One of the things that makes my family remarkable is also one of the most challenging things about my family.
My extended family is full of immigrants, and people who moved to different places, which have led my family to settle all around world, and many of us marrying people outside our race, culture, region, and religion. This has created a family that is diverse in many ways which has enriched all of our lives.
The problem with this is that unlike a family that all lives within the same city, or the same state, we don’t see each other as often as we would like. This is really tough. When I chose to go to college at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago, I had only had a vague idea of how hard it would be away from the rest of my family in Seattle. However, if I had I never made that choice and pushed through the homesickness, I would have never met my wife, and my three wonderful children would not exist.
We’ve done the best we can with this situation. Usually about three or four times a year we travel to Seattle and most years my parents come out to the Midwest to visit us. It’s an important part of our lives and my children really look forward to seeing my parents and spending time with their aunt and uncle (my brother), and their two cousins.
As Ollie has gotten older, he articulates more how much he looks forward to these trips back to Seattle. It’s really interesting. Even though, Ollie only sees his cousins a couple times a year, he talks about them a lot. Recently he was playing around with this idea that his brothers and cousins would all live together as adults and be in a band together. It’s really wonderful.
Like Ollie, I was looking forward to visiting during our Spring Break which is this week. As things progressed a couple weeks ago, it became clear that this was not going to happen. I was talking to my mom on the phone every couple days and I think we both knew that we had to cancel our trip to Seattle, but we didn’t say it out loud. When I finally brought it up, as I suspected, my mom agreed it wasn’t a good idea. She was holding out hope that somehow things would turn around but she knew there was no hope of that. I can’t remember a moment besides the time around her mother’s death that my mom was this sad about something.
The week school was cancelled I was eating dinner with Ollie. Diana was with the other boys doing something, so it was just us the two of us at the table. As he had done in the past weeks, he excitedly brought up our trip to Seattle and how he was going to play with his cousins and see my parents new condo.
In my most clear, and most gentle way possible, I explained that because of this virus, we would not be able to go to Seattle, and that we would see this part of our family as soon as we could during the summer.
I’ve seen Ollie sad when he breaks a toy, when we tell him he can’t watch more television, and when we don’t have time to play a game that he’s been looking forward to playing. This was different. There was no whining, or yelling, or an expression of anger. There was a quiet whimper of heartache and a look of loss as tears slowly filled his eyes. As my words dashed away months of envisioning wonderful moments of joy with his family, a little bit of the light in his spirit dimmed.
I don’t think I broke his heart, but it felt like I did.
I told Ollie that I was sad too, and I gestured for him to come towards me. He left his seat and climbed up into my lap and we cried together in silence holding onto one another.
Since that moment Ollie hasn’t talked about his cousins as much as he did before. I’m sure he will bring them back to mind soon and oncee again find the joy of thinking ahead of times they will spend together.
One day Ollie will understand how our lives are better because we live apart from members of our family. But right now, he doesn’t. Ollie just misses his family, and wonders when he will see them again.
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