‘It’s still unbelievable’
Mahsa Majidi always tries to avoid walking by Church Street whenever she’s in south-end Halifax.
“Whenever I pass that street, my heart breaks,” Majidi said in a phone interview Thursday. “I try not to look at the apartment, but I can’t.”
Majidi still remembers Masoumeh Ghavi’s relatives going into the Dalhousie University engineering student’s apartment on Church Street to pack her belongings to send to her parents in Iran around this time last year.
Ghavi and her younger sister, Mandeih, were among the 176 passengers killed in a Ukrainian plane crash on Jan. 8, 2020. Halifax dentist Dr. Sharieh Faghihi and Saint Mary’s University students Maryam Malek and Fatemeh Mahmoodi were also on the plane. And every day since the tragic incident, Majidi is trying to move on without her friend.
“For me personally, it is like, really hard to move on,” Majidi said.
“There’s no single day that I don’t remember her.”
Majidi met Ghavi on a Ukrainian International Airlines flight in September 2019. Ghavi had just started a job in Halifax and was excited to start her new journey in Nova Scotia, Majidi said.
Ghavi had gone home to visit her family over the Christmas break and was excited to return with her younger sister, who was to start school at Saint Mary’s University, and show her around the city.
“It’s still unbelievable,” Majidi said.
“I was talking with my friend about it and she was like, ‘Can you believe that she was here alive and now she’s gone?’ You can’t really accept that.”
The Al Rasoul Society, which hosted a memorial for the victims last year, said it didn’t have anything planned in person or online to commemorate the one-year anniversary, nor did the Nova Scotia Islamic Community Centre.
The Dalhousie Iranian Students Society said its members will all light a candle “in memory of all the lost lives, including dear members of our community.”
However, Majidi, tuned into a virtual ceremony hosted Thursday night by the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, a group formed by most of the victims’ family members, said it is to continue throughout Friday.