Neda

There is an interview with Neda's family on CNN right now. Here are just a few interesting parts:

The night before she was killed on the streets of Tehran, the woman the world would come to know simply as Neda had a dream. "There was a war going on," she told her mom the next morning, "and I was in the front."

More than four months after Neda's death, her mother, Hajar Rostami, described the pain her family has endured and how grateful they are to millions across the world who have hailed Neda as a martyr -- a symbol of freedom for Iran. She spoke with CNN by phone in her native Farsi from her home in Tehran a few days ago.

"As a message to everyone, I really want to thank the whole world," she said. "And I don't really know how to thank them, so I ask of you: Please find the right words for me.

"I can't tell you how much it has warmed our hearts, how much it's helped us."

Recalling that day, her mother paused in the hourlong interview. The family, she said, has gone back to the scene and retraced Neda's movements.

"She was only 26 steps from her car."

Those were 26 steps Neda never had a chance to take -- the difference between returning home to her family and becoming a symbol of a greater struggle inside Iran.

"But when I returned home, I did see the video," she said. "It was enormously painful. So painful that I've never been able to watch it again all the way through to the end.

"It was the moment of seeing her give her life, the life leaving her body. That was very painful. The look in her eyes at that moment. I wake up with that look in her eyes every morning; I go to bed with the image of that look in her eyes every evening."

It is tradition in Iran to give away personal belongings of a loved one after they die. But Neda's bed, her makeup stand, her photographs -- everything that was hers -- remains untouched.

The reason: Neda appeared in her sister's dream and told her not to part with anything.

"I am alive," Neda said.