By the time Bob Marley checked into the hospital in Miami, he was rail thin and had cut off all his famous dreadlocks since he was too weak to hold their weight up. He died at 11:45 a.m. on Monday, May 11, 1981, five days after checking into the hospital, according to The Miami Herald. At the moment of Bob Marley’s death, Ziggy (above) and Stephen weren’t with their father. “The day he passed away, we were at our grandmother’s house [in Miami],” Ziggy recalled (via YouTube). “And then I saw her coming down the stairs. And she didn’t even have to say anything, because I kind of knew.” Afterward, Stephen told his mother: “Mommy, you remember what Daddy says, ‘No woman no cry.’ … So come, let’s go to Jamaica.”
Before the elaborate state funeral planned for Marley in Jamaica, his family held their own intimate memorial. “We had had a private final ceremony for Bob in Miami before we came home with his body,” Ziggy told the Jamaica Observer. Bob Marley is gone but as Rita Marley pointed out in an interview with WBUR, he “didn’t die, he went to rest. When you die you’re forgotten. Bob has not been forgotten, so he lives on.”
