A breakdown of the feelings associated with a family gathering.
Gathering–whether it’s with family, friends or any group of people that mean a lot to you—can leave you feeling everything from grateful to a strange sense of sadness. It is truly beautiful what gathering does to you, and I want to emphasize a recent gathering I had with my dad’s side of the family for my grandma’s 88th birthday that left me feeling all of those things.
To give you some background, I come from a large family. My grandparents had four kids, my dad being the youngest, so naturally, that comes with a lot of extended family. There are a total of 12 cousins—16 if you include the “honorary cousins” who have married in. Let me preface by saying that marrying into this family can be a lot, especially difficult if you aren’t extremely outgoing. I mean, when you walk into our grandma’s basement, your name is being chanted by everyone in the room and you are being bombarded with hugs from every direction. So, if you are not about that lifestyle, it can feel slightly intimidating to join the Makinster Family. All that being said, as a family, we are extremely close and our dynamic is consistently upbeat.
Until COVID times, all four families made it a priority to be at Grandma Mak’s house for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and an annual family reunion every year, almost without fail. As everyone does, we cousins have grown up, gotten busier and some of us even moved across the country. Since I’m the youngest, I usually still make it to Grandma and Gramps’ house, but it is unrealistic for a lot of the cousins to come more than once a year, if at all.
This weekend, we celebrated my grandma’s 88th birthday and 22 of us were there—the closest we’ve been to the whole family being together in years. Much of my time there was spent just looking around at the beauty of so many familiar faces in the same room again. Of course, I made my rounds to chat with each of them and catch up, but I also sat at the head of the U-shaped table, where I had the perfect view of every person.
Although I sat there feeling an overwhelming wave of love and gratitude that we had all come together for our sweet grandma’s birthday, I couldn’t help but tear up a little thinking about how far each one of us had come in the past few years. That is the beauty of gathering. It brings out the realization that people grow, and sometimes that means you are not in their lives as much as you once were. The people I used to see four times a year, I now see maybe once every year—for some, every other year for others. It’s a bittersweet feeling of truth: gathering reminds you not just how much you love the people around you, but also what it is like to miss the people you can’t see as often as you would like to.
Maybe that’s why gathering matters so much. No matter how rare those moments of reunion may become, they remind us how love can stretch across time, states and even countries. That even when the weight of life feels heavy and it feels like it’s been way too long since seeing each other, the Mak Pack will always find their way back. Back to Grandma and Grandpa Mak’s basement, filled with laughs, hugs and chanting names. In that Space, even if only for an afternoon, it feels like no time has passed at all.