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This time of the year is an emotional rollercoaster for me: April 23rd and April 24th, for completely different reasons, have a powerful significance for me of remembering and reconnecting to my ancestry. My beloved grandmother’s birthday — a day of remembering someone in love with life and unwavering sense of inner power. Followed by a grimness of the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. This year, as I was sharing with my 4-year old pictures of Rita, the great grandma she’d never met, and contemplating whether it was time to also show her the documentary I had made about the genocide survivors, I for the first time realized the importance of the proximity of those days. Surrounded with news of the pandemic and the frustrations of the lockdown, I felt such a painful urge to bring her back, to feel her unwavering uplifting energy that made everyone around her feel like nothing could ever go wrong. As a parent and a teacher of wellness, I now wonder how much inner strength it took her to transmit that light, that contagious positivity, a certainty that there is no room for despair when the gift of life is to be embraced.
Despite the turmoil she lived through, I don’t ever remember seeing her lose her temper or her composure. She was a granddaughter of a genocide survivor, who fleeting her ancestral home in Trabzon (northern part of modern day Turkey) lost…