By June 9, 2015, Khaled Habash knew his mother was dead.

“Dear World Family,” he wrote on the Facebook page set up to support the search for Dawn Habash in the wake of the powerful April 25, 2015, Nepal earthquake, which set off a massive avalanche.

Khaled and Yasmine Habash summited the 14,500-foot Kyanjin Ri in Nepal one year after their mother, Dawn Habash, attempted the same climb but turned back because of the weather. Dawn Habash later died when an earthquake struck Nepal. Contributed photo

Dawn Habash is shown in 2011 in India. Her children returned last week from a commemorative trip to Nepal. Contributed photo

The Langtang valley village of Kyanjin Gompa is covered with a fresh blanket of snow last month during a visit by Khaled Habash and his sister, Jasmine Habash. Contributed photo

“With the heaviest of hearts, our family acknowledges that our sweet, radiant Mumma Habash has passed away in the Nepal earthquake and subsequent avalanche in Langtang village. Although she is still missing and unaccounted for, six weeks has passed since the devastating event that has broken our hearts. Our search-and-rescue mission in the area showed great loss, not only for ourselves but for the many hundreds of people affected around the world and within Langtang valley.”

Dawn Habash, who grew up in Gardiner and lived in Augusta as an adult, had been in Nepal for about five weeks when she decided that she would hike on April 25 from the village of Kayanjin to higher peaks that day and eventually travel down the valley to the village of Langtang. Habash, who was a yoga instructor, planned to travel with someone she had met, and she hired a porter to accompany her.

But she and her companion separated on the way because of the threat of bad weather. They planned to meet later for tea.

Sometime after that, around noon local time, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the region, killing more than 8,000. Accounts of people who were there describe the mass of ice that crashed down thousands of feet, triggering an avalanche that erased Langtang, a village of 400 that was popular with trekkers.

A year later, grief is still a fresh scar for Khaled Habash and his sister, Yasmine, but a measure of peace is now possible.

The siblings and their uncle Randy – Dawn’s brother – returned Monday from Nepal, where they walked the path Dawn is known to have taken, on the anniversary of the day she’s believed to have died.

“Walking the same steps as my mother one year to the day was really wonderful,” Khaled Habash said. “It did bring a lot of peace over me. As much as I am incredibly sad, it was so beautiful to be there on a gorgeous blue-sky day.”

When he spoke at an event in Nepal commemorating the loss of all the people who had died, he said it was nice to know that all of the people who had died there didn’t have far to go to heaven from that stunning place.

After a year of hard grieving, he was able to close that chapter.

“It’s a huge relief,” he said.

Yasmine Habash said all she prayed for on the anniversary was gorgeous weather, so that the people who gathered there to mark the passing of their loved ones would be uplifted by the terrible beauty of the mountains and nature.

“I wanted Khaled to love the area and not be angry with it,” she said.

‘TEACHER OF EVERYTHING’

Khaled Habash, who lives in Portland, and Yasmine Habash, who lives in Alaska, grew up traveling with their parents.

“Our father is Syrian, and we summered in Maine. We spent a lot of summers in Damascus. We went to Egypt. We lived in Cyprus and London. It was all very normal to us,” Khaled Habash said. Their travel would catch up with them in unexpected ways. They’d start mixing languages in the same sentence, confusing their friends.

“Our father is foreign and when you are foreign, you travel way more than Americans,” he said. So while their father traveled, it was their mother who had the adventurous spirit.

“She was a trailblazer at that sort of thing,” Khaled Habash said. She traveled to Asia by herself in the late 1970s, when she was not even 20.

“Our mom was our teacher of everything – manners, and how to work hard for what you want and to follow your heart and be kind and loving to everybody. She taught us these life principles, to be the best you can in your local community and when you travel.”

In a way, their mother continues to teach them.

“One of my biggest lessons is to live very open-heartedly, with vulnerability, and sharing truthfully your feelings,” Yasmine Habash said.

Even with the measure of peace he has attained, her brother has lingering confusion.

