Opinion: Family reunions can be solution to loneliness epidemic

In January, three dozen of my relatives descended on Canton at a massive rental house for our second family reunion of the 21st century.

We played games, told jokes, ate too much and celebrated moments of life, including a niece’s quince, a Latino coming-of-age ceremony for girls when they turn 15.

Despite my fears that politics might ruin the event because a few relatives hold strong opposing viewpoints, the only real drama I saw revolved around whether a backyard area for activities had, in fact, been cleared of dog droppings. Yes, it had.

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Credit: De la Torre family

Credit: De la Torre family

All these memories came back to me when I read my AJC colleague Ernie Suggs’ brilliant and heartfelt story about Black family reunions in the metro Atlanta area.

Suggs documented the history of these reunions, dating back to when recently freed Black Americans placed newspaper ads to find family members who became separated because of the domestic enslavement trade prior to the end of the Civil War.

Today, these family reunions are essential to preserving history, culture and memory.

3 decades between first reunions and recent ones

These same factors were why my maternal Cuban American baby boomer relatives designed our first family reunion in the 1990s.

We chose places that were easy to get to for relatives who lived around the Southeast and the Midwest.

The inaugural one was held in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and then in Tampa, Florida.

Then, they just stopped. We family members still gathered for baptisms, weddings and funerals, but the time together was fleeting and sometimes superficial. Life got in the way.

Then, over the next few decades, our maternal grandparents — the patriarch and matriarch of our family — passed away, making us feel a little lost.

Leave it to the ingenuity of the youth to save the day. A couple of our millennial cousins — one was a small boy in the 1990s and the other was not even born yet for those early reunions — decided they wanted to revive the tradition.

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They roped me — a Gen Xer — in, and following a brief COVID-related delay, we held our reunion in my then-hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, hosting three dozen people ranging from toddlers to a nonagenarian.

We consumed Nashville hot chicken and wore our dark blue reunion T-shirts for a family photo in a park. The long weekend ended with an awards ceremony where everybody got a prize, effectively, for showing up.

Three years later, we thrived from each other’s company in Georgia. The next one — most likely in South Carolina — is in the works.

Epidemic of loneliness calls on us to connect more deeply

My family always valued togetherness even in moments of tension.

When my grandparents decided to leave Cuba in the early 1960s, the adults had to stay because of a bureaucratic hurdle.

However, they chose to send their three children — including my mother, the oldest among them — to Mexico City so they would start on their path to a new life.

My grandparents thought they would be reunited with their children in just few weeks. It took more than eight months filled with despair, bad dreams and weeping.

That period of separation, however, made their reunion even sweeter. They eventually moved to the U.S., and the family expanded over the subsequent six decades.

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Many of us moved around the U.S. — and some out of the country — but efforts were made to see one another regularly. Time together meant everything, and my immediate family would make the trek every summer from Chicago to Tampa to visit my grandparents.

As we grew older, life happened again, and the get-togethers were sporadic.

The death of my grandmother in 2019 became a turning point.

When COVID emerged in 2020, the virus created so much grief, but it also became a time for my relatives to reconnect and grow closer. That year, we celebrated my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary in a Zoom ceremony in which the couple marched down their hallway to Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.”

So, when we had the chance to come together for the 2022 reunion, we relished each moment, each meal and each conversation.

That pull felt even stronger this year in Canton. By that time, my parents had moved to Georgia, and I took the Monday after the family reunion to interview with Editor-in-Chief Leroy Chapman for my job as AJC opinion editor in Midtown Atlanta. I felt the pull of my family.

At a time when the U.S. suffers from a national loneliness epidemic, finding connection in community has never been more important.

I felt that message through Suggs’ writing, and it made me look forward to my next family reunion.

David Plazas is the opinion editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and serves on the editorial board. Email him at david.plazas@ajc.com.

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