A problem shared is a problem halved
With the Antipodean propensity to dogear a passport, our familial relationships inevitably change. Bound together at first by living quarters and later by relatively tight geography, the big migration to distant lands adds an element to relationships that, till then, have stayed alive with the help of physical closeness. Once we leave one another’s sides; how we communicate, when we communicate, how much we communicate - it all has to morph to fit the rigidity of timezones and technology.
We can be in contact with home almost-daily, but if, like me, we’re never sharing anything more than a meme or a snap of your dinner from a Greek island, these communications are no better than a Facebook status. But this never feels strange at the time. It feels exhausting and sisyphean to do anything else.
“I have never really considered myself a family person. I always leaned into the notion that my friends were my actual family and that my family were the nice people I would go home to hang out with at Christmas.”
In fact, until the end of 2020, my immediate family hadn’t all lived in the same country since I was at high school. To include extended family would make it even longer than that. A lifetime probably.
Then, with the pandemic raging on, one by one everyone came home. Cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters, each stinting in a different quarantine hotel and all of us united by a common, low-burning grief. The grief of missed opportunity, sheltering from illness, adopted cities left behind, relationships ending, and jobs on hold. For the first time, every single person was here.
For someone like me who cowers from long periods of time spent together as a family this was mildly painful. These were not people who knew what my life had been like for the past 15 years. Do I now have to fill them in on the minutiae of my brain, my tics, my beliefs? Like most people pulled home by that beyond our control, I didn’t have two oceans as an excuse not to go to someone’s barbecue anymore. Instead, I was very much in their line of vision, living at home, utterly available.
To make matters worse, for my large Irish Catholic family, the unwanted-but-expected happened. The previous low-burn, in-the-distance grief turned fiery and moved closer to home when the matriarch of our global, patchwork family, declined rapidly in health one grey weekend. All of a sudden the hypotheticals we had ruminated on for years became real and she needed round-the-clock care. A woman of principle and independence, the only request she really had was to die at home.
And so we rallied, coming together to feed and change and move and water and administer medicine - always family and now loyal colleagues with a united mission to bring dignity to our shared love.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, the occasional hangout that before held little interest for me, was eclipsed by new living arrangements: six-to-10 women sharing a single room. Avoiding these people was not an option. Keeping my most private thoughts to myself was not possible. The big brain worries that come off the back of the worst year of one’s life, now splayed on the table in front of me, with little privacy to use as a shield.
Unexpectedly, this very circumstance that I had been avoiding, became the antidote to my heartache. Without needing to explicitly explore all the unique anguish that made up most of my moods, I found it was possible to find solace - unspoken and through repetitive labour. Being guided silently through discomfort and sadness, boredom and hysteria, the strength and compassion I needed from the rest of the world was found within, shown to me by unexpected guides.
This is not the way of most Anglo-Saxon families. It was plainly evident in this large Irish Catholic family made up of people who are brutally honest and not always emotional role models. But somehow, under the united goal and the lowered inhibitions, something shifted.
Three cousins, two aunties, a sister, a mum: everyone was welcomed into the fold but never pushed. Lifting one another up to places they didn’t know they could go, stepping in and stepping up to relieve each other of the business-as-usual burdens that, once important, were now necessary trivialities, to halve problems by sharing them and to build the foundations of not only family but of friendship. With every individual player’s biggest concerns on show, there was a built-in panel, right there, ready to tackle it.
We gave and received advice, we solved one another’s work woes, we shared stories, we heard stories about those around us that we shamefully should have already known. We shared experiences, at one point two of us shared a toothbrush.
It taught me a lesson in how if you ask for help, and you don’t even need to look that far, it will always be there. If you shine a little light down a dusty, disused alleyway, maybe what’s there isn’t frightening but it just might be something strong enough to glue you back together.
Words — Hannah Finnigan-Walsh
Image — via CLO
