A Letter to My Long-Dead Armenian Great-Grandmother
3.20.2024

Dear Sharoug,

        I’ve just read the news about the imminent mass starvation and the UN’s horrible horoscope about the impending holocaust on the other side of the ocean. I imagine my tears flowing down my cheeks all the way to the Euphrates River -- rise the Euphrates, what do we do, Sharoug? What’s to be done about the Palestine question?
        Last year I finally read Virginia Woolf. A century before it inflicted its moral injury on me, Mx. Woolf was howling about how dangerous and oppressive the field of psychiatry can be. How can she still be so dead-on in her scathing critique after 100 years? It’s shameful her words didn’t plant more seeds. Or maybe it’s shameful how few psychiatrists have anything to say about her, because we’re too busy saying “serotonin” and “99214” -- biology and billing codes, slaves to big pharma. I think of Mrs. Dalloway in her elite bubble -- the Woolf’s biting wit about how even people who pretend to care, don’t:

No, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?) — the only flowers she could bear to see cut. 

        It’s Septimus Smith’s character with whom I want to concern myself, the war veteran with PTSD and psychosis who jumps out the window to avoid involuntary commitment at the dashing bougie hands of Dr. (Sir) William Bradshaw. It is not that Septimus wants to die (“Life was good,” he says at the very end); rather, he rationally chooses suicide because he prefers freefall to incarceration. His last words were to tell Dr. Bradshaw “I give it you” — that is to say, as I see it, I am sacrificing this powerless sack of meat so that I maintain the sanctity of my soul. 
        There is no connection between Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith in the novel. The only space in which the two of them collide is when Clarissa is annoyed at the debbie-downer chatter at her party when someone gossips in passing about a man who flung himself out the window. It is as if she is spared the burden of bearing witness to severe mental illness and psychic suffering. She lives in an elite, privileged bubble and wants to stay in it, so she russells up an epiphany about how extraordinary it is to be alive, and returns to the party to embrace the realm of the living. She assigns Septimus’s death an egocentric meaning that misses the entire point of what actually happened. She stays trapped in her bubble and her soul remains obscured, while Septimus has found clarity and freedom. 
        Stanley Kunitz said, live in the layers, not in the litter. Between you and me, Sharoug, are three layers fortifying the bridge. Every day I try to stay in alignment with my matrilineage. If I can find the space between the layers, taste the grayest of rainbows by focusing directly on the ambiguous nuance — this is where the magic happens. The sweet uncertainty. Your first cousin once removed, a man named Jack Kevorkian, saw the nuance and put his ass on the line to give other people a choice. They put him in a cage, where he put himself on a hunger strike  —which you could say is a pendulum swing away from genocidal starvation, but what a difference it makes, who’s making the call!
        For those who saw Septimus in free-fall, I hope at least one of them knew they were in fact watching a victory dance for his soul. 
        Your daughter, my grandmother, used to mis-use the phrase no news is good news. I remember her walking by someone reading a newspaper, and saying no news is good news! as a way of commiserating about how many terrible things we read about in any given newspaper. I later came to understand that the saying means “if you haven’t heard anything yet, you might as well assume nothing bad has happened,” which actually has nothing to do with the actual news. In other news, the U.N. says we’re about 2 months away from 1.1 million people starving to death, Sharoug—
        It hurts to look back on your behalf, Great Grandma Sharoug, and zoom in on your family and friends amid stacks of bodies, stacks on stacks, but I’m here because by the Source’s grace you weren’t among them! 
        Last year, I finally read Kurt Vonnegut. Rabo Karabedian’s old man was trapped in one of those genocide stacks one day. Maybe he was one of the few who’d had a meal in his mouth in the previous week or two and that gave him the strength, after hiding from bullets, to stand up. He happened to notice gems slipping out of a dead woman’s mouth, where she’d presumably smuggled them -- along with pearls of wisdom grown from the pain inside its shell, stenciled in layers so we can rise up and make our own choices — and his choice was to steal the gems and sell them to get on a boat to Ellis Island. That’s how his people made it to this side of the ocean
        Remember when you were on that boat and your boobs shriveled up and my infant grandma Ovsanna was starving starving begging you to feed her — I myself, as a new mother failing at breastfeeding yet too stupid not to give up trying, have looked into a baby’s eyes and felt the desperate helplessness — the I know you’re starving but if you can’t latch, I can’t feed you, if you can’t hold on, I can’t get you what you need — the man in Gaza I heard interviewed on NPR last week, the one who said when his kids stopped running to him after hearing the bombs, because they had figured out there was nothing he could do to help them — he said that was the moment he regretted his choice to become a father in the first place, because who was he to bring them into a world from which he could not protect them? — I remember looking into my newborn’s pleading eyes saying I need food and you can’t help me, I think of what I felt then compared to what you must have felt on that boat— 