“My mom was the most kind, most loving, most fit and most spiritual person I knew, and I am not saying that just because she was my mother,” he said. “How was it that she was in absolutely the wrong place at absolutely the wrong time?”

INKLING OF TROUBLE

Initially, Yasmine Habash, who had been trekking with her mother until March 20, wasn’t that concerned. She returned to the United States, and her mother caught a plane to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital. As far as Yasmine Habash knew, her mother wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the devastated valley.

“We thought our mother was alive and stuck for the first four days” after the quake, Khaled Habash said. Nepal is a developing country, and communication in and out was difficult after the earthquake, the second most powerful recorded there.

Dawn’s last contact with her family had occurred a week earlier. They weren’t expecting her to be in the Langtang Valley at that point.

“I kind of tackled (trying to find her) much more diligently initially. Yasmine Habash was thinking everything was fine, because the village was destroyed but she wasn’t supposed to be there,” her brother said.

Only after communications opened up again did they discover their mother had changed her mind and had traveled to the Langtang Valley.

The first inkling of trouble came after four days. A Canadian woman who had met Dawn Habash a few days before the earthquake reached out to her son on Facebook to let him know Habash had been in the region.

“Her information seemed very concrete and confident, but there was still some uncertainty. No one had seen her walk into the village,” Khaled Habash said. “We were clinging to any hope that was left.”

Yasmine Habash traveled to Nepal with her boyfriend, trying to find any sign of her mother. They were forced to evacuate when another earthquake struck, and eventually returned to the U.S.

Even a year later, the marks of the landslide that destroyed Langtang are fresh. Khaled Habash came across a news story in October that estimated the force of the avalanche triggered by the quake to be half of the power of an atomic bomb.

“Your brain can’t comprehend that. We were studying Google Earth, but nothing prepares you for that,” he said.

CELEBRATION PLANNED

In the midst of the immeasurable sadness, some pieces of joy have emerged.

A year ago Saturday, the same day that Dawn Habash had been expected to return to Maine, her son’s daughter, Zinnia, was born.

“She’s the light for all of us,” Khaled Habash said.

Zinnia marked her first birthday at a celebration of life for her grandmother that took place Saturday in the Hallowell City Hall auditorium. Honoring Dawn Habash’s Buddhist beliefs, the celebration included mediation and chanting.

While Yasmine Habash was in Nepal a year ago, looking for any sign of her mother, she struck up conversation with a Nepalese man who was searching for his parents in Langtang. She realized he was an old friend, one she had met when she trekked through the region a dozen years earlier.

Phinjo Tamang had lost both his parents and a younger brother in the devastation. Even a year later, his family has only one room, a kitchen, and they continue to live in tents.

Yasmine said Tamang is now part of her and her brother’s world family, the community they gained in the wake of tragic loss, with whom they traveled in Nepal to honor the lost lives of those they loved.

When they were gearing up to search for their mother, the Habashes launched a GoFundMe page, to raise money for the search. They donated the money they didn’t need to cover travel expenses to the people in the area who are still in need. They continue to use the site for fundraising to help people in the damaged valley.

Yasmine Habash has taken on Tamang’s plight as her mission.

“He wants to rebuild his guest house, but he has no money to his name,” she said. When she struggles some days, as she still does, she thinks of Tamang. “That’s my driving force.”

‘SOLACE AND PEACE’

In his sad Facebook post, Khaled Habash ended his message this way:

“The last picture of our mother offers great solace and peace, as it represents our mother’s true serenity and beauty in an equally beautiful surrounding. We are infinitely blessed by having her as our mother, angel on Earth, and best friend. We will live every moment with her inside us and her guidance showing us the way. We are grateful and fortunate for everything she did. We are proud of all her experiences and spiritual growth. And we made sure she knew that, with as much love as we could humanly give her. Her teachings, principles, adventurous spirit, compassion and of course LOVE will live on for generations to come.

“Miss and love you to the moon and the stars. Miss you forever! xoxo

“Khaled & Yasmine & Family”

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