mylightspirit

It was early summer of 2016. End of May, early June. The first time I ever traveled; the first time I ever left Lebanon to go anywhere. We went to Turkey to celebrate my sister’s birthday. My mom, my sister, and I.

That trip was important to me in a way I couldn’t fully explain. I had this need to inhale everything I saw. To record it all in my head and my memory. The new culture, the new ways, everything that made sudden sense. Even the smallest things captured me. The crowd of the city, the massiveness of it; you feel everything, lost and found again between all those other traditions, the culture, the people. Everything was new and exotic.

On one of the tour buses, the tourist guide was explaining things around us. He looked over and said: and to our right is the eternal garden.

That phrase stuck.

I looked out the window. It looked like a small forest. Huge trees. Deep green. You could smell it from inside the bus. And suddenly the phrase made all the sense in the world.

I took a glimpse, it was a graveyard, and he was talking about the resting place of those who had already left. And that phrase stayed with me every day since. How we are rooted back to where we belong. How we flourish back into the land, back to our roots, back to where we came from. That is our eternal garden.

And you can’t help but notice how graveyards are almost always held together with nature; with trees, with flowers. And even when you go to visit a descended loved one, you always take something; a plant, a flower, something that belongs back to the land and to the root. It is a beautiful phrase, and a true one. That by the end of the journey, you are rooted. You flourish back.

May 2026. Ten years after. The same month.

We have lost a lot of people along the way. Ten years of loss; people we love, people who mean everything to us, whose absence strikes us every single day. The empty chair around the table. Their faces. Their smiles. Everything that still affects us to this moment. A loss so huge we can’t get over it, even knowing they are flourishing back into the land, their souls humming through it, back to where they belong.

And then we got the news. The graveyard in our village, Kafarroumman, was bombed. Struck.

The harshness of this world reached even there; not leaving people even at their final rest. Their eternal garden was disturbed. My sister called me: my heart, my heart is aching just from hearing the news.

Then the first videos came.

We couldn’t find anything about my aunt’s grave at first. But we saw the destruction. And then, among the rubble, we found her. My grandma. Behind her grave, we had kept a small box; her picture, her Quran. With the strike, it was destroyed. And there she was; her picture on the floor of the graveyard. Her smile. Her innocent face, looking up from the wreckage.

How harsh is this world, that it cannot even leave the ones who have already gone to sleep in peace. That it follows them even there.

Disturbing the eternal garden is like disturbing the doors of heaven. And who dares do this; and walks away without even a question?

It hurts. It aches from the deepest part of us. Just hearing the news. Just seeing things come from afar. How has this world become this ugly. This harsh.

And no one would move. We just wait and wait for all this madness to end.

But the loss is bigger than waiting. And disturbing the eternal garden is not something that should pass just like this.

It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t.