Ever since I separated myself from most of my biological family, I’ve only gotten news from two of my siblings. Which isn’t that different from before, since most of my family doesn’t really share news so much as need to have news dragged out of them. All they really share without extensive prompting is silence or gossip. I got all the silence I wanted by not talking to them and I have historically had zero interest in family gossip, so I never really got news about the extended family outside of holidays or the rare time something was important enough that my mother felt like she had to call people to tell them. Now, though, my siblings are my only sources and they can be unreliable about the family as a whole because one of them doesn’t really talk to the family either and the other just forgets to share stuff until I ask (which I almost never do as a rule) or until something major is happening. All of which is to say is that I learned that my grandmother had a health scare recently (that looked like it could be fatal when I got the initial news but turned out to be decidedly not even potentially fatal by the end of the following day) and that one of my aunts was homeless and in the process of falling out with most of the rest of the family for reasons that, as far as I’ve gathered, are entirely of her own making.

It was difficult to handle all that at once. I not only had to grapple with my grandmother possibly passing and what I was going to do if she did, but with the knowledge that my aunt was “terrible” to my cousins. Even now, days later, I still don’t know what “terrible” means since it was filtered through multiple layers of my family, all of whom would prefer euphemism to truth at the best of times and are absolutely closing ranks against the thought of anyone outside of my aunt’s siblings, children, and remaining parent knowing what was truly going on. I have no idea what my cousins have gone through beyond the abstraction delivered with the news and some ideas based on what I saw of my aunt and cousins growing up. It was a lot to take in, even without any of the details.

On one hand, I was struggling with the guilt of knowing that I wasn’t going to visit my grandmother before she passed and wasn’t even sure I would go to the funeral. On the other hand, I was suddenly struck by the feeling that I should have spoken up about my own experiences with abuse and neglect at the hands of my older brother and parents so that my cousins could have felt empowered to speak up on their own before things came to a head more recently (they’re all fine, by the way. Only one of her three children was living with her at the time of everything coming out and he’s now living with our uncle, aunt, and cousins). I had a difficult time sorting through my emotions and was only able to handle it because I called a friend to talk about it.

Since then, I’ve reached out to and spoken with one of my cousins. She’s only a few months older than I am and we practically grew up together, for the first few years of our lives at least. I haven’t spoken to her since our grandfather’s funeral, aside from a pair of texts we exchanged a couple years back, as part of my general disconnect from my biological family. It was nice to reconnect, even if the reason for it was terrible, and I was able to recommend some stuff to her based on my own experiences with abuse and terrible parents. It remains to be seen what will come of this, but I never really held any of my experiences as a kid against her the the way I hold some of them against my aunts and uncles. Its not like she had any power to act in those situations. She was just as powerless to do anything as I was. But, because of the way my family works, not talking to them also meant not talking to her. If I’d kept up contact with her, I imagine she’d have been ruthlessly hounded for information the way my siblings were at first. It probably would have lasted longer since, in the minds of most of my family, it makes sense to share things with your siblings that no one else gets to know. Staying in contact with a cousin would have been seen as an more peculiar behavior than just entirely disappearing and they would all assume she knew what was going on no matter what she said or did.

It was emotionally exhausting, but I’m glad I did it. Sure, I will have to grapple with my feelings about my grandmother passing without ever seeing her again the next time a health scare happens (being at peace with my decision to not see any of my family again doesn’t really help since I will still be mourning the loss of what might have been if things had been different, even if I’m not mourning the individual), but I won’t have to feel bad about not reaching out to my cousin anymore, nor will I have to face the surge of feelings I experienced when I learned that my cousins had similar (though much less intense by my cousin’s account) experiences to what I had a kid. All that aside, though, I think I might have been the only one to reach out with the sole intention of providing emotional support to her. From what I heard, anyone else who has called her only talked about figuring out what to do about her mother, as if she’s responsible for her mother’s decisions and situation now. Emotional support isn’t really something our family does, so I’m not terribly surprised. Emotional isolation is more their thing.

I’ve had a couple smaller conversations with my cousin over text in the days since our call and it’s been nice to have this connection again, even if the reasons for it are bad. She might not understand everything the way my sister does, but my cousin had a front-row seat to a lot of what happened in my childhood in a way that almost no one else did and it’s really nice to be able talk about some of that stuff with someone who doesn’t need details to understand. I just hope she handles things with her mom alright, since these sort of emotionally charged situations are hard on everyone and, since her life is fine to outward appearances, I don’t think most of our family is going to spare much time or thought for her wellbeing. It sucks to suffer through this stuff alone and I hope that, if nothing else, I can be a reminder to her that she is only as alone as she wants to be.