The Last Day: Remembering Tania Abbasi

The Last Day: Remembering Tania Abbasi

Tania Abbasi: the girl who loved life, and Papi, who is still waiting for her

Written and compiled by S. Rouzbeh

When some people go, they leave more than an empty chair. Their absence spreads through the whole house: into a room that still holds their scent, into clothes no one has the heart to move, into a mirror that has seen two faces side by side for years, into the sound of the doorbell, into a birthday that is no longer a celebration, and even into the eyes of an animal that does not know what death is, yet understands perfectly well that the person it loved is not coming back.

Tania Abbasi was one of those people.

If we turn back through her life to childhood, the first person we meet is a little girl with large, curious eyes: sometimes holding a small bunch of flowers, sometimes a ball, sometimes in colourful clothes, her hair decorated with little children's clips. Her world was still simple. It was the place where her mother was, where there were games, snow, flowers, birthdays, and a tomorrow that was meant to come.

That little girl slowly grew up, but something in her eyes never changed: the same brightness, the same openness, the same smile that came from within rather than being made for the camera.

At twenty-one, Tania was an accounting student. She was young, beautiful, and life was only beginning to open before her. There were still a thousand paths she had not taken, a thousand decisions unmade, a thousand journeys yet to come, and a thousand mornings when she should have woken without knowing what new thing that day might bring.

She was more than the daughter of the house. To her mother, she was a friend, a companion, someone to laugh and talk with, to grow tired beside, to find strength with again, and to make tomorrow bearable.

Her mother later wrote that Tania had been her ‘whole life’.

Someone who has never lost a child may simply read those words. But a mother understands what they truly mean. When your only child is your whole life, losing her does not merely mean one fewer person in the house. It is as though a part of you has been taken away, and the half that remains is forced to go on living.

Tania did not look at life only through her own window. She was kind to animals. She would hold a cat, feel for an animal hurt or thirsty, and never pass another creature's suffering with indifference. Perhaps these small things tell us more about a person than any grand slogan.

And then there was Papi.

Perhaps Papi still does not know what ‘death’ means.

For Papi, death has no word. There is no understanding of why the person who called, stroked and shared in the everyday world went away one day and never came back.

But absence is understood.

Waiting is understood.

And longing, too, in an animal's own language.

Every sound brings a movement. A footstep, a door opening, someone arriving may, for a few seconds, revive that old hope in the little animal's heart: could it be Tania?

Papi has no calendar, does not count the days, does not know how many months have passed. Only that someone is missing.

What a painful image: an animal that cannot understand dying, still waiting for someone who will never come again.

But Tania's mother has understood death all too well, more than any mother should ever have to.

There is a day in her life that divided everything into ‘before’ and ‘after’. Before, there was Tania. After, there were Tania's photographs, her clothes, her memories, Papi, and a mother who must open her eyes each morning and remember the same truth all over again.

There were days when she bent over her child's body. A mother who had once held her little girl in her arms now had to face a bag containing the person dearest to her in all the world.

No language was made for such a moment.

We can write about death. But how can we write the moment when a mother lays her hand on the lifeless body of her twenty-one-year-old daughter?

From then on, Tania's grave became, for her mother, a place between two worlds.

Flowers arrived. Candles were lit. Small and large framed photographs stood side by side. Images of childhood and youth were placed together, as though they could gather all twenty-one years onto a few metres of earth.

Sometimes her mother bends over the grave. Sometimes she kisses the flowers, lifts her hands towards the sky, or releases a bird.

The dove rises from her hands.

Her mother watches it.

The bird can leave.

It can pass beyond the walls, leave the cemetery behind, and disappear into the sky.

Perhaps, in those few seconds, freedom takes on another meaning: as though a mother were entrusting to the sky something she no longer has the strength to hold on earth.

But she stays.

With the stone.

With the flowers.

With the name carved into the stone.

With a question that has no answer.

Before Tania herself became a name among those killed, she had spoken of those who had gone before her. She had said:

‘I am carrying on the path of Mahsa and Nika.’

Today, those words carry a different weight.

Perhaps when she said them, she did not know that one day her own name would be written beside theirs. She did not know that her photograph would be raised in the streets of other cities, that people would hold it in the cold air of Europe, and that the face of a twenty-one-year-old girl from Tehran would be seen among crowds thousands of kilometres away.

Tania's name left their home.

It reached her grave.

It went beyond the grave.

It went into the streets.

In Brussels and other cities, her photograph was held by people who may never have heard her voice. At gatherings where hundreds of images of young people killed were arranged side by side, Tania's face became one among them: faces behind each of which stood a home, a mother, a father, a friend, and an unfinished life.

But there is a danger here: that among hundreds of photographs, a human being becomes only a ‘name’.

Tania must be more than a name.

Before she became a picture on a placard, she was a girl who laughed.

Who took photographs with her mother.

Who played in the snow.

Who celebrated birthdays.

Who loved animals.

Who stroked Papi.

Who liked colourful clothes.

Who made plans for the future.

And who was meant one day to travel, to build a life of her own, perhaps fall in love, perhaps become a mother, perhaps sit beside her own mother years later and talk about being young.

None of it happened.

Now Tania's birthdays have taken on another form. There are candles, but no laughter. There is cake, but no one to make a wish and blow the candles out.

Her mother lights a candle, and mourning takes the place of celebration.

Perhaps this is one of the cruellest forms of loss: when things that once signified joy become the objects of mourning.

Yet Tania has not remained only in her mother's sorrow.

People have spoken her name.

They have carried her photograph.

They have brought her flowers.

They have stood beside her grave.

And her mother, despite all that has collapsed within her, has tried to keep her daughter's name from being forgotten.

Perhaps this is the only thing left for a mother who can no longer bring her child home: to keep her from being killed a second time, this time by forgetting.

Tania was taken unjustly, young, without a voice, at the beginning of life.

But after her death, that silence became a thousand voices.

In her mother's voice.

In the voices of the people who called her name.

In her images, which crossed borders.

In the doves that rose into the sky beside her grave.

And even in Papi's silence, a head lifting at every sound.

Perhaps Papi still hopes.

Perhaps her mother, too, somewhere far beyond reason and reality, still waits for a moment whenever the door opens.

That is loss.

The mind knows someone has gone, but the heart will not believe it.

Tania was only twenty-one.

But a life cannot be measured only in years.

Sometimes a person lives for just twenty-one years, and after they are gone, the love of them endures for years in a house, in a mother's heart, in a people's memory, and even in a dog's waiting.

Tania will not come through the door again.

But Papi still listens.

Her mother still calls her name.

The dove still flies through the sky in the image of that day.

And people still hold up the photograph of a girl who once said:

‘I am carrying on the path of Mahsa and Nika.’

Death could bring her short life to a halt;

but it could not bring love to a halt.

And perhaps that is what remains of Tania:

a beautiful, gentle girl in love with life;

a girl who never had the chance to live her life to its end,

but who lives on in her mother's heart, in Papi's waiting, and in the memory of the people who have not forgotten her name.