The last two weeks have been a complete whirlwind for me. Not only have they been two of the busiest so far in terms of schoolwork, my parents were also visiting and my final exams schedule came out. This means that I had to balance loads of assignments with giving my parents attention and figuring out how I am going to spend my last weeks in Ireland. As stressful as they were, these two weeks actually ended up being really amazing and were almost a defining part of this semester.
For me, the best part about my parents’ visit was that they brought my grandmother with them. My grandmother has lived across the street from me for my entire life and we have always been very close. My grandmother immigrated to the US from County Galway when she was 16, almost 60 years ago. Having my grandmother visit me in her native country was incredible for so many reasons. I went to the house that she was born in, where her brother still lives, saw the church that she and my grandfather were married in and ate in a restaurant that she worked in. I got to see a snapshot of her life before she came to America and understand what her formative years looked like.
I also got to meet a number of relatives that I probably wouldn’t have been able to meet if I hadn’t come to Ireland to study. While my parents were visiting, I got too meet two of my grandmother’s sisters and two of her brothers as well as two of her first cousins and three of my second cousins. It was so striking to see how similar my grandmother an her siblings were and how much they even reminded me of their own stateside relatives that they themselves had never met. It was also a very emotional experience because many of them had not seen each other in several years. My grandmother had not been to Ireland in five years and my mom had not been to Ireland since she was 8. This meant that pretty much all of my mom’s aunts and uncles on her mother’s side hadn’t seen her since she was a child. While we were in Ireland, my mom met three of her first cousins for the first time.
The experience of being able to see my grandmother revisit her home made me understand her experience a lot more than I had before. The night before my parents left to go home, my grandmother’s sister stayed over at our hotel and she and my grandmother sat up talking for most of the night just like me and my brother do when I come home from college for breaks. They gossiped with each other like two sisters that hadn’t been apart for years. When it was time for my aunt to leave, they both cried, not knowing when they would see each other again. For the first time, I began to understand just how emotional leaving Ireland to come to America all those years ago must have been. I started to see just how hard it was for my grandmother to spend those first years without her family. Without the experience of having my parents and grandmother come and visit me in Ireland, I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the things that she had done in the way that I do now. The time that I spent with my family added so much meaning to my experience of studying abroad. The fact that I’ve been able to come to my grandmother’s homeland, experience it as a student and understand the Irish diaspora through the context of my peers is the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me and I am beyond grateful that I was able to do this.
Back to where it all began #GWU #GWAbroad