In the name of my daughter, Reera
My daughter, Reera, would have turned sixteen today.
Reera and her mother, my beloved wife, Parisa, were among the passengers of Flight
#PS752, shot down by missiles fired by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the skies above Tehran on January 8, 2020.
Every birthday that arrives without Reera is no longer a day on the calendar. It is another season passing through an unfinished life.
I think of everything that was stolen from us. From me. From Parisa. From our daughter, Reera.
My child was murdered by a criminal regime.
Anyone who has lost a child knows that grief is not only the pain of absence. It is the slow accumulation of futures that never came to pass.
We spend the years imagining the lives denied to them.
How would they laugh now?
How would they speak?
Would they gather their hair behind their shoulders or let it move freely in the wind?
Would they still belong to spring, or would autumn one day become their season?
If they had lived.
For me, these questions are both alive and impossible to answer. But more than anything, what darkens my days are the conversations I have lost with Reera.
With every sunset, with every reluctant awakening into another morning, with every book, every film, every sorrow and beauty unfolding in the world, I find myself thinking: another conversation has been taken from me.
Another moment when I might have asked her what she thought. What she felt. How she saw the world.
So sometimes I imagine her answers. I imagine her voice returning briefly through memory.
No one truly understands this endless suspension except those who have lost someone they loved to injustice.
Reera was a gifted runner. She played on a soccer team in Richmond Hill. Had she been allowed to live, she might have become a remarkable athlete.
Every father carries dreams for his child’s sixteenth birthday. Some small. Some immense.
Mine now exist only in fragments, buried beneath memory and longing.
Two years ago, I began to think that perhaps I could run in her memory on her birthday. She is no longer beside me, yet when I run carrying her image, I feel I am telling the world something simple and undeniable:
For me, a world without Reera is not a beautiful world.
A world without the children stolen by cruelty, by missile, by bullet, by bomb, can never be beautiful.
Tomorrow morning, I will run the Ottawa Marathon in memory of my daughter, Reera. These past two years of training, the pain, the solitude, the discipline, have all been for her, the most beautiful girl in the world to me, who was, who is, and who always will be.
As long as I live, I will not forgive those who took her from me.
And as long as I live, I will not forget the murder of my wife, Parisa, and my daughter, Reera.
#PS752justice