“Families expand like ripples in a pond”
The Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat’s family is anything but nuclear. It comprises the aunt, uncle and cousins
who helped bring her up, she writes, as well as elders long buried and generations yet unborn
Sometimes I think my mother and father are parenting me from the grave. A few weeks ago, I dreamt that I was pushing a mini-hatchback up a steep hill, with my mom and dad on either side of me, helping. In the dream, both my parents are the ages they were when they died: my father 69 and my mother 84 years old. After Sisyphean effort was exerted towards getting the car to the top of the hill, the three of us celebrated by contemplating the magnificent view of a beautiful green meadow below.
It was close to the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death and I often found myself grieving for her in my dreams. The Sisyphean twist, though, was new. Although Sisyphus, the dishonourable king of Corinth, twice cheated death, it turned out that he couldn’t cheat life. The punishment for all his murdering and angering the gods was being condemned, day after day, to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it constantly roll down again.
The day after I had this dream, my 78-year-old uncle, my father’s younger brother, wandered out of his house in the early morning hours, alone and bewildered. A neighbour spotted him and alerted my cousin, his daughter. Suddenly – perhaps not so suddenly – he was living, it seemed, the same day over and over again. My uncle’s past and present seemed to have merged. The future was blurred, or had possibly faded altogether. An entire segment of our family history, of which only he had been the caretaker, was no longer available, to us or to him.
Growing up in a multigenerational Haitian family, I never thought of it as “nuclear”. For all the term’s other meanings, either relating to atoms or energy generation, or even war, when applied to families it seemed limiting. My parents and uncle agreed. Families, they believed, expand like ripples in a pond. Besides, migration forces you to remake your family as well as yourself. Family is not only made up of your living relatives, either. It is elders long buried and generations yet unborn, with stories as bridges, and dreams as potential portals.
The idea of my parents communicating from a great distance is not new to me. When my mother and father moved to the United States from Haiti in the 1970s, both to escape a brutal dictatorship and to look for work, they left me and my younger brother behind, in the care of another uncle and his wife. From the time
I was four till I was 12, my parents and I communicated via letters, a weekly phone call, and cassette tapes carried by friends and acquaintances between Brooklyn and Port-au-Prince. I was one of half a dozen children for whom my aunt and uncle cared while our parents were working in other countries. This is what family was supposed to do, to help with things you couldn’t always do on your own, including raising your children. This is what many families are still doing: while mothers and fathers are incarcerated, or held in immigration detention centres, or fighting opioid or other addictions, family members fill the gap.
Family, as my now-silenced uncle used to say, is whoever is left when everyone else is gone. It is whoever is cleaning up at the end of the party or the funeral repast. It is that person whose one nod might comfort you more than hundreds of words from someone else. Family members share and carry your memories with you.
I feel an immeasurable sense of loss when I think of how family members are disappearing from my uncle’s mind. Day by day he has fewer and fewer faces left on which to project his lifetime of memories. I keep wondering if he dreams, and what he might be dreaming about. His own dead parents and siblings? His childhood home in the mountains of southern Haiti? His years spent as a factory worker, cab driver and carservice owner in New York City? His five sons and daughters? The Bible verses he has recited throughout his life? The final years he’d imagined as a proud grandfather embraced by a large brood of grandchildren, possibly even great-grandchildren?
“Family is whoever is left when everyone else is gone. It is whoever is cleaning up at the end
of the party or the funeral repast”
Perhaps his dreams are vivid, like movies of his own making, but he’s probably also experienced hallucinations and night terrors. Like a lot of dementia patients, he might also be suffering from sundowning, evening agitation and restlessness, when familiar shadows grow mysterious. Could he be confused at sunrising, too, driven by dreams into the street, at dawn? To speak of “sundowning” and “sunrising”, though, assigns him much more agency than he appears to have, as if he were Phaethon, dragging the Sun behind him across the sky.
When my parents were dying – my father of pulmonary fibrosis and my mother of ovarian cancer – it was their bodies that failed them. During their final days, they were both able to communicate and get plenty off their chests, as they liked to say.