This month we lost one of the legends of Afghanistan.

You may have seen news of the passing of General Suhaila Siddiq. Her obituary was published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC…the list goes on, and rightly so. She was in her early 80s, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s, and died from complications of COVID. Those are the facts of the final days of her life. But those aren’t the days I’m here to write about.

You’ll see that her obituaries refer to her as “General Siddiq,” but to Afghans, she was General Suhaila – and to Afghan women, she was a hero. Her accomplishments seem almost unreal: she was our nation’s first female lieutenant general. For several years after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, she led the Ministry of Public Health and put in place policies that brought about polio vaccinations for millions of children. She was a surgeon who, when the Taliban took power in 1996, was forced from her position at Daud Khan hospital in Kabul because she was a woman – but just a few months later, the Taliban asked her to return because her surgical skill was unmatched in the country.

General Suhaila told the Taliban she’d come back, but only under one condition: she said that she and her sister were not going to wear the burqa in public, the way other women were commanded to.

And the Taliban agreed.

General Suhaila was the fire on the mountain – a beacon that lit the sky in the night, marking the path and showing the way. I never met her, but I’ve known her story for just about as long as I can remember. It’s hard to explain how important it was, as a girl growing up in Kabul, to know such a woman existed.

I was 11 years old in 2001. I of course knew the stories of great women of days past, women like Malalai of Maiwand, a warrior and one of Afghanistan’s folk heroes who gives her name to the Malalai Medal – an award that it was SOLA’s great honor to receive in 2018. I knew these stories, but it was powerful to understand that women like that lived in my time, not just in the past. General Suhaila was in Kabul, in my city. She walked the same streets I did. And her bravery could be my bravery too.

But not just mine, and not just then. I think, today, of our students at SOLA. I think of what our 11-year-old girls see when they look at the world. I think of our teachers, working from home and challenging the norms that say women cannot successfully hold jobs and raise families simultaneously. I think of the eight women recently appointed as deputy governors in eight provinces, and of the woman who represents our country at the United Nations.

I think of all this. And I think of how, upon the news of General Suhaila’s death, there were those in Afghanistan who chose not to focus on her triumphs, but rather on the fact that she never married.

And then I close my eyes and in the stillness I honor a modern day Malalai: the journalist and women’s activist Malalai Maiwand, murdered just days ago in Jalalabad.

In the darkness, a fire burns. A year is ending and a year will soon begin. We will build our new campus. We will add new classes of students. And you will be here with us, for the coming of the new day.

Rest in peace, General Suhaila. Rest in power. You lit a light that will never go out.