On Easter weekend, I packed up my family and took them on a road trip to Toronto. Normally, I wouldn’t have thought about going away at Easter since it is a weekend with expectations to eat dinner with parents and design Easter egg hunts and other activities for children. However, friends invited us to go along with them, and I try to live my life now seizing opportunities when they appear. It was an opportunity to go on a road trip and spend time with our good friends.
Since we were going in the Toronto-direction, I decided to add on to the trip to give it a special family significance. Of course, we would visit Jaime’s brother in Toronto who had just gotten engaged. Congratulate him in person. But I also thought it would be an opportunity to introduce my kids to the only relatives they have in the country – one of the only few in the whole continent – a distant great aunt and uncle and a third cousin to my children.
We had discovered these relatives in Toronto when I was about twelve years old living in Sydney. My parents’ friends were all doctors and they mentioned one day that a young locum with the same surname as ours had come to work in the hospital for a few weeks. My parents figured out that this young locum happened to be the son of my father’s first cousin in Toronto. We invited T to dinner several times while he was doing his locum in Sydney and got to know him. That summer, my family did a road trip from Sydney to Toronto to visit T’s parents, my aunt and uncle. They took us to their cottage (perhaps that is where my love of cottages began) and to Niagara Falls. It is one of my happiest memories.
About 15 years ago, my parents moved to the Toronto area, where they lived for a few years. I would visit them from Ottawa and we would get together with my aunt and uncle and my cousin T and his family. When my parents moved to Ottawa, they kept in touch with my aunt and uncle, and there were a couple of visits, but I hadn’t seen them in about ten years.
So, when my friends asked if we would like to go to Ottawa, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to go and see my relatives. I deferred to my parents to make the initial calls, but there seemed to be a lot of reluctance on the part of my relatives to see us. I was finally given T’s wife (K)’s phone number and called her. She was warm and friendly and confessed that she and T had been separated since last September. The problem was that my aunt and uncle were terribly upset and wanting to keep it a secret from everyone, including my parents.
I felt bad about unravelling this family secret – though I later learned that this was just the tip of the iceberg – but I understood. Indian parents keep secrets. My parents keep secrets too. I am sure they hadn’t mentioned to my aunt and uncle about my cancer. And, there wasn’t any way out of it at that point. I said we would visit K and her daughter and their new puppies at the very least. If she could persuade T to come by, so much the better. We would also go visit my aunt and uncle separately.
On Good Friday, we set off, stopping at Port Hope where K and her daughter I live, en route to Toronto. T came too, and we all had a lovely visit. They served up tea and banana bread. T impressed Aveen with his soccer knowledge, and Aveen and Amrita were both enraptured with the two golden retriever puppies. The visit flew by and Aveen asked why we had never come to see them before. “I don’t know,” I honestly said.
The next stop was the big city. We met up with our friends, and had a wonderful weekend in Toronto – eating two fabulous dinners together, visiting the amazing new Ripley’s Aquarium, climbing up the CN Tower, and then having Jaime’s brother give us a personalized tour of the ROM (where he is a tour guide). Before leaving Toronto, we had lunch with Jaime’s brother and his fiancée and found out all about their wedding plans.
On our way back, we visited my aunt and uncle. My aunt cried when she saw us. She had prepared a huge meal though we had agreed on only tea. We managed only a few bites since we had already had lunch and had eaten so much throughout the weekend. Aveen and Amrita thought it was hilarious that my aunt is exactly like my mother and my uncle is exactly like my father (even though it is my aunt and father who are the ones who are related). My aunt cried again as we left.
Back in Ottawa, I e-mailed K to thank her for arranging the visit. In reply, she sent me a long e-mail, explaining in detail the cause of her separation from T. It wasn’t what I would have expected – a couple growing apart from each other over the years. No, it was much more dramatic and sad, involving their daughter and terrible things that can happen how those things tear apart a family.
There was something pulling me to visit my relatives in Toronto. I wanted something. I wanted to give my kids a bigger family. In the back of my head, I feel that if anything should happen to me, I want Aveen and Amrita to have as big a support network of family and friends possible. However, I learned that there may have been another reason that I needed to visit. It is I who may be able to give some help and support to this family. It is they who need a big support network right now.
Or maybe it is that we both need each other. We all have our secrets. We all have our sadness. We can support and lean on each other, if only we will talk to each other.
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