SYMBOL OF A NATION’S HEARTACHE
24-year-old bride was one of at least 154 people killed by massive explosion in Beirut
On Thursday, Sahar Fares’ fiance and family gave her the wedding party she will never have. A zaffe band played for her, the flute striking a joyful tune while drums kept the beat, as family and friends threw rice and flower petals. The musicians, in festive, gold-embroidered white gowns, played while uniformed firefighters carried her white coffin to a waiting hearse.
Her fiance, Gilbert Karaan, sat atop the shoulders of a relative, crying as he waved goodbye for the last time, blowing her a final kiss. “Everything you wanted will be present except you in a white wedding dress,” Karaan had vowed in a tribute posted on social media. “You broke my back, my love, you broke my heart. Life has no taste now that you’re gone.”
EACH DEATH IS A UNIQUE TRAGEDY
Fares, a 24-year-old paramedic, was one of at least 154 people killed on Tuesday by the massive explosion that levelled most of the Port of Beirut, devastated entire neighbourhoods, injured more than 5,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless.
In a split second, it left Lebanon’s capital looking like a war zone without a war.
Each death is a unique, unfathomable tragedy, but the story of Fares, the young brideto-be, has rippled across social media, capturing the attention and heartache of many Lebanese.
The determined daughter of a family of modest means, she had managed to break into the nearly all-male world of the Beirut Fire Brigade, devoting herself to public service and making plans to build a family of her own. Instead, her relatives and Karaan, 29, buried her.
Fares called Karaan on Tuesday evening to show him the fire that was consuming a warehouse at the Port of Beirut. No one needed medical attention, so she sat in a fire engine, watching her colleagues as they struggled to douse the flames.
As the roar of the blaze intensified, she climbed down from the truck, holding her phone up to give Karaan a better look at what appeared to be fireworks igniting, shimmers of red and silver within the thick smoke. The sounds were weird, Fares said, like nothing she and her team had ever encountered.
He pleaded with her to run for cover, relatives said later, and she did, but too late. The last image Karaan saw of his fiancee was her shoes pounding on pavement as she sought safety. And then, a blast.
“My beautiful bride. Our wedding was to be held on June 6, 2021,” he wrote on Wednesday in his online message, accompanied by a photo of her posing proudly in her paramedic’s uniform. Instead, it will be “tomorrow, my love.”
“I loved you, love you and will always love you,” it went on, “until I am reunited with you where we’ll continue our journey together.”
GREW UP DREAMING OF OPPORTUNITIES
Trained as a nurse, Fares decided in 2018 to enter the civil service. She craved the job stability and social benefits of a government career, she told relatives, after she and her two sisters watched her father, an aluminium welder, and her mother, a schoolteacher, struggle to make ends meet.
She grew up in the village of Al Qaa, in northern Lebanon, on the border with Syria, and dreamt of opportunities and security it could not provide. In 2016, residents said, at the height of the Daesh group’s rampage across the Middle East, the militants stormed into Al Qaa, killed five of its residents and wounded dozens more. For many people from her village, her death was too much to bear, apparently stemming not from the external threats that have long plagued Lebanon, but from the internal ills of government corruption and indifference.
Everything you wanted will be present except you in a white wedding dress. You broke my back, my love, you broke my heart. Life has no taste now...”
Gilbert Karaan |
Sahar’s fiance