“Շատ լավ, աղջիկս - now tell me a story, of our foremothers,” she says.

My maternal great-great grandmother, Անա (Anna) was working in the cotton fields of Ադանա (Adana; historical Armenia) with her mother-in-law Խանեմ (Khanem) when she went into labour. Khanem led Anna to a nearby tree and helped her lay down on the grass. She delivered the baby, my great-grandmother Մաքրուհի (Makrouhi), and tore the bottom half of her own skirt to wrap the newborn with. Mount Ararat was literally the backdrop of my great-grandmother’s birth. Anna died when Makrouhi was still a baby due to miscarriage complications. Makrouhi survived the genocide and grew up in Beirut with her father and stepmother. She was very studious, and when her parents could not afford to send her to school anymore, her teacher arranged for Makrouhi to get a job as a cleaner to bring in an income for her family. She woke up at the crack of dawn and went to school to wipe the desks and sweep the floors of the classrooms for many years until she graduated, then became a teacher. She married my great-grandfather, a tailor and an orphan of the genocide. My grandmother told me that not once in her life did she see her parents fight or say nasty things to each other. My great-grandfather always wanted to die at the same time as his wife. He used to sit on a short wooden stool right behind her while she played on the electric organ and sang songs from her hymnbook. After she finished, he would rub the sides of his two index fingers together and say, ‘կնիգ, կնիգ (woman, woman) let us die together, let us go to heaven together’. And he would point to the sky. They died exactly three years apart from each other, to the day. Such is divine love.