EDMONTON -- Minutes before her flight was shot down by Iranian missiles, Elnaz Nabiyi texted her husband of three years in Edmonton: "I am on the flight. We are ready to take off."
She had travelled to Iran to visit family, marking the first time the couple had been apart for more than four days.
It was friends who broke the news to Javad Soleimani Meimandi that his wife's flight was "gone."
"I didn't believe it at first. Even right now, I don't believe it because some time I unintentionally check my cell phone to see whether I have any message from Elnaz," Meimandi told CTV News Edmonton in an interview on Wednesday.
"I'm still waiting for her."
Nabiyi was 29 years old. She and Meimandi had moved to Canada about a year ago to earn their PhDs at the University of Alberta.
"Elnaz wasn't a person that accept everything without any reason. She was a person that always tried to understand, discover, the reason behind everything."
Meimandi called his late wife a naturally smart woman who didn't have to work as hard as he did in school, and who knew how to bring people together.
"I always wanted to make a plan for our life: this is first step, this is second step. But she was a person that lived in the moment and enjoyed her life."
He recently returned to Edmonton from Zanjan, Iran, having joined family in their home country to bury Nabiyi's body.
He says representatives from the Iranian government and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attended what was meant to be a private service, and hung a sign on Nabiyi's casket that read: "Congratulations on your martyrdom."
"But she wasn't a martyr. She just wanted to come back to Canada and study. She was an innocent person," Meimandi said.
"We had to tolerate because our first priority was to just immediately bury my wife."
When he questioned the government and military officials on their presence at the ceremony, Meimandi says he was called in to make an apology.
Now that he's again in Canada, Meimandi said he's not staying silent.
He wants to see the black boxes of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 released to international authorities. Iran has so far refused to hand over the data, despite once saying it would be given to Ukraine.
Meimandi fears Iran's refusal to do so means the missile firings weren't the result of human error as it has suggested – and wants to use his voice on behalf of the victims to call on Canada to continue to pressure the Iranian government.
"Honestly, if you ask me, 'What do you want right now,' without a doubt, the best thing for me right now is death," he told CTV News Edmonton.
"But before death I just want to discover all of the truths about this catastrophe and identify all people responsible for this catastrophe and punish them.
"This is, honestly, my only motivation for the rest of my life."
With a report from CTV News Edmonton's Sarah Plowman
