Inter-generational Trauma

I went to the dentist today with a cracked molar. My dentist is Armenian, so I mentioned I was currently writing a mystery that has an Armenian detective in it. This led to a discussion of the most recent attacks on Armenia and the horrible economic and political situation over there. None of the superpowers will stand up for Armenia, because of Turkey's political pull and money and strategic location.

And then he paused working on my tooth and just talked, telling me about his family's history. His grandmother, great-aunt, and great-grandmother were the only three out of their family of 150 to survive the genocide. His grandmother, only about four years old at the time, saw her family decapitated and mutilated before her eyes. As he spoke, I could hear the emotion in his voice, the passion he feels for his homeland, and his frustration at not being able to do anything about what his people are enduring. The genocide happened many years ago, but President Biden only recently finally acknowledged that it was, indeed, a genocide. And the attacks continue. The distress and pain behind this ordinarily mild man's words were tangible.

At one point, he said, "How would you feel if someone came in and killed all your family and took your home?" And I thought, well, they did, and we had to flee the country and head for Mexican Territory (now Utah). But we didn't suffer anything on the scale of what the Armenians went through.

This got me to thinking about inter-generational trauma, and how the suffering of one's ancestors is still alive and felt by their descendants. I grew up with folk songs, sung in my family, about the burning of our homes and fields, the betrayal by the state governor, about how God saved his people. Songs about burying our dead on the plains, hidden beneath campfire ashes to hide the bodies from the wolves. I was told bedtime stories about great-great-great-grandpa who escaped from jail by outwitting the guard's dog, about another grandfather who had to keep a horse saddled all the time in the barn in case the U.S. marshals came for him. Those stories and songs are valuable to me as part of my heritage, and even though the personal persecution I've experienced has been small, I still feel (and in some ways treasure) that tremor of memory handed down through my family.

Right now the indigenous people of Canada are going through their own fallout from the residential school system, and the earlier generation's memories can't help but filter down to their children and grandchildren. The recent discovery of over two thousand graves has brought that trauma to the fore in new ways. The reverberation of history continues down through the generations, to both those whose families suffered and those whose families caused the suffering. None of us escape that history.

I wish at some point the earth and its peoples could just rest. Until then, we need to be very, very kind to each other, because--in ways we may not easily see--each of us is feeling pain from something.