My mother is a doctor. She’s spent her life taking care of others, carrying things without showing them. We’re very close, her and I.
Last year, I took her to Florence for her birthday. Just the two of us. One evening, we were talking quietly, and she started telling me stories.
When she was studying medicine in France, she had to leave me in Haiti for a few months with my grandparents. She told me about the distance, the longing. I was listening to someone I’ve known my whole life describe a chapter of her life I’d never really imagined.
Then she told me about the earthquake.
In January 2010, my sister and I left for Canada. My mother stayed in Haiti with my father to help the injured. What she had never told me was what she felt when we boarded that plane.
She told me she felt empty. A deep absence. The house without her two children. She stayed to help, kept working, never said a word.
She never came to live in Canada. We are her life, and we live thousands of kilometres away.
She had been carrying that for years. In silence.
What struck me that evening was that she wasn’t saying it with bitterness. She said it as a fact. As if she had long since accepted that some things go unsaid, that you carry them and that’s that. And I realized I had never thought to ask. Not out of indifference, but because I assumed I already knew. We think we know the people we love. We stop asking them the real questions.
You can know someone your whole life and not know what they went through for you. Not because they’re hiding something, but because you’ve never created the space to ask.
That trip was exactly that. A space. And stories that had been waiting years to be told.
Since that evening in Florence, I ask her more questions. About her childhood, about her own parents, about what she dreamed of doing when she was young. I realize there’s still a lot I don’t know. And that you don’t need to wait for a trip to start asking.
Yann, co-founder of LifeMemory