        and the sound of babies crying from starvation — I want to tune it out, zoom back out to my present day bubble where I have all the Thin Mints and Frooty Pebbles my kids could ever need—
        But I’ll look back for you, Sharoug, because you have something to say through me and I prayed as a child to make me a channel of somebody’s peace — I’ll circle back to the story, to the part where some other nursing mother on that boat loaned your daughter her breastmilk. Of course, loan is a strong word because she did not expect a return — it was an act of kindness that allowed my grandmother to survive, and now I am here to share this joyful story as a checkpoint to the opposite end of the century’s pendulum—
        Andrea Gibson said even if the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is — the truth is humanity has learned about as much as psychiatry has learned in the last 100 years, that is to say, almost nothing — because all I see are stacks on stacks of starving bodies yet again and—
        Aaron Bushnell is a present-day Septimus. In his self-immolation he chose to make himself a spectacle of what hell looks like in churchgoing minds — a never-ending fire that burns burns burns just to remind everyone within nose-shot just what they could have done better—
        I think of the patient I lost to suicide 10 years ago, the one who was dealt a devastating blow and (because I hadn’t planted enough of a seedling of trust in him) he didn’t pick up the phone to call me that day, he picked up a gun instead — when I found out he’d died, I thought immediately of an idea I’d had a few months before that but ended up dropping, when I knew he had to move all his shit to a new apartment and didn’t have anyone to help him — I thought I’d bring a few able-bodied friends and extend helping hands to him that weekend, but as a doctor I’ve had problems with boundaries before so I decided to be careful not to do anything wrong, and I did nothing wrong but I also did nothing — and what’s to be done, Sharoug? Who knows what memories may have reached out to him in his darkest moment, if only I had done more—
        I think about the Baha’is celebrating Naw-Ruz today in their multi-million-dollar gardens 20 miles away from the Palestinians — they won’t be lending sugar to their starving neighbors or even sending a can of beans -- but they’ll tell you all about how all religions (but especially theirs) are unified in professing some version of The Golden Rule: do unto your neighbor what you what have done to you. For years I interpreted this commandment as “just don’t be an asshole” but now I see it’s about literally what will you do to help your neighbor—  
        Doing no harm on thy neighbor is great — But have you tried breastfeeding someone else’s baby on a boat? My kids are alive today because Sharoug’s neighbor leant some sugar knowing she wouldn’t get the same in return but also knowing that mattered not at all, because all that matters in this system is kindness—
        I can dream of it — I can be of use to it and rely upon it, knowing it averages out in the end to give and take, I guarantee it — that’s because the universe always finds balance. Give a penny, take a penny, abolish the very concept of pennies and currency and focus on the now, what’s currently happening is 1.1 million Palestinians terminally ill from imminent starvation — Oh, what’s to be done, Sharoug?
        One of the stories my mom has told me about you is the weird way you pronounced the word “potato.” Like PO-tato, so we’d sing you say potato, I say PO-tato and laugh our asses off, meanwhile there’s a potato famine in Ireland and hot potatoes be droppin like flies, droppin like all the Palestinian kids about to die— 	
        What to do, Sharoug? If we drop hot potatoes maybe gravity will turn them into wrecking balls that leave cracks in the pavement so light can slip through, how else could a flower grow between two rocks? The dandelions in the sidewalk cracks didn’t call themselves into being — Andrea Gibson said I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind and when it did it scattered a thousand seeds—
        Sometimes balance looks like one thought of starvation for a thousand about liberation. Septimus like Aaron Bushnell like a stockbroker on the 100th floor one morning in September 2001—
        We all remember where we were that day — I was a med student in the infectious diseases lab and I wonder if Lauren Selph remembers me for that same sad reason I remember her; we learned about 3,000 people dying together as we counted colonies of bacteria in petrie dishes— 
        I went home and watched the footage, over and over, of people hurling themselves out the window and who among us would call that “suicide”? You have to look at what that person is escaping in order to see what I mean, and then maybe you can see the thousand seedlings of a dandelion losing its mind in the wind and minding the gap between now and the vine that will swing it to the spot under two rocks where a stem can bust out because somehow light and water have gotten in—
        My mama likes to point to a quote from Obama about how, on days like the day same sex marriage was legalized nationwide, slow and steady effort is rewarded when justice arrives like a thunderbolt. Hope doesn’t look like Obama to me though and what thunderbolts giveth, they can also taketh away — see Dobbs v. Jackson and its grasp on my uterus. But it’s always a pendulum, and we don’t got a thing if we ain't got that swing—

Lindsay-Rose Dunstan, MD (she/they) is a queer psychiatrist, prison/police abolitionist, and founder of Uncaged Minds, a psychoeducational resource tailored for folx with neurodivergent conditions and marginalized identities. Her work has been published in leftist and mental health journals, poetry anthologies, and Slate Magazine. She lives in Detroit.