Dedication to Emma

Emma’s life began so incredibly bright. She came into this world swiftly - ready to take things on. She won a blue ribbon from her Grandma for being the earliest potty trained grandchild on the Soorikian side of the family. I bought her some cute undies when she was not quite two and that was it – she was done with diaper line. She had curly brown hair that turned to spun gold in the Rhode Island sun every summer. She had big brown eyes that could express the gamut of emotions - silliness being the one I recall the most. She was willful, she was determined, she was funny, she was stubborn. She was the type of child that you did not have to worry about. My husband, Matt, is of Armenian heritage. Emma would become so proud of this lineage. In Armenian, there is a word - jarbik. It means witty, sharp, street-smart. As a little kid, Matt’s family applied this descriptor to Emma. She truly was jarbik in the full sense of the word and was fiercely loved and adored by her family and friends. As she grew into her teenage years, she discovered her love of working with children, a love for art and became an excellent writer too – these became hallmarks of her young adult life and culminated in the writing of her children’s book. Yet these years were also marked by the shadow of something hard to describe.

Young Emma seemed to have an ineffable handle on life. Kids and adults alike were drawn to her. She maintained this in her more public persona, but as a family, we were not prepared for the turmoil to come. Adolescence seemed to unleash fits of anger, the sudden onset of ADD, difficulty at school, increasing insomnia, and her teary confession to me in the summer of 2014 that, “there’s something wrong with my brain.” I mistook all this for puberty, for depression. I stopped working for a time and sought help from her pediatrician, several psychologists and a psychiatrist. We hung on for dear life in the hopes that this was a phase she would grow out of, that her childhood spark would return. I never could have guessed where it would lead us. Though we managed to temper the chaos by the second half of high school, stomach aches, worsening insomnia, and a migrating set odd physical symptoms took over.

What happened after Emma turned 19 is the stuff of nightmares. By the end of high school, she was struggling mightily with her inability to focus academically and worried about what that would mean for college. She desperately wanted to succeed, yet her brain was not cooperating. She asked to see a psychiatrist again about this and felt relieved that his prescription of a stimulant would help her as she moved on to her dream life studying graphic design in New York City. She started college nervous, but full of hope for her future, and art school was so well suited to her academic inclinations. She excelled and even made the dean’s list. But, in these early months of college, she ended up in the emergency room once for chest pain and once for a terrifying feeling that her rib cage was ajar, the first was ascribed to pulled chest muscles the second to hypochondria and stress. They were a foreshadowing. In her second semester came the pandemic, and seven months later, a psychotic break. Stimulant medication and cannabis use she justified to combat her insomnia, along with her poor choice to try a psychedelic drug in fall of 2020, set the stage for Emma’s eventual diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, but the fire had been smoldering for years. Her many symptoms, physical and psychiatric, prior to this were never investigated as a connected set of clues to one illness, and after her psychotic break, no provider ever asked another question about her early medical history, that is, until the last treatment center we brought her to. The one where she took her own life.