removed. The skin on his reconstructed nose is replaced. Now Qusay can stop shaving coarse black hair from his nose every morning, courtesy of the initial graft, which came from his scalp. After multiple surgeries, he can even breathe through the new nostrils. His upper lip is rebuilt, his eyelids are lifted, prosthetic eyes are implanted, and cartilage from his ears is used to reshape his forehead. “Ah, this is good,” Qusay jokes. “It makes my ears smaller.”

With each change, he is more open to the world around him. Jordan feels different than Iraq, he realizes, “more understanding of disability. Not accessible 100 percent, but blind people find ways to navigate. So, okay, that will help me to my future.”

To be useful between his surgeries, he counsels other patients, helping prepare them for their surgeries. When hesitation shakes their voice, he asks the surgeons if the procedure can be postponed another week or so, until they are ready. Meanwhile, he begins taking groups of patients on sightseeing excursions every Friday. “I don’t want them just going from hotel to hospital, hospital to hotel, always just a patient,” he explains. The weekly reprieve from anxiety and bad memories makes a difference. People start to heal faster.

When his own surgeries are, for the moment, finished, it is time to figure out what comes next. His family is not wealthy, and they have no idea how to help him. Many of his friends have drifted away. But he has himself. The ship that is not affected by wind—that’s me, he thinks. I know how to be strong. But I need to be in a country that believes in me as a person, as human. My country, they don’t support blind people for anything.

At an event, he talks with a blind doctor from the Palestinian Territories who studied in the United States This, he decides, is what he wants to do.

•  •  •

Qusay has no passport. His English stops at “Hi, how are you?” People laugh at his dream, shocked by the audacity of it. This blind guy with half his nose gone thinks he can make it in America?

His father does not want him to leave; it feels too dangerous. But when he sees his son’s determination, he extracts a promise.

“Yes, okay, I will become a doctor,” Qusay says.

“Okay, go.”

He steps off the plane at JFK airport in New York and stands in the center of a maelstrom, travelers whizzing around him with rolling suitcases. A badge is pinned to his shirt: “I don’t speak English.” He is wearing dark glasses. A woman touches his shoulder and says, in Arabic, “Do you need help?”

“I’m going to Texas,” he tells her, “but I don’t know where it is.”

He eventually makes it to Austin, where he has been assigned for resettlement. A caseworker with Refugee Services of Texas drives him to a studio apartment in North Lamar, locks him in, and warns, “Don’t open the door for anyone.”

Qusay is scared even to open the windows. He should have listened to his father. Two weeks go by in a haze of fear. Then he snaps back to himself. “Please call an interpreter and tell him I need to get out,” he asks his caseworker. “I need to see human reaction; I need to see people. I feel tired from sitting here just by myself.”

That afternoon, someone shows up to take him grocery shopping. When they walk into the store, he hears a cheerful babble of voices and thinks, This is America. He has not felt so happy in a long time.

He takes an English as a Second Language course, then his GED—which he fails. He studies harder, takes it again, and gets the second highest score in the region. By the time he earns his associate degree, he is the top student and can tell his parents he won a presidential achievement award.

This is far from the end of his schooling; he has promised, after all, to become a doctor. As an upperclassman, when he asks for someone to read his history exam to him, the professor is wary, and reads Qusay the quiz himself. Qusay answers every question correctly. “Do you have something in your ear?” the professor now wants to know, suspicious of electronic coaching. Instead of stalking off, Qusay rides it out. The two wind up good friends, having breakfast together every Sunday and talking about philosophy. More than once, the professor apologizes, saying that Qusay made him realize how arrogant he was. “You are a scholar,” the professor says.

“Not yet,” Qusay answers with a grin.

•  •  •

He cannot fulfill his childhood dream and become a plastic surgeon. But the birthmark on his friend’s face? Maybe he can erase the pain of it instead. He majors in psychology. When his department hosts a summit, they ask him to be the keynote speaker. Fine; he is not shy. He climbs onstage and tells his story.

