Saying Hello While Saying Goodbye

by Natasha McEachron (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find Guyana

To give you a bit of background my mother’s family is from the South American country Guyana. When I speak to a lot of people they generally haven’t heard of the country unless they’re from New York or the Caribbean themselves. Guyana is notable for being the only country in South America where English is the primary language. As a result of Guyana being a former British colony and bordering the Caribbean Sea, it is still considered a part of the Caribbean and the West Indies. My mother, her parents and siblings, and several other extended family members emigrated to America between the 60s to the early 90s. As a child, I visited a few times but several years had passed since my last visit. In 2016, when my grandmother passed away her final wishes were to be returned to Guyana for her burial. I spent a day traveling from Atlanta to Orlando to Georgetown, Guyana and then onward to the New Amsterdam, Berbice area where my mom grew up. Because the trip was somewhat unexpected and planned at the last minute we only spent a few days in the country. This offered just enough time to visit a few family members and attend my grandmother’s funeral. It was an incredibly sad occasion but it offered an opportunity to meet family members as an adult that I had not seen since childhood. I also had the opportunity to reconnect with my great-great-aunt and my grandmother’s mother, my great-grandmother. I began having regular conversations with my great-grandmother over the phone when I returned home. From these conversations, I learned a lot about my great-grandmother and other members of the family who had already passed away before I was born or when I was still quite young. A little more than a year after my grandmother passed away the family found out that my great-grandmother was also terminally ill. My mother and I decided to return to Guyana in hopes of seeing and spending time with her before she passed away. Once more we spent about a day traveling from Atlanta to Miami to Georgetown and then onward to Berbice. Unfortunately, my great-grandmother passed away while we were en route. My mother and I ended up spending three weeks in Berbice as we waited for more family to arrive and for the funeral to take place. My great-grandmother had played a huge role in the lives of and in raising several other family members. Given a bit more advance notice more members of the family were able to travel back to Guyana to mourn and pay tribute to her life. Once again a sad occasion had a silver lining because my great-grandmother’s funeral became an unofficial family reunion. I spent nights at the wake listening to stories about my great-grandmother and other family members. Something you should know is that my great-grandmother was a tiny woman but an absolute ball of fire in human form. There were stories upon stories about events from her life, her shenanigans, disagreements, and church lady beefs. During one trip up the Courantyne coast with my great-great-aunt (my great-grandmother’s sister), we sat in the car and I asked her questions about herself, my great-grandmother, their parents, and other family members that I’d either never met or could no longer remember. I still look back on it as one of the saddest but also one of the happiest and most memorable experiences in my life thus far.