On September 12, 2022, Gayane, a forty-two-year-old mother of four, made a brief phone call to her eight-year-old son, Hayk, to check in and let him know she would be unreachable for a while. Just weeks earlier, she had been deployed with her army regiment to patrol the town of Sotk, the last Armenian town before the Azerbaijani border. Neither Gayane nor Hayk could have imagined that this would be the last time they would hear the other’s voice.

Mere hours later, Azeri forces launched a series of artillery and drone attacks against military positions and civilian infrastructure across the border. These clashes claimed the lives of almost three hundred service personnel in just two days of fighting.

As the news broke, Gayane’s sister Lala began calling hospitals near the front lines to see if she was among the casualties or being treated. “There was a live map of the war, so when we checked, we saw [that the area where Gayane was deployed had been taken over]. We understood she was [dead], so the next step was to find her,” Lala says from a coffee shop in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.