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She was 42.

She had time for everyone, says Hewitt. “She was very thoughtful, and you felt very special because of the attention she gave you. You’d think, ‘How can she give so much to so many people?’ But she was able to.”

“She was full of energy and really happy,” adds the youngest of Kamkar’s two sisters, Lily. “She really wanted to stay alive, to travel and see more of the world.

“She really wanted to have a daughter. My sister has a daughter and I have a son, and she really, really loved my niece a lot; she was like a daughter to her. When she was going through chemotherapy, she was worried that she might not be able, later on, to have kids.”

Lily adds that even after becoming bedridden in January, Kamkar had remained positive, optimistic that, as she had done in the past, she would weather this latest setback.

“Even when she could hardly move, she would talk about how it was important to her to get better and have a job and do something for society.

“She was happy and positive, and did a great job fighting this disease. Sometimes I think that I cannot do it the way that she did. She was always saying, ‘I will get better.’”

Kamkar’s health and residency issues first came to light in Postmedia in December 2011. She had arrived in Canada six years earlier, in 2005, from Iran, with hopes of following in her younger sister Maryam’s footsteps and becoming a medical researcher.

She had applied for a permanent resident visa at around the same time Maryam came to Canada in 2003, and had passed a criminal-background check in 2006 and her immigration department medical exam in 2007.