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| Armenian civilians are marched to nearby prison in Mezireh by armed Turkish soldiers in Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, April 1915. |
In 1896 my father's father Haigazoun was born in jail, in Istanbul. His father Der Nerses--his ordained name, we don't know his given name--was incarcerated, along with his wife, for being a Christian priest. Der Nerses was poisoned soon thereafter, and my great-grandmother--Khoutsig, I love that name--raised him and his two brothers alone, until she met her own demise at the hands of the Ottoman Turks around 1915.
My dad doesn't know the stories--or the names--of his maternal grandmother or grandfather; the trauma his mother experienced in her childhood seems to have rendered her early memories inaccessible.
My mother had no living grandparents either, and knows almost nothing about their lives. She tells the story of her father Garabed, age 8 in 1915-1916, visiting a vineyard with his father when a Turkish soldier on a horse came and took his father away, leaving young Garabed standing there. Her mother Azniv, bereft at age 7 in 1915-1916, was adopted into an Armenian family in Palestine, in Jerusalem, where she essentially became the nanny and took care of three younger children.
So my grandparents survived unspeakably harsh life events. By witnessing the elimination of their parents, my hypothesis is that a fear of annihilation was sparked in them at a young age.
I believe this fear of being decimated has passed down the generations. My parents feared the extermination of their own existence, as it happened to their grandparents, and as Armenian-Americans, my sisters and I feared annihilation too. Unconsciously we feared death if we didn't grow up and prosper as Armenian-Americans, and raise Armenian-American children too.
Which leads to the idea that Alice got annihilated. Not by the Turks, yet killed nonetheless. She was supposed to make it well into old age, as our ancestors desperately willed for all of us. And I've been blindsided by the horror. To the extent that I'm still writing about living without her almost five years later.
The term "rest in peace" comes to mind. Alice rests, and what I'm working to do is lay to rest my loss of her.
Soon.
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