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I clearly remember the day I decided to step away from the state-offered form of grieving and develop a practice of my own.

It was sometime during my school years when I was accidentally swept into one of the queues to Tsitsernakaberd, the Armenian Genocide memorial. Me and my flower fell to the ground. Lying there among sunflower seeds and candy wrappers, I found myself wondering whether this slow, doomswalking toward the eternal flame was really the best way to honor my ancestors. 

Do I need to place myself in a procession, one that echoes the marches they were once forced into, to remember them? Metaphysically, I understand the intention: to rewire something that once meant death into something else, into remembrance. But physically, every inch of my body resists it, feeling unsafe, uneasy even at the thought of being in a space where I can hardly control anything.

But in one way or another, I’ve always felt that this ritual wasn’t enough for me to process the depth of inherited pain. So I kept searching for other ways that might help me bring out unprocessed emotions and let them go.

First, I came across Nyepi, the Day of Silence in Bali; a New Year marked by stillness, with no movement, no travel, no noise for 24 hours. Later, this information overlapped with reading about Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), where remembrance takes a different form: naming the dead, lighting memorial (Yahrzeit) candles, sharing survivor testimonies. There is prayer, the reading of names, visiting memorials or studying family histories.

So these two, paired together, over time developed into my very own practice of mourning the memory of my ancestors and celebrating their resilience. 

Since then, every April 24, I spend the day in silence and fasting. The next day, I dress up and treat myself to a simple, beautiful dinner, almost as if I am celebrating something. I connect with my relatives, and we spend time speaking about those who are no longer with us: grandparents, great-grandparents, the family legends of buried treasures, lost homes, and everything that once was.

This tradition turned the past into a body that actively develops, transforms and surprises almost as much as any future and helped me to fear my past less, seeing more than just a narrative layered with bloodshed.

“When I first began to understand what it meant to be a descendant of a Genocide survivor, the first thing I felt was pain,” says Taguhi Nane Yeghikyan whose family can trace their origins to the ancient city of Ani, Raised in Los Angeles, Taguhi is a busy mother, Jungian psychologist, and co-founder of the B’Arev Transformational Festival and TAJAR, a cultural and consciousness initiative she launched with her sister, Hasmik Michelle.

“We have a resistance to turning back and tapping into the pains that were never fully grieved or transformed,” Nane explains, adding that Armenians often look to the past from the position of victimhood, for understandable reasons, but this is not the only lens available to us. The idea of being a survivor doesn’t only mean those who have been hurt, but quite the opposite.

“We come from the people who surpassed the experience of something unimaginable and still continued to live, chose to give birth to new life. We are not descendants of victims, but heroes who survived something powerful and life changing,” she says. 

According to Nane, diving into these very uncomfortable parts of our experiences is essential for allowing the full emotional spectrum of collective life to emerge.

“When we are willing to meet the unconscious, it meets us back with medicine and wisdom,” she explains and notes that the collective psyche is something that wants to move forward, it doesn’t like going back or being stuck. But all fairy tales and myths begin exactly there: from the desire to move out of the blocked state, from the journey of the hero, who wants to become “un-stuck” and move beyond the unknown. That’s when the pain becomes a driving force, not a paralyzing one. 

But this is where space and ritual become important. One cannot work through emotions in an environment and space where fear prevails. Ancient cultures had specific mourning rituals or ceremonies of holding space, of recognizing grief and through that helping the community to transform and heal. Today, though our culture doesn’t have any state-offered spaces or rituals to go through these emotions of collective grief, we have other, alternative options, created by individuals like Nane and many others like her.

“To us, Armenians, it’s especially important, because the very foundation of our state is connected to this traumatic event and by finding ways to integrate the grief we’ll also find ways to integrate fragments of our identity, which we don’t see, which we hide, because they are associated with pain and therefore shame,” Nane explains. 

She says that moving beyond the idea of control is something that makes grief one of the most humbling and sacred experiences for humanity because one crosses the threshold of tolerance, entering a place of the unknown. “But today, societies are so obsessed with control and grief that it becomes one of the hardest things to allow yourself to experience,” she says.

