It was the first weekend of June in Toronto. Usually at this time of year, the weather gets warmer. But that weekend was totally different. Wind was blowing hard. Rain drops were so big and powerful, and thunderstorm was making weird noises, like we had a war going on here. And there she was standing. You couldn’t read anything from here face. Not depressed, not hopeful, maybe something in between. I was standing right beside her. She looked at me and started to talk.
She was a middle aged white woman. She was just coming from the airport, saying goodbye to her son. He went to Afghanistan, and that goodbye, maybe was the last chance she could have with him. She said she didn’t want to go at first. She had thought that saying goodbye meant accepting something bad. She believed in seeing her son again. But her daughter had persuaded her to go and say goodbye. You never know!
I was looking at her while she talked and talked. Her eyes were wet, but she was trying hard to keep the tears from coming out.
Mother of a solder
Dark dirty clouds had filled the sky. It was still raining and the scary sound of thunderstorm was all around us. But maybe she, and a few people like her were the only ones who could feel the sound of war in this darkness.
Canadian solder saying goodbye
My mind went back to years before. When I was a child, my home country was in war. Those days we didn’t understand the meaning of war. We used to enjoy every moment of it. Even when people were running for shelter and trying to find a safe place out of reach of enemy’s bombs, kids like me were thinking of it as night gatherings with all neighbors, which of course was so much fun!
It didn’t took me long to grow up enough to get the meaning of "losing beloved ones". I was still in grade 7 that one of my friends, the same one who used to sit behind me, went to war and got himself killed. And I saw his mother the same day she received the news. That face will never be erased from my memory. There were so many faces I saw, and felt the unspeakable pain on them. Many of them were mothers!
It is 20 years later. I live in another side of the world. Everything around me looks and feels different than those days. But still there is a mother, standing right beside me, with the same face. And there is a beloved one, who may never come back again. You never know!
Canadian solder saying goodbye
