A relative calm unlike the storm that’s sweeping through all of us, I woke up on the morning of Saturday, July 26, 2025, to the news of the passing of Ziad Rahbani, my father’s close friend.
My father had never met Ziad in person, yet they were friends who shared jokes, melodies, and the same sadness. They often had long conversations about God, the country, and sometimes about Fairuz.
These discussions were a fundamental part of my childhood and the shaping of my rebellious identity, especially since society always pointed fingers at me and labeled me as a “revolutionary.”
My father raised us to embrace difference—not as a reason for conflict, but to speak about reality as it is, without sugarcoating it. To live life with all its beautiful and ugly contradictions. And to respond with sarcasm to the reality of our societies, to the unique “Lebanese temperament,” and to the syndrome of loving and hating the homeland at the same time.
My father lived a life different from the society he felt he didn’t belong to—a society he always saw as filled with resentment, hypocrisy, and exaggeration.
Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that my father passed away a few months before Ziad. A father who had always lived in sadness over the loss of his close friends before him. Surely, he wouldn’t have been able to bear Ziad’s departure—the friend closest to his heart, the one who never left my father’s mornings or ours.
I grew up surrounded by my father’s gatherings with his friends at the Cultural Movement Center in Tyre. I was raised amid conversations about women, politics, music, and lively debates—most of which were filled with sarcasm and loud, continuous laughter.
I feel like I lost my memories today, which already seemed orphaned with Ziad’s absence and departure. I lost a vital part of a crucial period that shaped my personality and who I am now. I lost Fairuz’s voice, Ziad’s songs in our mornings, and my father.
Fairuz’s songs have now become tied to the pain of losing those beautiful moments shared between me, my father, and Ziad. Escaping from them has become my way to distance myself from that whole past, as if it has nothing to do with me.
In fleeting, random moments amid the chaos of my daily work, I remember him sitting on the house balcony where he spent most of his time—finishing Fairuz’s songs and drifting into another world. A world where he met with his friends, mourned them, imagined another life—the Rahbani world and the Lebanon of dreams. A Lebanon that even Ziad couldn’t erase from my father’s imagination, because for him it was his way to escape to a better life amid the chaos—or the true face of Lebanon, as Ziad described it in his plays and artistic works.
This contradiction was also my father’s nature. In his imagination, at a café on the crossroads where he waited many times, yet his state was much like Ziad’s when he said, “Whenever you ask me how I am, I remember that I’m not okay,” in the show Al-Aql Zeina.
What I know is that close friends unite—they agree on many ideas, sometimes disagree, and go through human struggles. They drift apart at times, but then come back stronger than before.
My father, who always said he had no problem with death—“those who die find peace”—I don’t know if that impression was planted by Ziad when he talked about death and said, “I used to have a problem with death, but not anymore. After everything we’ve been through, I’ve come close to death several times.”
My father disagreed with Ziad politically at one point, but their door for discussion was always open. This was because neither of them ever placed themselves on a pedestal nor allowed anyone to be idolized. So, their disagreements never spoiled their friendship or diminished Ziad’s creative stature that had won hearts and minds. Because, above all, whether you agreed or disagreed with him, he forced us—whether we liked it or not—to face reality, pushed us to dive into our existential and life struggles, to ask deep questions, and to strip away all the falsehoods society had boxed us into.
What I do know is that close friends come together—they share many ideas, sometimes disagree, and go through human struggles. They drift apart at times, but then return stronger than ever before.
This is not a pessimistic call to see death as a hopeless state in our lives, but rather an invitation to make peace with it, as Ziad described it in an interview—calling death an “instinct” and referencing the scientist and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.
But parting remains that empty space—full of everything at once—the absence that even Ziad expressed when he wrote:
“I’m afraid even the line won’t reach you,
I feel it must find you…
So you reply and talk to me, my love.”
This fear has haunted me since you left, my father. And, Ziad, I feel it must find you too, as Fairuz’s voice hums along with me:
“So you reply and talk to me, my love.”