Mike Norton, a Harvard professor and author of “The Ritual Effect”, whom many may recognize for identifying and naming the “IKEA effect”, has spent years studying rituals and their impact on collective wellbeing. In an interview with Harvard Business Review, he explained that rituals of commemoration and mourning often help restore a sense of control, allowing communities to safely reclaim agency over painful narratives.

As Nane noted, modern societies, obsessed with emotional self-control and keeping grief private, deny communities the catharsis and connection that become possible once that control is released. For this to happen, however, communities need either specially designed rituals, or safe spaces, fostered through social and cultural initiatives.

Even a small, carefully held space can allow a person to feel whatever is hidden. Author and illustrator Lilit Altunyan’s latest project, also dedicated to loss and grief, offers such a space in the form of an animated artist’s book, a metaphorical space open to anyone willing to enter it. Although Lilit’s work is largely rooted in children’s literature, often exploring subjects neglected by other authors and standing in sharp contrast to the “always cheerful and hyper-happy” tone common in books for children, some of her other projects tap into wider audiences, such as her animated short “When I am Sad” and the animated artbook “Farewell”.

“If we observe carefully, we’ll see that we’re not taught to feel our emotions, we don’t recognize them and don’t allow ourselves to,” Lilit says. Originally from Van and Erzurum, she adds: “I did this project for myself, it was born from a personal grief, but it can be the catalyst for others too, as always an artform is. My meditative book could help to provide space to get in touch with that emotion.”

She says you can’t close loss with peace: “It’s a process, you have to live through the loss entirely and then get to closure. To live through something you need to give yourself the time…even if it was a loss of your dream, it takes time to mourn it.”

A scholar researching grief and bereavement, Susan A. Berger, offers the following typology to illustrate how people within any given culture or religion may process grief differently.

Nomads: those who have not yet resolved their grief and may not fully understand how their loss has affected their lives.

Memorialists: those who are committed to preserving the memory of loved ones by creating concrete memorials and rituals.

Normalizers: those who are committed to re-creating a sense of family and community.

Activists: those who focus on helping others who are dealing with the same disease or circumstances that caused their loved one’s death.

Seekers: those who adopt religious, philosophical, or spiritual beliefs to create meaning in their lives.

I have no idea where to place our society within this system, but I know one thing for certain: we need closure, and it is not something we can expect solely from the outside world. Otherwise, we will keep waiting for as long as we already have. It has to begin with ourselves, with our communities and with society as a whole.

Perhaps political closure will come more easily once we begin to find it on an individual and communal level. Perhaps we will discover a narrative, a common thread, that sustains rather than consumes us. Especially today, as the peace process is actively being discussed, the gates of long-unprocessed emotions will open, and we’ll have to find ways of dealing with it. 

“Closure is one of the steps we have not yet reached as a society. Because we never got it, it has been impossible to move on and leave this state of grief. So I feel this idea of pain, I’d use it instead of the ‘grief’ that is woven into Armenian identity, not culture,” says Camille Lévêque, a French artist of Armenian origin whose work explores memory and family mythology. She often works with phrases and symbols that evoke a subtle mythology of pain, including Tsaved Danem, the Armenian expression meaning, “I’ll take your pain away.”

“My first encounter with grief was the loss of my grandmother, who escaped the Genocide as a child and later fled the Russian Revolution. I lost her when I was a young teenager,” Camille says. “That inheritance of pain and loss weaved its way into my artistic language. I speak often about emancipating ourselves from this narrative of pain and creating new lexical fields to recount Armenianity.”

“I agree that we need carefully curated and constructed rituals, but above all we need more unity. Armenians and the diaspora. We are lacking union. I often use the image of the Tower of Babel in my work, or what people in France call a ‘conversation of the deaf,’ which describes so well the dialogue we have between diasporans and locals. I feel we are all trying to reach the same goal: closure, feeling good about ourselves and our heritage, feeling peaceful….”

Camille adds that too much misunderstanding remains, and that the heritage of the diaspora is often romanticized, exoticized, or judged rather than truly understood.

She says Armenians need more open-hearted conversations and greater empathy toward one another in order to better understand each other’s realities and that the kinds of “rituals” that help people cope with inherited trauma do not always need to be formal or ceremonial. They can be as simple as meaningful conversations.

