Excuse me for not wanting to talk about peace. I want to speak about my grandfather.
We always wake up from a nightmare, but since yesterday I only wake up into a nightmare. The nightmare of life without you — and this is incomprehensible.
The television does not stop broadcasting your pictures, and you look so much alive and tangible that I can almost touch you. But only almost, because I cannot anymore.
You were the column of fire that went ahead of the camp, and now we are left only with the camp, alone, and we are so cold and sad. I know that people speak in terms of a national catastrophe, but how can you try and console an entire people or make it part of your personal pain when Grandmother doesn’t stop crying and we are mute, feeling only the enormous void left by your absence.
Very few truly knew you. They can speak a lot about you now, but I feel that they don’t know at all how enormous the pain is, the catastrophe, and yes, it is a holocaust, for us at least, the family and friends who remain, your only camp, now without our column of fire.
Grandfather, you were and still are our hero.
I want you to know that in all I have ever done, I have always seen you before my eyes. Your esteem and love accompanied us on every step and on every path, and we lived in the light of your values, always. You never forsook anyone, and now they have forsaken you. And here you are, my eternal hero, cold and lonely, and there is nothing I can do to save you. You who are so wonderful.
Others, greater than I, have already eulogized you. But none of them had my good fortune to feel the caress of your warm, soft hands, and the warm embrace that was reserved only for us. Or to see that half-smile of yours, which always meant so much to me, that smile that is no more, frozen with you. I have no feelings of revenge, because my pain and my loss are so big, too big. The ground has slipped away from under our feet, and we are trying somehow to sit in this empty space that has been left behind, but so far without much success.
I cannot bring myself to end, but it seems that a stranger’s hand, a wretched hand, has already ended it for me. Having no choice, I part from you, a hero, and ask of you to rest in peace, and to think about us and miss us, because we here, down below, love you so very much. And of the convoy of heavenly angels that accompany you now, I ask that they watch over you, that they watch over you well, because you deserve such a guard.
Iran News
