Reunited

Family reunions are wonderful for any number of reasons. Finally, we’re all there together, can check stories and memories backwards and forwards with others. We can see how people have changed, how children have grown. Young cousins, who have a special kind of connection, can play and build memories that will last all the rest of their lives. And perhaps more than anything, we can feel our family-ness, can feel our connection through blood, through time, to those who have come before and those who will come next.

The Garvey family is doing quite a good job at moving through time. We were together, in part, to celebrate the beginnings of this grand family—my grandmother and grandfather, both dead now, who would have turned 90 and 100 this year. Their 7 children, with their 6 spouses, and 19 grandchildren with their 4 spouses, and the 7 great grandchildren are quite a legacy. We were all there, all except Mary Ellen, a cousin who died 15 years ago, and Christine, a cousin who gave birth to her second child less than 6 weeks ago. We made an impressive crowd.

We began our gathering with a dinner for the whole group. My uncle Bill took us back through time with a glimpse at what life was like in 1907 when Grandpa was born. My father told us about a relative who came to the US in the 1860s and what Dad had found out about this fellow’s service in the Civil War. (Patrick Ashe fought at Gettysburg but never came home from the war. We are descended from his sister.) So our reunion began as we thought of our great great grand uncle who died in service of reuniting this country of which he was a new citizen, as we thought of my grandfather, who was born in a world where most houses in the US didn’t have running water or telephones or cars. The idea of time, mortality—the shadows of the past which fade in the daylight of today, of generational layers—these were what began our reunion.

The next night, dinner was complete with birthday cake for my grandma and grandpa. We stood around the cake, my aunt Patty (the eldest) holding her grandson Liam (the youngest present) and blowing out the candles on the cake which represented the genetic lines which connected us all. Then, after a night out at the campy resort, we headed back to the golfcourse McMansion where we were staying to watch old family movies on a flat-screen TV that was bigger than Naomi.

It was here that the movement of time sped up, that the generations marching were not the mythic forefathers long dead but the people in the room and the ghosts of people who had been in rooms like this at other family reunions. It isn’t just my great great granduncle who speeds through time with his horse and musket. It is me (only without the horse).

We watched my aunt Judy’s wedding, saw my Grandmother flirting with the video camera, heard my grandfather’s voice, which has been silent these last 15 years. We saw aunts and uncles--who would become the parents of my generation--as brides and grooms, as parents of babies. They were so young and beautiful and—oh my God—they were me. They were, in some cases, younger than I am now. My father has sleek black hair and beard and is years away from grey. My aunts and uncles are at the beginning of their adult lives. And there I am, in braces and awkward 80s hair. My cousin Kevin, laughing at the image of himself as a little tiny boy dancing at a family reunion 20 years ago, had to leave the laughter to comfort his own baby who was woken in the clamour. My little cousins—whom I remember as babies—stood around watching with their partners, grown now with careers and the beginnings of families of their own.

I was rocked, could feel the wind racing through my hair. I can remember those exact days, remember what I wore and what the weather was like. And now I was watching them on the screen, with my daughter on my lap, the anxieties and unhappinesses of my teens and 20s (and, er, most of my 30s) behind me—and the joys and pleasures, too.

And then a shining girl came onto the screen and the earth moved again, the loss pouring through me. There, dancing to break the tedium of a rainy vacation week, my cousin Mary Ellen moved with sprit and grace. In four years, she would be 19, and in her freshman year of college, and dead. Unlike her little brother, now watching with his own baby in his arms, there would be no growing through the scary early 20s, no finding a love and settling down. The children sat in our laps as we the adults who knew her wept, and she danced obliviously on the screen.

So this family reunion leaves me changed somehow. In the four days of solid work that I’ve done since then (am now in a hotel room in New York city after a gig in Delaware and a two-day workshop in DC), I’m still trying to figure out what to make of it all. There will be more on that another night, from another hotel room in another city. For tonight, St Patrick’s Cathedral glows outside the window, flanked by skyscrapers. It’s the new and the old, together in the same place in the way that buildings can be. It turns out people can be that way, too, only we can’t always know it. I’m flanked by Patrick Ashe and by Mary Ellen and, somewhere, by Naomi and Aidan’s children, too. Who says there’s no such thing as a ghost?