Stories My Father Never Finished Telling Me: Living with the Armenian legacy of loss and silence

As an eight-year-old in 1960, Douglas Kalajian watched his father break down in tears as a man on television spoke about the slaughter of Armenians in their native land nearly a half century before. His father rushed out of the room, and his mother stopped him from following. “Don’t ever ask him about what happened,” his mother said. “It’s too sad.” This is how he was handed the Armenian legacy of loss and silence that led to a life-long series of interrupted conversations between father and son. More than 20 years after his father death, the author continued to piece together the jagged bits his father shared in order to make sense not only of his father’s life but of his own identity as an Armenian born in America.