This memoir is an intentional visitation of the past. In order to properly analyze the document, it is important to remember the real inciting incident of this story. When the Danticat finds out that her father is mortally ill, she returns her mind to the truth of the past. What that suggests is that there is something about this story that has the elements of sacred pain. In other words, this is an emotional domain which is so raw and emotional for Danticat that without proper cause, she chooses not to discuss what she now chooses to discuss so frankly.
The implicit message of the memoir is that the children were aware about the likeliness of an alternative narrative. They suspect their parents are lying. They suspect this from abandonment fear, because they don't know whether their parents are truly capable of lying outright and just using excuses to abandon the children completely, dooming them to a life of despair, loneliness, and struggle. Then, when the parents finally send for them, they see that the parents might have done so with a guilty conscious. The parents and children to not sync back up easily, because the children have been made to starve and suffer while the parents were comfortable.
With all this in mind, we return to the major premise of the memoir. The book ends up being an essay about honoring one's parents by forgiving their human failures and character flaws. This comes with the full weight of memoir, because the emotional conundrum caused by admitting a parent's character flaws is a long chain of self-doubt and rediscovery. The cycle is evident in the text, and when Danticat decides at the end that she will respond to the death of her father with mourning, that is an indication that forgiveness is on her mind.
