It has been a bit over a month since I first wrote about it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about the Ship-Of-Theseus-Of-The-Self in regards to myself, my biological family, and my experiences with them. It’s not really an active, all-consuming thing, but the entire train of thought hasn’t been far from my mind in a while. Historically, summers have always been rough for me, especially in regards to family issues, due to a string of birthdays and how often the worst events of my childhood happened during the summer, so it’s not surprising that I can’t really get these thoughts that far from the surface of my mind. I’ve also been encountering a bit of family issues in media recently, what with watching Fruits Basket and finishing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion, so that certainly hasn’t helped keep it off my mind. It was actually the stuff from Final Fantasy 14 that prompted the latest branch of this thought tree. In Endwalker, there’s a difficult family situation that is resolved by the end of the expansion and, as I played through the post-expansion patch content, the thought occurred to me that the family member causing problems in the expansion “lived long enough to grow into a better person.” Which got me thinking about my grandfather, who probably did the same thing, and my parents, who might never. It’s a grim thought, that, and one that filled me with a great deal more grief than I expected it to when it popped into my head, but I genuinely have no idea if my parents will accomplish that particular feat or not.

To be honest, I’m not sure I’d even believe it if it happened. Hell, I might even reject it. I’ve spent so much time and energy over the years trying to connect with them and, more recently, make them see the problems I have with/because of them, that it would feel kind of insulting if something else finally made it click in their heads. All of which sets aside the issue of whether or not I could even make myself believe it was genuine in the first place. After all, my years of talking to them and trying to air out these issues so they could recognize the problems (in hopes of them owning up to their part in all this rather than continuing to shift the blame to other people) of our shared history are filled with examples of them saying what they think I want to hear or what I’ve literally told them I want to hear only to quickly reveal that they haven’t actually learned anything or made any kind of change in their lives. It happened when I visited them in 2020, when I exchanged letters with them in response to them not respecting my boundaries, when I attended family therapy with them and my little sister, and even in the years prior to my grandfather’s passing when I was not purposefully keeping my distance and just trying to connect to them from one adult to another. None of my experiences with them have given me any reason to believe they are capable of the kind of growth I need to see in them to let them back into my life. Instead, I’ve been supplied with ample reasons to suspet everything they ever say or do as a calculated overture meant to reforge a connection between us at any cost rather than because they realized the error of their ways. It’s such a low bar to clear, though. To grow into a better person. All it takes is some minor change in some small aspect of their lives and they’d accomplish it. I bet they’d even be able to make a compelling argument that they’ve already done it and, if they mentioned how they’ve stopped trying to contact me, I’d be unable to argue against them.

This distance, though, keeps me safe and prevents them from interfering in my life, just as it keeps me from ever really knowing if they manage to grow into genuinely better people. Unless I get emeshed in their lives again, and let them become a part of mine, I will never be able to tell it’s happening, much less fully trust it. Just like I’ll never be able to tell if my grandfather was actually a better person later in life or if he was just different from the stories I’d been told. If he chose to change and followed through on that with substantive effort or if the change in circumstances–from father to grandfather and from primary-cargiver to, at best, secondary caregiver–was what made the stories I might tell about how I interacted with him as a child and teen different from the ones my mother and her siblings would tell when they weren’t viewing him through rose-colored glasses. There’s no way for me to know since the people who might have once been able to tell me now no longer will, either because I’m not in contact with them any longer or because his passing left them incapable of speaking about him in anything but positive and loving terms. Hell, even I’m not immune to that last one. By the way I talk about him, you’d think he was a major positive force in my life when, in the bitter truth of things, he just wasn’t a negative force in my life like all the rest of my family was. Is that enough? Can I really say that he grew into a better person when all I saw was the neutral-leaning-positive result of his years and not the path he took to get there? I don’t know.

Which is probably why all this stuff keeps swirling around in my head. I will never have answers. I will not be able to learn anything resembling the objective truth about my grandfather just as much as I will never be able to know if what my parents might say to me is objective truth. Whatever interiority he might have had over the years, that could have explained what felt to me like a positive change for the better that continued my entire life prior to his passing, is lost to time. Whatever truths and reflections he might have shared are gone, now, and exist only as the tinted memories of the people he spoke to. It is not too late for me to get that from my parents, though. They still live. They still have the opportunity to grow into being a better person. I might yet learn something important from them if they can prove they’ve changed enough for me to believe them. Anything’s possible. It’s not very likely, given my experiences over the years, but it’s still possible. Life, however, is rarely as statisfying and believeable as stories are. Reality is so much more chaotic and inexplicable and unbelievable and rarely ends in a way that wraps things up neatly, cleanly, or even at all. Life is full of dangling threads, of plot and of worldbuilding, and I think I need to continue putting in the effort so I can learn to accept that some day.