Que Sera, Sera

Vahe H. Apelian

Doris Day has passed away. I read that she was born on April 3, 1922, and recorded more than 650 songs and that her first musical hit was in 1945, the year my parents were wed. I only remember her iconic song, “Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)”. I have no recollection of having seen the film in which she sang the song. I read that the song was recorded in 1956.

My mother was a contemporary of Doris Day and I associate the song with my mother. Not only she sang it but she had also explained to me the meaning of the song.  I was a ten years old lad in 1956 growing up in a traditional Armenian family, went to an Armenian school, spent my summers in my grandparents’ in Keurkune and spoke only Armenian and had a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic taught in school to our great disdain.

Throughout the passing years, Doris Day’s iconic song has come to my mind and at times I have become reflective remembering my mother singing the song and explaining the song to me.

LtoR: Hovhannes, Khacher, Zvart, Antranig, Karoun(Apelian), and Anna Chelebian

My mother was born in Keurkune, Kessab in that exclusively Armenian enclave where her parents were born and raised as well. Unfortunately, she and her siblings were orphaned at a very early age. The patriarch of the family, Khacher Chelebian, had died at the age of 38 due to pneumonia. Much like her other three other siblings, she was also driven so much so that Rev. Garabed Tilkian made a note of the promising young girl and had arranged for her to study in the famed Aleppo College. WWII broke in her junior and communication with the U.S. became impossible. The school no longer could receive financial assistance. She was forced to quit school in her junior year and returned to the village where secured a teaching position in the Armenian Evangelical School in Kessab, to the dismay of her relatives. Much like the postman’s creed: neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night would keep her from attending to her students on foot threading for almost an hour each school day and each way over the rocky short cut that connected the two villages.

A few years later she was engaged to my father from the same village, married, moved to Beirut after giving a farewell speech to her Sunday school students. She had kept that speech with her. I had it included in her book “I and The Teaching” as the book’s last chapter. 

She would tell me of those years and of the promise that the Aleppo School principal had made for her to have her continue her schooling after graduation. But that never came to be.  She received her HS Diploma the year I received mine from the same school, the Armenian Evangelical College through a special education program the Evangelical community had initiated for teachers like her. Subsequently, she continued her education in the Armenian Department of St. Joseph University in Beirut and received her diploma and she remained student throughout her life and became a learned and a much-beloved teacher of Armenian language, literature. Catholicos Karekin II of blessed memory bestowed upon her the Sant Mesrob Mashdoz ecclesiestical decree. The high school where she taught for a quarter of century named the school’s library after her.

A few years ago I came across a loose paper on which she had written a poem of sorts in the spur of a moment and then crossed it out. She had a tendency to keep her writings in draft and review them over and over again until finalizing it. She had dedicated that short poem to her children,  her two sons, my brother and I and had titled it “The Treasure of the Treasures”. I have attached it here. In English it reads:

Of the treasured dreams of my youth

Would one come by me?

But I forgot the whole world

When they placed you in my lap

On the earth, I found

My heaven, God my witness.

Your mother Zvart

My mother passed away on January 31, 2017, and we had her remains buried a week later, next to her husband. Much like her, I too found much joy and immeasurable sorrow. Nowadays I remember the song she sang and I also say: “Que sera, sera; whatever will be, will be…..”