His mother, Daphnie Couamin, told him, "This is how I'm gonna dance with you when you get married."
She never could have foreseen him being taken from her so young.
"We didn't even get there ... you know?," she told Patch in a phone interview. "I'm pretty sad."
The William Floyd High School junior had experienced epileptic seizures for eight years, but the disease was manageable with medication, and he lived "a normal life," she said.
The teen took the bus and attended school, but had a registered nurse with him to give him medication if he needed it.
Despite his medical condition, he was still at grade level, which was "awesome" because he had a lot of visits to the doctor and overnight stays in the hospital, Couamin says.
He was never restricted from most sports, and enjoyed swimming in his free time and horseback riding at summer camp.
He was the baby of the family — her baby.
"He was special," she said.
Couamin, who moved from Queens with her children to the Mastic-Shirley area in the last year, feared that her youngest child would not live as long as his siblings due to his disease, but his unexpected death several weeks ago caught her by surprise.
"I never in a million years thought that would be what took him," she said.
Hajir told his family he was tired and was going to lay down to go to sleep, and when Couamin went to wake him up to take his medication, he did not respond, appearing blue in the face.
She couldn't think, and it was like an "out of body experience."
His twin sisters, who were home from college, took charge and worked with a 911 operator to administer cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, but he was already gone.
She calls them her heroes for how calm they kept while trying to save their brother.
"I was screaming, panicking; running around the house like a chicken without a head," she recalled. They were screaming, too, but they kept calm. They were helping ... trying to see if he would come back to us."
Hajir's death was deemed non-criminal in nature, a Suffolk police spokeswoman said.
The cause has not been determined by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's office, Couamin says, but she believes it was related to his epilepsy.
Couamin said her twins, 18, who would watch their brother when she was at work, have been distraught.
It's likely they pair will stay home from college until the fall, because "they can't go back right now," she says.
In addition to his mother, and sisters, Hajir leaves behind his grandfather and grandmother, and father.
Couamin remembers her son for being a typical teenager who loved his phone, his bike, and vacationing with his family.
He was funny, and he was intelligent, and like any teenager, had his "mood swings," but he "just was happy to be alive."
It was hard for her choosing his casket in preparation for his funeral service this past Sunday, and days after his death it was hard to count.
"Everything was just like, I'm just going through the motions," she said. "I just still can't believe he's gone."
On Dec. 17, the teenager leaned over and blew out the candles of his birthday cake as his mother and older siblings cheered him on, singing out to pose the question of how old he was.
He was gleeful, dancing back and forth on his feet, while clasping his hands close to his chest in pride.
It's a moment frozen in time in a family video, serving as a reminder of how fragile life is.
"You never know when it's going to be the last day you see your loved one, because it's not like he was sick in the hospital," Couamin said. "It just happened. He was just talking to us. He went to lay down. He couldn't get up. He couldn't wake up again."
Source: https://patch.com/new-york/shirley-mastic/william-floyd-hs-student-who-died-unexpectedly-one-month-after-his-16th
