The are no more words for the grief, so a year after the worst day of their lives Rosa Haroutyunyan and her husband Edik Abgaryan just sit in silence and the vacuum their lives have become after losing their son Tigran in the madness of last March 1.

“My husband and I stopped talking to each other, we sit down like this, the grandma with us, we do not utter a single world, we cannot bear it, and again we fall into silence,” says Rosa. When she does speak the sentences are halted by weeping.

They try to find what they lost in this deep silence – their boy’s smile, his speech, laughing. He was 19.

“If my son died on a frontier line or in a war, I would again mourn, suffer, but I would understand that he died for the Homeland. I am getting crazy; my son was killed in the center of our capital city, without any reason; what for, whose post for? I sent my son to defend the Homeland and not someone’s position,” says the mother.

Tigran Abgaryan was a conscript. On the night of March 1 he was in the thick of violence on Leo Street where artillery fired tracer bullets for warning and snipers fired for real.

The cause of death is “gunshot wound within the neck, injuries in spine and spinal marrow.” However, this does not answer Tigran’s parent’s questions. They were told that Tigran was injured at 10:30 p.m. by a gunshot. After being injured Tigran lived 40 days with the help of artificial breathing. He turned 19 in hospital where he died on April 11.

“And they do not say what type of a gun. The preliminary investigation committee explains that Tigran was shot by a sub-machine gun. But what preliminary investigation is that,” his angry mother desperately asks no one in particular. “How did it happen that a sub-machine gunshot hit my son’s neck – just a 3-centimeter open space? That day his whole body was covered with military uniform, helmet and shield.”

She asks for answers. And she asks for the impossible . . .

“Give my son back to me, or at least say how it happened that he did not return,” she cries. “I gave a healthy boy, a sportsman, to this country; I did not want to get his corpse instead.”

Tigran’s relatives are angry especially at the fact that the soldiers who were serving only a few months were at the line of contact in Yerevan streets.

Tigran’s father enters the room, however, he does not join the conversation. Rosa says that his heart is not standing it anymore. Tigran’s photos are everywhere: handsome, tall, blue-eyed, fair-skinned.

He was a student at Yerevan State Pedagogic University, faculty of science of law when he was conscripted.
On March 1, 2008, at 10 a.m., Tigran was at the Opera House, among the soldiers surrounding the building. His mother managed to go there and see her son even at a distance. In the evening Rosa and her husband went there again to see him.

“He ran to us, with red face. I had cigarettes and Snickers chocolate with me, I put them into his pockets. And than I asked him to lean so that I could kiss him, he was very tall. At that time he said, “It seems that everything will stop now, as far as I understood, they are planning to take us back to the military unit.”

He turned back and went running, and then he stopped for a moment and looked back.

“Ok, good bye,” he said to the parents, then ran to await his last assignment.