TORONTO - Mourners gathered Tuesday to remember Trooper Marc Diab as a cherished son, friend and mentor who in his 22 years left an indelible mark on the many lives he touched -- and as a man who gave his own life in the name of peace.

"You paid the ultimate price -- your life -- for the cause that you believed in: to have a better world for everyone," Charbel Barakat, the father of the soldier's girlfriend, said at Diab's funeral service.

"I hope the price that you and your many comrades have paid will be enough and that we will see a peaceful world flourishing from Afghanistan to Canada."

Hundreds of mourners packed Our Lady of Lebanon church in west-end Toronto to remember Diab, who was killed March 8 in Afghanistan by a roadside bomb.

"Marc, you once told me, `I will make you proud of me,"' Barakat said in his eulogy. "Well, you really did it, son."

Diab was born in Lebanon, and his family moved in 2000 to Canada, where Barakat said the young man was proud to serve his adopted country.

"As a Canadian your dream for peace, your love for everybody, did not change," Barakat said.

"But you felt the need to help in a special way, the most difficult way -- you enlisted as a soldier."

Diab had no illusions about the risks that accompanied his mission in Afghanistan. Knowing there was a chance he might not return home alive, he recorded a video to be shown at his funeral.

Diab had been planning to propose to his girlfriend Mary Barakat when he returned to Canada.

The priest at Tuesday's service said the 21-year-old woman was too distraught to deliver a eulogy for the man she had hoped to spend her life with.

Military personnel and police officers were on hand to salute Diab's casket as it arrived at the church. As police held back traffic, mourners and bystanders paused to watch as the casket was unloaded from a hearse and brought inside.

Diab, a member of the Royal Canadian Dragoons based at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa in eastern Ontario, was the 112th Canadian soldier to die as part of the Afghan mission since 2002.

Friends remembered Diab as someone who had an answer for everything and was always striving to make them laugh, particularly with his impression of the character Borat.

"He wanted to experience absolutely everything and he dragged us along with him," said his friend Stephanie Deeck.

"From trips to the cottage and the beach, to off-roading in his Jeep, to singing songs out loud in the middle of the street, breaking the rules and overeating sushi -- there was never a dull moment."

He always wanted to make people happy and would not have been pleased there were so many tears at his funeral, friends said.

Diab led a summer camp through his church, and during the service and in messages in the funeral program, the teens he mentored praised a young man who made a lasting impression on their lives.

"He treated us like his friends and not children," Jessy Khalife wrote in one of several tributes in the funeral program.

"He made us a part of his life, and now he will forever be a part of ours."

Others called Diab a hero who taught them "when you want something, you have to work for it and you should never give up."

The last page of Diab's large, colourful funeral program was reserved for three poems and songs written by the soldier himself.

"This is the time we fall hard onto shaken knees/Praying and begging the lord for a second chance," he writes in one entitled "The Moment."

"Veins awaken, yet pumping and heart full of tears/My life is so short in time, it only lasts a glance."