They say family is everything

I grew up in a large extended family. My father had nine brothers and sisters, and when the whole bunch got together – usually only at Hanukkah – there were almost fifty people in the room. My grandparents’ children formed a family club in the late 1940s, and they have met with some regularity every since. Meetings were monthly at first, when everybody knew each other, but the schedule has become lax in recent years.

My parents’ generation is gone, and mine is thinning out. Many of the children of my brothers and sister have left Detroit, as have the majority of my thirty-nine cousins. Their families are scattered, mainly around the United States and Israel. I would be hard pressed to identify the names of the remaining Detroiters, the people who attend family club meetings these days.

It was years ago when I first realized that some of the children of my cousins were so different from me that they might as well have come from a different family, or even dropped from a different planet. They had stayed in North Carolina or Louisiana after going to school there, and the families they had spawned would never know anything about the family that I knew when I was young.

Everything I’ve said so far relates to my father’s family. Our little group did not maintain the same ties with my mother’s family, and I have rarely communicated with more than a few of my cousins on that side. My mother had three brothers and one sister, and in a pinch I would be able to track down the children of only one of them.

The five of us who grew up in my parents’ house were close to each other until my mother died, just over ten years ago. None of us consciously did anything to change our relationships then, but there was an immediate change from that moment on. There were few occasions to bring us all together again. Our children all knew their cousins, but they saw each other only on rare occasions.

In Catherine’s family, the mother’s side dominated. The family I met when they got together for holidays was an assimilated bunch of French-Canadians, none of whom spoke any other French than a joual of the streets. Catherine and her brother were the only ones from her generation who actually spoke the language.

Simone Cunningham, Catherine’s mother, gave all the family parties and was the animating spirit that held them together. After Simone died, it seemed almost as if the cohesive element in the family had been the holiday turkeys and the wine. Catherine was left to do all the work to clean out and close up the house; the cousins showed up only when asked, and then only to see how much of the estate they could lick from the bones. We have seen few of them since, though many of them continue to live in or near Ottawa.

People in the family we are born into are a part of our identity as long as we and they remain alive. But, in tandem, if we are lucky, we also cling to people who share something with us, such as likes and dislikes, or values. They are our de facto family as long as that sharing matters to us.

From the start, with only a few of her close relatives nearby, Catherine and I wanted to be each other’s family. But we realized that if we were going to have anything like the family we had known as children, we would have to do something special with our friends. So we invited people to our house for special occasions, such as Valentine’s Day. On Christmas Eve, we lit the house with candles and asked our non-Christian friends to join us. We all found comfort and joy in each other at a time when much of the world around us had another reason to celebrate.

We tried to create a family atmosphere for all of our friends, many of whom had no family in Ottawa, and some of whom never spoke about their blood relatives at all. Some were continents away from anybody close, and others had been abandoned or betrayed by the people who should have been closest to them. We wanted to create an atmosphere of warmth and love for all of us together.

When Catherine and I went on the road to ask people about love two years ago, a number of interviewees were passionate about the central place of family in their lives. More than one person told us that family is everything. They insisted that life is empty without loving people around you.

It upset many people in Ottawa that our move to Kelowna would mean the end of our bringing people together. For us, too, this was one of the biggest negatives when we weighed pros and cons. We could only hope to be able to bring a new group of people together in our new home.

As it turns out, in the few short months we have been in Kelowna, we have met a significant number of wonderful and interesting people, who have given us their time, attention, and consideration. It’s a family in the making.

For Catherine’s recent birthday, she invited some of those new friends to a party at a downtown restaurant. About a dozen came, along with one cousin who lives nearby.

There was an ironic twist to the evening. For the last couple of years of his life, Catherine’s father lost all awareness of her birthday. She was more than disappointed when she always went out of her way to celebrate his birthday and he could not even acknowledge the day when her turn came. This year she decided to pay for her birthday party with some of the money he gave her before he died early in 2015. So, in effect, Jack Cunningham paid for the evening.

It was the old family unwittingly celebrating the new one.