Family

Throughout The Kissing Bug, the author uses her aunt’s experience with the kissing disease as inspiration for considering the ways in which illness and loss might impact the individual’s family. Hernández introduces this thematic interest in her opening chapter “A Word She Whispers.” Unlike the other chapters in the text, “A Word She Whispers” is written in the present tense, and thus immerses the reader in the sensory details of Hernández's past life. In the scenes presented in “A Word She Whispers,” Hernández describes a day she spent at the New York City hospital visiting Tía Dora. “No one in the hospital that day, or for many years after, told me that Chagas is a parasitic disease,” says Hernández in a moment of retrospect (2). Although she and her family knew almost nothing about the kissing bug disease when her aunt fell...