She notes that many Armenian women around her are deeply engaged in practices of self-care, in learning more about history, and in trying to transform grief into something that can nourish the future. Many of these women are mothers, which she believes profoundly shapes the way they relate to the world and to healing. For Camille herself, spending time with her daughter and speaking with her has become one of the most meaningful ways of understanding and processing difficult emotions.

“The other way, of course, is my art and projects” she continues. “I used my grandmother’s name and created completely imaginary conversations with her about grief and loss.” 

The desire for closure may be one of the few things that unites Armenian communities across their many differences, Camille observes. Yet closure means more than remembrance alone, it points toward something beyond that.

Philosophers like Hannah Arendt, viewed the atrocities of the 20th century as a fundamental rupture in historical continuity, a trauma that broke the “thread” of tradition, creating a gap between the past and future. Arendt argued that survivors and society must live within this “gap,” using it not as a place to hide, but as a site for thinking and constructing new foundations. 

David Kessler, an American grief expert and author of “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief”, writes that grief should unite us “because it is a universal experience.”

But from what I have observed so far, we have often used grief to isolate ourselves from others, creating a narrative in which only our pain matters and is illuminated, detached from the suffering of other communities. We should not forget that the year 1915 carries horror for many peoples who also lived in the Ottoman Empire and endured persecution, including Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Bulgarians, Christian Arabs, Maronites, as well as Armenians.

We have all been damaged and wounded by that history. Yet Armenians, who often tie their identity to Christianity and to ideals of compassion and humanity, carry a deeper ethical responsibility: not only to remember and seek justice for our own suffering, but also to recognize the suffering of others. Otherwise, we risk suggesting that our lives matter while others are “ungrievable,” to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase. In doing so, we ignore the pain of others, reinforcing the same systems and logic that once erased our own pain, reinforcing conditions in which healing becomes impossible.

“Each pain has a timeline and ends when we feel ready and choose to heal. It takes a huge amount of inner resources to even start seeing your pain, naming it, questioning where it came from and understanding that you can also live differently, and it’s not as easy as it may appear,” says Hasmik Tonateptyan, a breathwork specialist with a background in strategic communication, conflict resolution, and intervention design whose descendents hail from Mush.

“We don’t only get our physical appearances from our ancestors,” she continues. “We also carry their attitudes, beliefs through this encoded DNA and that’s also how transgenerational traumas are being transferred to us. Pain creates fear and fear encodes in our DNA as a survival response. It may help us endure danger, but in safer contexts it can also prevent us from fully living or trusting life. If we look deeper, we’ll see that living and surviving are two different dimensions.” 

After a small pause, Hasmik continues: “We learned to connect to our past only through pain and often forget how much love it holds. Recognizing and focusing on the love behind all our stories could possibly help to change our inner narrative.” 

It sounded too simple, but I gave it a space to breathe and after a while it made sense.

It’s true. Every April 24, we focus so much on the pain related to it, that we overlook the love woven through our stories.

The love of life that allowed millions to keep going, choosing survival over despair and decay. The love and care shown by people in many places, including Hayasdan, that received Armenian refugees and helped them build new lives. The love survivors kept in their hearts and passed on to new families, in spite of all the loss and horrors they had endured.

Maybe if we focus on that, we might come to see ourselves differently today. And who knows, maybe our story might begin to change right there.

Honoring our ancestors can take the form of a vast communal ritual, or a quiet prayer at night; gratitude to all those who gave you your eyes and feet, your heart and mouth, your mind and spirit, to all those who gave you your voice and life. Remembrance alone no longer feels enough. We must also learn how to be grateful and how to turn our narratives toward the light.

To all the families of survivors, and to all our Mets Parents.
To my beautiful, scared teenager Salbi, running away from Kars, whom I never met, but from whom I inherited these eyes.
Thank you. 

P.S.: What’s your family story and ritual of commemoration? Share them with me.

From discovering love in inherited trauma to the quiet art of navigating Yerevan’s sidewalks, from a sound keeper at public radio to a boba tea shop opened by a newcomer from China, and reflections on how Armenians listen to radio today, this month’s SALT traces an evolving society in the spaces between image and reality, past and present.