I thought we’d always have Armenia
My mother took me everywhere—across Europe, the United States, the Middle East and North Africa. Everywhere she took me, she took care of me, ensuring my safety, comfort and happiness. That’s what mothers are meant to do, of course. And then daughters, when their mothers can no longer take care of them—or themselves—take care of their mothers, make them comfortable, keep them safe, and take them to meaningful places.
On our way to the hospital, a month or so before COVID blew up, we were waiting in the drive-thru of a Dunkin Donuts in Tamarac, Florida. I found myself longing for a time when my mother and I traveled to faraway, fascinating places: London, Paris, Athens, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo and Istanbul.
This was a time when my mother was brazen and healthy, rattling off French, Arabic, Greek, Turkish or English to tour and hotel operators, train and bus ticket agents, restaurant staff and flight attendants. She sat beside me on a summer day in Nazareth, the city of her birth, chatting on a porch with some Palestinian-Armenian Christians who knew of her father, the Armenian pharmacist who had owned the city’s first apothecary in the early 1940s, before the family moved to Jerusalem.
I think of the time she helped me out of a pyramid in Giza with her four-foot nine-inch frame—petite but commanding—pushing through the people going up a narrow ramp to descend to the exit, because I couldn’t breathe properly (turns out I’m a bit claustrophobic). Or how she refused to take me to a disco in Athens, because we had to get up early to go to the Acropolis, and she knew I would want to sleep in if we were out late.
Or when she admonished the Parisian tour guide for “skipping” Versailles, because there wasn’t enough time.
“How would you like it if you came to my country for a tour, and we bypassed an important historical monument?” my mother asked the twiggy, red-lipped guide in almost perfect French. Though which country my mother identified with at the time—Lebanon, Palestine, the United States, Jordan, Armenia— I wasn’t sure.
The French woman, in her mini skirt and pointy heels, responded: “France is the most beautiful country in the world. I have no reason to visit any other country.”
How wrong she was, I thought, as I pulled out of the Dunkin Donuts drive-thru, placing a paper bag between my mother and me. At a stop sign, my 87-year-old mother, shrunken in the passenger seat, reached for the bag marked with the DD logo. She opened it cautiously, the way an apprehensive child turns the handle of a Jack-in-the-box toy. Her movements were slow—more from age than anticipation–but curious, even if she would forget that moment mere minutes later.
But I would remember it—and all the trips we took together. For now, they were stored in my memory. While I knew I was fortunate and privileged to have experienced all those places with my mother, I was disheartened, knowing there was one trip we would never take together, one country left that we would not share, one last language my mother spoke fluently that she would not use to guide me—asking questions like, where can we catch a ride to Mount Ararat, what time does the Genocide Museum close, or how do we get to Tatev Monastery?
It was on my imaginary agenda to ride the Wings of Tatev with her, despite my fear of heights. After all, when in Armenia…even if only in my head.
My mother never lived in Armenia. She didn’t even live in Turkey, where her mother was born. My grandmother eventually fled with her family in 1922, albeit splintered from the men who had gone into hiding and an older sister sent to a convent—from the interior of the country to the coastal city of Smyrna, seeking safety in its largely Greek community.
But a few months after their arrival, the fire and destruction of the city tore them apart again. My grandmother and one of her sisters were loaded onto a boat bound for Greece— a journey that saved her life, but also scarred her for the rest of it.
There was one journey I always thought I’d take with my mother. I had dreamed about it for years. As a child, I identified more with my father’s Palestinian roots than with my Armenian ones—and even those I tried to downplay, growing up in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., during the Reagan years. But when I went to college and began traveling more on my own, I started exploring my Armenian heritage and history in more detail. I told my mother that, one day, I wanted to go to Armenia with her.
I pictured us arriving in the center of Yerevan, planning our excursions from an outdoor café near Republic Square (in my fantasies, it was always warm in Yerevan), sipping strong dark ‘soorj’. It was one of the few Armenian words I remembered from a couple of sultry summers spent in Venice, a city with a strong Armenian history, attempting to learn my mother’s mother tongue. Now, it seemed the only coffee I’d be drinking with her would come from a strip mall Dunkin’ Donuts off a Florida highway en route to the hospital.