“Mr. Hussein, how do you walk?” one of the psychologists in the audience calls out during the Q&A session. Qusay cocks his head, puzzled. “I walk…normally.” Does this doctor have no interactions with people who have special needs? Another psychologist, a woman, says, “You are so lovely. I wish I could put you in my suitcase and take you to Dallas.”

“I’m too big for your suitcase,” he points out dryly.

These people might be smart, but they are working behind a screen, he decides. Too much technology, too little human interaction. Worried that something will be missing from his training, he adds a second major, in clinical social work, and then a master’s in social work.

By now he has learned Braille, mastered the use of a computer and assistive technology; helped start a new major in disability studies; worked as a research assistant and a teaching assistant; served on various committees for refugees and people with disabilities; smoothed his English; and begun learning Spanish.

•  •  •

When we first speak, Qusay is finishing his doctorate. He chose to focus on the acculturation of immigrants—especially those with disabilities. He wants to teach, and he wants to start an organization to help people with disabilities in the Middle East and around the world. “And be a researcher and get married and buy a house and have kids,” he adds. For a break from the books, he runs, swims, and goes to the gym, which is his “reset button.” Cooking also brings him back to his body: “I don’t look at a recipe; I just create one from my head.”

What does he miss from the days when he could see? “Nothing,” he says firmly. “If I could get my vision back, I’d say, ‘Thank you, but no.’ I’m happy I’m blind. I live in another world, one that’s beautiful. I don’t want to see the news. Sometimes your eyes bring you things that are not so good.”

He just had his sixty-ninth surgery, necessary because an MRI shifted the titanium plate in his skull.

What is his relationship to his body, I ask. Does it feel separate from him, like a wounded buddy he has to carry? Or does he feel he is his body? Is it a source of pain, a creature to comfort and soothe, an antagonist to overcome?

“I will shock you,” he says: “I love it. I get judged a lot because of the scars, but I love my body. I feel I have a purpose, to be a message: we are capable.”

He serves on the board of Doctors Without Borders and gives talks around the world. At first, he refused to charge for any speech in the United States, asking only that organizations pay for his flight. “This country makes you work hard, but it lets you achieve your goal,” he explains. “I gave speeches to give back.”

I ask for his take on American culture. “I am not to judge,” he says first, “because they live years and years in this style. I love how Americans help each other, how when something happens, they stand up, or they donate to someone in need. What I don’t love is that they are not a close culture. Families get separated. People stop talking to each other for some very, very small reason. Why create that gap?

“When we love each other, we love like a whisper, because we hear not in our ear but in our heart,” he continues. “If I get mad and start shouting, it is because I feel like you are on the other side of the world, and I have to make sure you hear me. But if I love you, I speak very softly.” He pauses. “I feel like American hearts are very far away from each other.”

•  •  •

One of Qusay’s best friends is Hassan Abrahim; they met at school when they were five years old. Hassan now owns a shopping center in Iraq. The three of us talk by phone, with Qusay translating.

“He was a very smart, sharp student,” Hassan says. “We started competing to see who would be smarter. Outside the class, we started asking each other questions to see who has more knowledge, and in that moment, our hearts got tied to each other. So because we love each other, we start to help each other be smarter.”

I ask what they teased each other about, and Qusay chuckles. “Hassan always looked very sharp, like a teacher going to school. Everything must match. Clothes, to me, are not that important; I dress whatever.”

Hassan begins speaking, more seriously, about how, when the war broke out in 2003, Qusay left the village. With no other way to stay in touch, he sent messages to his friend with people who traveled between the towns. Seventeen years later, Hassan found a video documentary about the explosion—and located his old friend on Facebook.

Qusay was not sure who was messaging him. “He asked me, ‘Who was one student who always competed with you and then both of you raised the flag to sing the national anthem?’ I said, ‘I know only one person and that is Hassan.’ And he said, ‘That is me.’”

In 2022, Qusay flew home for the first time in seven years, and Hassan came to see him. At first, they did not fully recognize each other—such deep voices! “You became tall!” Qusay blurted. “You were so skinny.”

