For a year and a half, Roz Antoun just couldn’t warm up.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter, she shivered inside sweaters and blankets. Her husband Richard, a 77-year-old Binghamton University professor emeritus who devoted his life to intercultural understanding, had been stabbed to death on Dec. 4, 2009.
From that day forward, Roz felt relentlessly chilled to the bone.
Abdulsalam S. Al-Zahrani, a Saudi national who had once been welcomed to the Antoun dinner table, was charged with the crime.
When Roz had to sort through her late husband’s belongings, she found Al-Zahrani’s contact information in his wallet, along with that of his friends.
Realizing such connections in retrospect, Roz could only shake her head in grim wonder as she shook with a chill no furnace could abate.
As time wore on, friends saw her as strong; she knew better. She credits her psychotherapist with keeping her alive as she cycled through each agonizing stage of grief.
Slowly she warmed. But when she talks now about Richard’s death, she feels icy again.
“It’s been almost three years and I still think, how in the world could this have happened this way?” she said. “Richard always went out of his way with immigrants here, because in the village (on which he had based much of his research through the years), he had been the stranger in the foreign land, and they always had helped him.”
Roz never felt anger, she said, but only pity for Al-Zahrani, who was found to be mentally unfit to be tried, but later pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
Roz is looking toward an event next Sunday with mixed feelings.
But she wouldn’t miss it for the world: The Children of Abraham, a local interfaith group that promotes cultural understanding in the Triple Cities, received a grant from the Richard Antoun Memorial Fund. It invited Zainab Al-Suwaij, co-founder of the American Islamic Congress and promoter of interfaith acceptance, to speak on the topic of “multi-religious America.”
“Dick was such a steady, regular practitioner of this model of ‘meeting’ people across culture and faith differences,” said Douglas Taylor, minister at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Binghamton. “Much of the interfaith work I see in our community is an echo of Dick’s style.”
Roz Antoun has finally thawed; a mixed blessing sometimes.
“Now I’m not frozen,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ll get through it, to hear him be honored and remembered in all these kind ways he deserved.
“But Dick would want to be remembered for all the work he did, his loving family, his accomplishments. He would never want to be remembered for the way he died.”
