N.S. mourning an unimaginable tragedy

In the photographs that have now been viewed around the world, they are almost always young and smiling, as befitting people with everything out there waiting for them.

Which is fitting.

It is best to remember their lives – despite their brevity, already filled with love, commitment and accomplishment – rather than how they died: in a fiery crash. Iran has admitted it shot down the civilian airliner, but says it was an unintentional act.

Last Thursday, inside the Al Rasoul Islamic Society in Bedford,

people gathered to mourn Masoumeh Ghavi, a 30-year-old Dalhousie University engineering student, back in Iran for the holidays, and her sister, Mandeih, about to start studies at Saint Mary’s University this month.

Both of them had the misfortune of boarding Ukranian Airlines flight PS752 at Imam Khomeini International airport, bound for Toronto.

Through the remnants of a winter storm, they arrived to commemorate the lives of Maryam Malek and Fatemeh Mahmoodi, both masters of financial management students at Saint Mary’s.

They remembered Sharieh Faghihi, a beloved Halifax dentist who was in Iran visiting her mother with her daughter, who returned to Halifax a few days earlier.

As darkness fell, they paid homage to all 176 who died on the flight – 57 of them Canadian – including Shekoufeh Choupannejad, an obstetrician-gynecologist most recently living in Edmonton, but who practised medicine in Halifax from 2011 to 2014.

She was aboard the plane with her daughters, Saba Saadat, whom the Edmonton Journal described as “a tutor, a volunteer piano teacher, and a volunteer with the Iranian Heritage Society of Edmonton," and Sara who, in photographs, look enough alike to be twins.

“Nova Scotia’s Iranian community is heartbroken,” said Hossein Mousavi, founder of Cresco, the home-building company, and one of the pioneers in the local Iranian community, which swelled after the Iranian Revolution, and now measures about 2,000.

But so were others: friends, colleagues, classmates and neighbours, people from different faith communities, complete strangers, stunned by the tragedy a world away.

And so they gathered – as the rumours swirled that the tragedy was due to an Iranian missile (Iran had not yet admitted to this at the time). Those who gathered were bound together in disbelief, anger and grief.

Premier Stephen McNeil, voice straining with emotion, could have been speaking for all of them when he talked of the lost potential of the victims and the unimaginable depth of loss everyone close to them must feel.

“We mourn your loss with you,” he told the full-to-capacity room.

Kelly Regan, his minister of community services, and the MLA for Bedford-Birch Cove, noted that every victim with a Nova Scotia connection was female, and many of them were returning home after visiting family in Iran.

“There are no hyphenated Nova Scotians,” she said, echoing her boss's sentiment – a feeling that her husband, Geoff Regan, the Halifax-West MP expressed too when he said, “Today we are in grief, and are grieving with you.”

Few in the room felt this grief as deeply as Masoudoud Adabi, the husband of Sharieh Faghihi. Showing almost unimaginable fortitude he walked haltingly to the podium, holding the arm of a younger man.

It seemed almost indecent to watch Adabi speak, as he laboured under the fresh pain of his loss. I could make out the words “tragedy,” “crushed” and “thank you so much.”

Then he was led back to his chair, next to McNeil.

In this mournful room, on this tragic day.