My great-grandmother was a Sicilian immigrant to Brooklyn who used the time she could have spent learning English experimenting with healing oils and holding séances that sent tables rocketing to the four corners the room. My grandmother, Clara, charged at a young age with monitoring her eccentric mother, would come home from school and find her in the clutches of a coven of spiritualists, whom she threw out to the street with the strength of a lioness. She often had to battle the table, as well, which chased her around corners and down stairs until she managed to get the upper hand and restore the semblance of order to that madhouse.

By the time I knew her, my great-grandmother was a depressive old woman with a white bun, who lived in my grandparents’ basement and shuffled when she walked. She never spoke a word of English, but we managed to communicate with gestures and rudimentary Italian, which I learned as a toddler and promptly forgot when that entire branch of my family moved to Florida. Years later, when I saw her again, she became upset when I could no longer understand her, but this was the least of her worries. Her petulant, incomprehensible battles with my grandparents had grown so fierce by that time that she moved in with my aunt’s family, and she was only there for a short while before another round of combat caused her to retreat to a nearby nursing home. I remember visiting her there one day, struck almost to tears by its bleak neglect, or perhaps that was only the emotion projected by my great-grandmother. I found a pretty rock on the ground outside and gave it to her, a tiny gesture she accepted with an outsized enthusiasm that warmed my heart, although I subsequently had a nightmare that she beat someone to death with it. She, herself, died not long after that. I can’t remember where she is buried.

Recently, my brother retraced her steps back to Sicily, where he met her relatives and compared divergent family histories. There are photos of him with those third and fourth cousins, whose eyes shine with warmth and welcome but who otherwise look perfectly ordinary. I could see them on the street and never guess that we shared the powerful bond of blood. A microscope, I suppose, could pierce the mysteries of our atoms and sort out the question of DNA, but nothing but a fragile thread of memory could link us all to those distant days of ectoplasm and floating tables whose messages spanned the worlds.