My dearest Sadie,
So much has changed since I wrote to you last April 24, when you were just six months old. You can walk and talk now, as you delight in exploring the world around you and communicating it to your mother and me with an ever-growing vocabulary. You already are a loving girl, enthusiastic in your hellos and fierce in your goodbyes. And every time I think it could not be possible for me to love you any more than I already do, you manage to find a way to indeed wiggle and squeal your way into my heart just a little more.
So much has changed in the world around you, too. Though I imagine you will not consciously remember any of it, I do wonder how much will remain in some part of your subconscious, as you pick up on our cues of the many stresses, worries, and dangers we face amid a once-in-a-century global pandemic that I pray will never again occur in your lifetime.
Yet existing next to that fervent wish is my desire to one day tell you of what happened, of how many we have lost, of what we sacrificed in the name of the greater good, and of your mother in particular arose in the moment to guide an entire medical practice towards a comprehensive response to this virus because, quite simply, she was the only one who could.
Though getting described as a hero these days seems to act as somehow in lieu of a raise or hazard pay, the truth is that your mother is indeed a hero, married into a family with a long matrilineal line of heroism. Your grandmother sets free the wrongfully convicted for a living, and your great-great-grandmother, your namesake Satenig, successfully smuggled herself out of a genocide that we take today every year to remember, that its lessons might not be forgotten to the dusts and winds of history.
One of those lessons might have been lost to your dad, but for the dogged research of our cousin Hagop, who uncovered that one of your ancestors, Yester, died amid a typhus outbreak in 1917, two years into the genocide as she was caring for Armenian children who had been made orphans during the past two years. She died in outbreak exacerbated by a genocide, caring for the children of other parents after losing her own son and husband to execution and then arranging for the smuggling of much of her remaining family out of the country.
Yester's was far from either the first and last death from a disease outbreak enabled by genocide. Indeed, death from disease exposure is made far easier when your society has made clear that they no longer value you, or never did.
And just one year later, the global flu pandemic to which many of us are comparing the current coronavirus pandemic struck, even as the genocide continued. I have been sharing what others smarter and more-versed in the history than me have told us about how racism and xenophobia was fomented in that time, and eventually, that xenophobia came for us as well, with Armenians, including genocide refugees, functionally banned from immigrating here for decades.
Neither of us were around to witness that callous display of inhumanity, but I know about it because others made sure I did--by telling me the stories, by educating me on the history, and by impressing on me the importance of learning from the lessons they (and our ancestors) had to share.
I suppose that is how I feel about what you would take from this pandemic. The protective side of me wants you to remember none of this, but there's another side to me--I am not sure what to call it--that does want to make sure that you hold onto the lessons that we are learning right now from the suffering that we witness. Much as I want to always be able to keep you from harm, I know that is an impossibility, and that you learning from the harm we see so that it might not be repeated is vital to my work as your father as well.
My darling girl, there is so much I will share with you that I hope you never forget, about how your family came to be here as part of a diaspora, how we thrived in the face of the death wish against us that became a genocide, and how that story matters in dismantling prejudice and bigotry more broadly. What we remember today is part of a much broadly tapestry of inhumanity, one that we can help unravel by taking our stories and putting them in the service of anti-racism as a whole. I understand Yester's plight just a bit differently now as I witness the devastation that the pandemic is wreaking on families and peoples of color here, and of how it is a sin when we force others into such marginalized places. What I look to her, to our family, and to God for now is the example of what to do with that understanding.
In the meanwhile, much will continue to change, and at what human cost, I can only guess. You will learn that others like to use war metaphors and language to describe such things, almost as though the thought of war is somehow comforting. While your dad does not, it is true that just as indifference can lead to a forever war that takes tens of thousands of lives, so too can indifference lead to a lack of response to a virus that takes tens of thousands of lives.
Yet your mother is still a hero, as is your grandmother. Yester, too, will always be a hero. Satenig, even after she left the war zone and the genocide, will always be a hero. I suppose that is one overlap of war rhetoric that I must permit, because the stories of the women you descend from demand it in order to categorize their deeds with the proper respect and reverence. That, too, is part of the purpose of setting aside a day like today to remember--remember that genocides ruin and ransack, wars rage and diseases ravage, but we still remain. We always remain.
You burst into the room as I wrote this, full of exuberance and radiating energy. It is one thing that you give back to me, though you may not realize it yet. You hugged me before dancing away, but not before making sure I knew where your knees and toes were thanks to the head, shoulders, knees and toes song that Winnie the Pooh has taught you. Yes, Sadie, I will continue to teach you our stories, to hold them in your very being and to tell them for good, to bring meaning to others as you do to me. They will become your stories, and part of your story, as you continue growing into the person God calls you to be.
Sing out your story, Sadie, and dance away to your next retelling of it. Then, I think, you will be well on your way to embodying this strange, mournful, beautiful existence of belonging to a dynasty of heroes, refugees, exiles, and survivors. You will be well on your way to embodying their love, and exhibiting their grace, for a world that may not always return that love, but requires it of us nonetheless.
Sing out and dance away, my beloved child. Sing out and dance away.
All my love,
Dad