Hassan grinned. “You know how a bird can fly wherever it wants? That is how free we were as children. I do not count the years I never saw you—you are a brother I missed for a while, and then he came back to me.”

I ask how he learned of Qusay’s accident. “People in the village told me you got injured,” Hassan says, telling Qusay this for the first time. “They didn’t know if you were alive. So I started searching. I didn’t stop until I found that video. Now, I hear your voice, and that makes me feel I have the world.”

•  •  •

Dating is not allowed in Qusay’s religion, which complicates his search for a wife. I ask what he looks for.

“I want a wife not to walk up to me because she is feeling sorry for me,” he says. “I want a wife who accepts me for who I am and sees my intelligence. And I would like to have children.”

When he travels, he notices various styles of childrearing, drawing the best from each place. He wants his children to be respectful and grateful for what they have, not eager to “take, take, take, so that when they become adults, they are never satisfied.” And he intends to have fun exploring the world with them. “Traveling with my dad was always for work, taking sheep to sell them.”

Still, those trips with his dad let him explore life in other ways. “I took a lot from my dad, 85 percent of my character,” he says. And the other 15 percent? “I think I’m more open. For me, any opportunity for travel, I go. It’s knowledge. If I don’t travel, I will miss exploring other people’s cultures and how they live.”

He also gathers accessibility tips. “In Germany, I saw how the ramps are set for wheelchairs—they are so beautiful! The wheelchair cannot slip. And the shower—I saw how to make it so the wheelchair can go in and the water doesn’t go everywhere.” In a kitchen, he says, there should be a window over the stove. “So when I cook, I can open the window and let out the steam,” he explains. “In my apartment, there is a microwave over the stove, and the nearest window is in the next room. I told the manager, ‘If I met the architect who designed this unit, I would pull his degree from him!’”

He laughs, admitting he was “maybe a little bit rude.” But he gets especially frustrated when architects design for people who are blind: “They try to put us in a black box. Natural light gives you happiness; it activates the whole being inside you. When the sun comes out, I don’t see it, I feel it, and I feel I am in heaven. That’s why I don’t like clouds and rain. I do everything in the morning: I do my prayer and immediately I go and open the curtains, and the warmth touches my skin. Not just the heat but the fact that it’s a newborn day. New cells born in your brain, new thinking, a new love.”

•  •  •

Qusay is on campus waiting for the bus. Two young women approach, and one exclaims, “You!” Oh my God, Qusay thinks, I’m in trouble or what?

“You changed my life!” she tells him. “I finished high school and got a job, and every night after work I’d grab a pizza and go home and watch TV. I saw you and your award on the news, and how you walk to the classroom with your cane, and I said to myself, If this person can do all that, what am I doing just eating pizza and watching TV? So here I am.”

She is not the first to be inspired. Qusay gives advice regularly: so much was so hard for him, and he knows how to make it easier for other people. “Whatever you are going through, say, ‘Everything has an ending.’ We have a date to die, our food expires, a building will one day collapse. So whatever situation you’re in, it will have an ending. One day, it will be over. So there is no need to stress about life. And for any person who does not see that life is beautiful, please do not make it hard on other people.”

There is more to his creed: “Always be useful.” “When you see wrong”—this, his father taught him—“speak about it. Don’t be quiet.” “When people have disabilities, be close to them, don’t leave them alone. You can lift that person or drag them down to depression—just one word can change a person’s life.”

His email signature for a while was, “Do not let your disability stop you from doing what you want to accomplish. Never say, ‘I can’t,’ instead say, ‘I will try.’” His current signature is more impish: “I’m going to the top and taking everybody with me.”

Over the many hours that we talk, there is not a hint of anger in his voice. But I hear a steely triumph when I ask what his life’s turning points have been. “When people think you are not able to achieve anything, and then you walk on a stage and three thousand people listen to you,” he says. “They stay where they are, and you are able to travel around the world. A good moment? When you prove them wrong. You don’t lose hope. You just find another way to reach your destination.”

