I was glad to see my cousins. I hadn’t known many of them as a child, as visits with my mother’s large family were infrequent. As kids, in their early twenties, she and her brother Glen had moved away from Cajun country to try out life in the “big city,” New Orleans—where they both stayed and made their lives and where my mother had me and my sisters. We saw a lot of my uncle, but my mother’s other siblings and their children were hundreds of miles away, so my sisters and I got to know them only intermittently. It was only in the aftermath of Katrina that I connected with some of them in very moving ways. I’d flown down to stay with my mother and father, soon to pass, as they evacuated from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Lake Charles. In those weeks, especially after my father’s death (his body just couldn’t stand the strain of the evacuation, having lived with Parkinson’s for well over a decade), I got to know this part of my family—their strength, their generosity, their care for one another. Some of them had taken their pirogues (small outrigger boats) with them into the flooded city to help out as they could. Good people. They were kind to my mother in her time of loss, sheltering her and grieving with her. I remain in their debt.

This visit, nearly a decade later, was a chance to reconnect, but also to grieve anew, as one of my aunts had just passed about seven months previously. Aunt Put, we called her. Like my mother, a feisty character, larger than life. She’d been the postmistress in her community, and she hated the word postmistress. She was the postmaster. I felt for my cousin’s loss.

So this gathering both celebrated our reunion and marked the transitions of time through which we all try to make our lives. That marking took a particular form as my mother, uncle, aunt, and their families sat around my cousin Dana’s kitchen island, sifting through hundreds and hundreds of photographs that my aunt had taken and collected. There may have been a thousand pictures—boxes of them. My cousins wanted to label them, calling on my mother’s generation to identify people they didn’t know. So, in between bouts of eating slow-cooked and spicy food, everyone sifted through the photographs, some eighty years old, scrutinizing the past and remembering lives lived and lost. Some faces and scenes remained opaque to memory. But many others evoked fondness and commiseration, and a couple of them a sense of the damage wrought by people on each other—even people who love one another. Several were pictures of family members in uniform, from World War II or the Korean War. Some were on oil rigs. Many were from family reunions. We organized the pictures primarily by closest association with my aunts and uncles. Eight large plastic baggies slowly accumulated the networks of relations, sorting memories through family ties, blood connections, and miscellaneous friendships.