BEIRUT: Yasma Fuleihan has been interrupted by a phone call from a well-known U.N. official. She greets the voice on the other end of the receiver with a lightheartedness honed over the last 10 years and lists her engagements matter-of-factly – ambassadors, dinner, family, the children. As she listens, Yasma’s eyebrows rise and fall. “You know how Basil is,” she says, using the present tense to describe her deceased husband.
The widow of Basil Fuleihan, the former economy minister who died from wounds sustained in a bomb that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 21 others on Feb. 14, 2005, has maintained a low profile in Geneva since his death. She returns to Lebanon periodically on April 18 to commemorate Basil’s death publicly. Privately, that fateful day remains a vivid fixture in her mind – when she retells it, her body seems to relive it.
After Yasma had dropped the kids, now 15 and 13, to school, Basil called from Beirut to wish her a happy Valentine’s Day. Despite having the option of flying directly to Beirut from Geneva Feb. 15, Basil chose to take the route via Paris two days earlier so he could get to the Lebanese capital in time for the parliamentary session Feb. 14, the day Hariri’s motorcade was attacked. When Basil said goodbye, he said he would call her back once he left Parliament.
Yasma was shopping when her mother called and asked frantically whether Basil was with her. She said he was in Beirut and her mother fell silent. She described the following hours as like “being in a tsunami.” Immediately Yasma called her husband’s mobile and got an out of service signal. Terrified of what awaited her at home, she went to a friend’s house. The calls poured in, the panic of uncertainty set, plane tickets were purchased and two months beside her dying husband’s side in a hospital in Paris went by. Ten years later, Yasma says her sense of reality, as she once knew it, is irretrievable and altered.
“It’s a struggle, because you have to be strong for the children. It’s not easy, sometimes I fall,” she says.
“And then I dream of Basil, like he came back and feel,” she searches for the words, “like a release, and the dream feels so real.
“Then I wake up and realize. But I feel stronger somehow.”
The couple had grown up in houses facing each other in Beirut but didn’t meet until they were young adults in Washington D.C., where Yasma was attending university and Basil was working with the International Monetary Fund. After a six-year engagement, they were married.
“Life is irony,” Yasma says, recalling how months before his death Basil had marveled at how the seating area in Hariri’s new private plane could be converted to an intensive care unit. The plane would eventually transport Basil’s burned body out of Lebanon to France.
The children bear a striking resemblance to their father, and like him have excelled in math and science. Both are adept young musicians, playing piano and violin at a conservatory while completing high school studies in a rigorous Swiss program. The siblings have expressed interest in pursuing engineering as a career, but Yasma is reluctant to carve out a definite path for their futures.
“The children, they know what they want,” she says, adding philosophically, “No matter what we think, we don’t realize that we humans are fragile.”
Her daughter Rayna wants to pursue studies at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne. Yasma says the precocious young teen already has preferences about which one of her girlfriends she wants to dorm with.
To deal with their father’s passing, Yasma had the children write poems about their feelings. “We talk about everything, I tell them everything,” she says. When they were younger, they drew pictures for him which their mother would dutifully hang on the trees surrounding his grave. They learned the details about his death as they got older. Initially Yasma told her children their father had died because “God had an economic issue,” she says.
“I’ve had to become not just their mother, but their father and also friend,” she says. “But even with that, no one can replace a father.”
Her son Rayan complains that he is “always surrounded by women” in the house. When the kids asked if they could have another sibling, Yasma got them a pet dog. “Each one deals with it differently – my daughter because she is the oldest asks more questions, her brother listens.”
In her efforts to keep the memory of their father alive – Rayna’s WhatsApp profile picture is of her with Basil on the last ski trip they took together a week before his death – Yasma cautions them not to harbor hatred for those responsible for his murder. “The criminal, once they kill someone, they kill everyone [who loved that person]. If you fall into that trap, you will want revenge and it becomes a never-ending cycle,” she says. “It would destroy everything.”
Taking over full responsibilities for the household and rearing the children sometimes can almost prove too much for Yasma. “It’s hard when a part of you is missing,” she says. “At every event, when they graduate from school, we think about how Basil isn’t here.”
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