On that quiet-before-the-storm day in early 2020, before I would go back to New York City and lockdown, my mother peered into the Dunkin’ bag through large bifocal glasses covering half her face.
“What’s this?” she asked, pulling out the sticky-sweet pastry.
“It’s a coffee roll,” I answered. I marveled at how she observed it, turning it over in her wrinkled hand and bringing it up to her nose like it was a foreign object.
“Taste it,” I said.
She brought the pastry to her lips and took a small bite. I could see the sugary, artificial cinnamon flavor hit her taste buds—her eyes opened wide, and her mouth formed a puzzled but satiated smile.
“Where did you get it?” she asked, looking it over again.
“At the donut shop, right back there.”
“You mean, I can just go in there and give them my money and they give me this?”
“Yes, mama.”
She seemed pleased with my answer and went back to nibbling the coffee roll as I drove toward the hospital.
“Where is Baba?” she asked. It was about the eighth time she had asked since we left less than an hour ago.
“At—the—hospital,” I said, sounding out each word. “That’s where we’re going now.”
“Baba is in hospital…” she said, uncertain. Was it a question or a statement? It didn’t really matter. In a few minutes, she would ask again, and I would patiently reply again. It was a conversation we’d been having for days, switching from Arabic to English.
Though Armenian was my mother’s first language, she raised us in Arabic, my father’s language. She never spoke Armenian to my siblings and me, saying it was a dead language, Arabic was more important to learn, and we were never going to live in Armenia, so what was the point?
“Yes, Baba is in the hospital,” I repeated, taking her statement as a question. Or maybe I was answering myself in some way. “And we’re going to visit him now. He had surgery.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
This time, it was a question, one I had answered several times already to the best of my knowledge. But to be fair, we hadn’t really told her the whole story.
My eldest brother had called me a few days after the world rang in the new decade. He said our father hadn’t told my mother yet.
“Why? Because she won’t remember?”
“Oh, I think she would remember this,” he said, chuckling, either from nervousness or my tasteless joke. My brother spent decades as an ER doctor in North Carolina, and while he didn’t have extensive experience in memory conditions, he knew enough to believe she would remember my father was dying.
“I can’t believe no one told you,” he continued. “I assumed you knew.”
As the youngest of four, it was not uncommon for me to be the last to know of things going on in the family. I accepted it as a cultural and somewhat educational thing—I studied literature and languages while my siblings were all in the medical or healthcare field, so my parents thought there was no need to bother me with unnecessary medical details.
Once, when my parents were living in Jordan and I was away at boarding school, my mother was hit by a car crossing one of the ridiculous traffic circles in Amman. It should be noted that most, if not all, of the traffic roundabouts in the Jordanian capital have been eliminated and turned into traffic light intersections.
But I was never told that she stayed in hospital for weeks and had months of physical therapy. Years later, I’m home from college, and we’re at an intersection when my dad says, “This is where your mother was struck by that car and went flying up into the air, flipping two or three times before she hit the ground.”
Like the details of that accident, any health-related information about my parents rarely trickled down to me, and by the time it did, the seriousness had already passed.
But not this time.
“Well, what is she going to say when he’s not around?” I asked my brother. He only said that, at some point, someone would have to tell her. The thing is, we were probably going to have to tell her several times.
“He had a tumor and they removed it,” I said.
“A tumor?” she said, startled all over again.
“Whain?” she asked, reverting to the Arabic for ‘where.’ But in whichever language she asked, it was always difficult.
“Fee teezo,” I responded, using the colloquial Arabic expression for “in one’s derriere.”
She gave me a tender, childlike smile, and we both laughed a much-needed laugh. Hearing my aging, health-failing, memory-losing, world-weary mother laugh so genuinely, I forgot for a bit where we were and why.
I had imagined that, one day, we would laugh like that in Yerevan over soorj and gata (Armenian coffee cake) during a break from touring. Instead, we were joking over drip coffee with non-dairy creamer and a generic coffee roll in South Florida.
But I was going to hold onto that memory for as long as I could—if not in Armenia, then in my heart.
Mona Ghuneim
Latest posts by Mona Ghuneim (see all)
- I thought we’d always have Armenia - May 7, 2025
Excellent piece of writing. Great talent!