•  •  •

I have referred to Hussein Al-Mamari as Qusay not out of disrespect but for simplicity’s sake. He only recently added Al-Mamari, his tribal name, because he could not search for the papers he was co-authoring without wading through hundreds of pages about Saddam Hussein. Finally, after brainstorming with his professors, he decided to add the tribal name, reinvent himself yet again. He would need the right byline; he was working on his memoir, Can You Open My Eyes?

I ask him how much of the child he was in Iraq, not that many years ago, is still alive in him.

“Wow,” he says. Long silence. “I could say 50 percent. And you will ask me how. I still like old things, like ancient Rome. I have a collection of wind-up clocks as old as the machines I used to repair. I adapted to the culture with fork and spoon and knife, but if I am home, I will still eat with my hands. I still pray five times. But thinking about people, how to be closer—that changed. Before, we were all the same tribe, the same relatives. I knew people were different because we watched TV, we read. But it’s not the same as when you live with them. That fills in the picture; before, I had just the frame.”

In the frame he made for the United States, “people did not pray. I thought it was a free life, do whatever you want to do. I found an order. People don’t, actually, have free time. You live in order, like machines, work from eight to five. It takes the sense of understanding life away from you. I think that is the capitalism: work, work, work.”

Asked what his life would have been if he stayed at home, he shudders. “It would be difficult for me, especially in Mosul. ISIS demolished my city. They killed the history; they killed what was human. They killed love. They killed care. They killed everything.”

A second chance is not just a rescue, though, or a resolve to live differently. It is an opportunity to recover what you thought you had lost for good. And for all its deeply ingrained flaws, this country is about second chances. The United States is one great big DIY project, each of us reinventing ourselves every day. What does it take to pull that off on Qusay’s scale?

Patience, he says, adding that his mainly comes from his faith. “Through the years when the infection was so painful I could not sleep, I knew God would reward me if I had patience. And then I got the reward: I got to America.” Resourceful as he is, he has learned to step aside for whatever feels like God’s plan. “Human beings, it’s not easy for us to believe quickly. We have too much argument. But I don’t argue—” with people or with God. “And if someone argues with me, I try to separate the opinion from who he or she is. I taught myself that. If we can separate, we never create hatred.”

The brain, he insists, can retrain itself. “People don’t evaluate their brain. They see only one side, and they don’t give opportunity to another person to show themselves. Are you the same as yesterday? I don’t think so. Maybe some person will get mad and shout at me; maybe their day is not okay. So give them time. Time to apologize, time to come back.”

His capacity to forgive—family, strangers, the man who set off that bomb—feels bottomless. “Life taught me,” he says. “Life was rough on me. But it’s not about equality—‘because life was rough on me, I will be rough on other people.’ No. It’s not their fault. Children have a free, clean memory, so whatever environment the child is living in—loving and caring, or with parents who say, ‘Oh, I hate that guy,’ ‘I hate that religion’—the children are just collecting, collecting, collecting.”

People should be curious, he adds, and discover what is true for themselves. What is the barrier to curiosity? “Selfishness. Also greed. You think everything you want is meant for you to have. No, that is not possible. Share, and then you will see the beauty.”

•  •  •

In May, scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw a video of Qusay’s graduation. It had been many months since we spoke. Delighted, I clicked and happily watched him cross the stage to become a doctor. His step seemed less sure than usual, but a stage, I thought, would be tricky to navigate without sight. After the doctoral hood was placed around his neck, after the thunderous applause and standing ovation, speeches were made. The dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas announced that the Qusay Hussein Humanitarian Award had been established in Qusay’s honor. Then he took a deep breath and said, “I have permission to share with you….” His voice near breaking, he announced that Qusay has been fighting cancer. He managed to finish his degree, but he is now on hospice.

My heart twisted, and for a moment I could not breathe. All that loneliness, pain, struggle, and study—all those triumphs and glowing future plans—for nothing?

Qusay would never think that.

Nor would any of the thousands of people who saw, through him, that we are capable.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.