MORGANTOWN – Maybe it’s appropriate, Nick Rehmani’s friends said Friday, that he began his professional life in the University City as an electrician.
After all, they said, electricians know how to harness the spark.
They know how to complete the circuits that make wondrous exchanges happen.
“Well, that was Nick, for sure,” Gary Squires Jr. said of his friend who died Tuesday in a motorcycle crash in the Morgantown area.
“He never had a bad day. He was just there for people. Everybody. Me. I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
Rehmani, who in recent years was known as an entrepreneur and motivational speaker, came into the world under less than ideal circumstances.
He was born Nihat Abdul Rehmani in 1971 in Likasi, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The family fled the oppression there, crossing an ocean a half-a-world way to land in West Virginia, and Morgantown, as Nick – he grooved on his Americanized name – was entering his teens.
Nick didn’t know one word of English, but with an immigrant’s zeal, he worked, worked and worked, to master the linguistic idiosyncracies of the Western lexicon.
Even on the occasional PG-13 words his pals would teach him to say, his friend George McClain remembered, chuckling.
Rehmani quickly embraced rock ‘n’ roll, his blue jean jacket and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
“He loved his new country,” McClain said. “He loved being an American. He was really proud when he became a citizen.”
He was proud of putting in a full day of work, also, whether it was at the original Ali Baba restaurant in Morgantown or in his later job as a journeyman electrician, following his studies at Fairmont State University.
Those full days always included being fully present for his mom, his wife, his kids, grandkids and great-granddaughter.
There were bountiful dinners he’d prepare, beach vacations that would quickly get epic and his life at Hope Church, where his funeral service will be at 3 p.m. Sunday.
Squires expects people packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the pews, crying but laughing too, with fond, funny remembrances of a guy who just knew how to bring the light … electrician or no.
“My son has Down syndrome and I’m his caregiver,” Squires said.
“Nick was all the time calling, reaching out. It was like he was family, my brother. Because he was.”
In his entrepreneurial life and full embrace of social media, Rehmani regularly posted reels and other messages on ethics and the art of being a good person, while still succeeding in business.
One such missive, his friends attest, couldn’t have summed him up any better.
“Some people come into your life as a lesson and some come as a blessing,” the post read.
“Both are needed. One teaches you what to avoid – the other reminds you what’s worth holding on to.”
Amen, Squires said.
That’s Nick, Squires said – the latter, especially.
“I’m just really gonna miss him.”
