Who Else Pays for a Family Rift?

When I was eleven, my father and his elder brother fought over my grandfather’s house in Pune. I do not know the details. Nobody will tell me. What I know is that until that summer I had five cousins I saw every Sunday, and after it I had none.

I am getting married in February. Last week I found my cousin Rajiv on Instagram. He has a daughter. I have typed a message four times and deleted it. My father would see an invitation as a betrayal. Is it?

Neha, you lost five people in one summer and nobody asked you. I want to start there.

A rift is never between two people

The sociologist Karl Pillemer describes a family as a system. What happens between any two members moves through all the others. When two brothers stop speaking, their wives, their children and their children’s children are sorted into sides. He calls the people this happens to collateral damage.

He also explains what they lose. Relatives are a reserve of people you could turn to for advice, a bed in another city, a hand in a crisis, even if you rarely do. Sociologists call this social capital. At eleven you had a great deal of it. Then you had half.

Pillemer knows this from his own life. In Fault Lines he tells how his grandmother and her siblings quarrelled over the family home after the eldest sister inherited it and sold it. They never spoke again. Decades later he worked out that he had dozens of relatives, half a day’s drive away, whom he had never met. He wonders whether anyone in that quarrel gave a thought to the children who would come after.

The house was not only a house

Money and inheritance are among the six common routes to estrangement that Pillemer found in his interviews. The others are old childhood injuries, the after-effects of divorce, trouble with in-laws, unmet expectations, and clashes over values or ways of living.

Why does property do such damage? A will may say “divide equally”, but a house cannot be cut in three. Equal may not feel fair to the child who nursed the parents. And Pillemer cites the sociologist Jacqueline Angel on a harder point. A will can express favour or disapproval in a form that is legally final. It is the last thing a parent says, and nobody can answer it.

So the fight is seldom about square feet. It is about who was loved. In India we say “ancestral property” and everyone at the table nods.

You caught it without being in it

Pillemer writes about stress contagion. Watching someone you love suffer is itself a strain, and bystanders are often pressed into service as messengers and referees. He interviewed college students who had spent their teens absorbing a parent’s fury about an uncle or an aunt.

You will know the signs. The room changed when a certain name came up. You learnt which questions not to ask.

Rifts are inherited

This is the part I find most sobering. Pillemer noticed that many estranged people came from families where cutting off had been done before, sometimes for generations. Children learn it as the thing one does with a difficult relative. He calls it the wrong kind of family tradition.

His remedy is what he calls legacy thinking. Before two people end a relationship, he suggests they draw the family tree forward and not back. What will this mean for the children, and for theirs? One woman he interviewed put it memorably. Each of us, she said, holds about a hundred and fifty years of family memory, because our grandmothers can tell us about their grandmothers. A rift cuts that store in half.

Is it a betrayal?

I do not think so. The quarrel belongs to your father and his brother. You were eleven. You did not sign it.

Several of the young people Pillemer spoke to said the same thing in different words: it all happened above us. Some reached across anyway. Not all were welcomed, and you should be ready for that. Rajiv may have been told a different story about the house.

But a message is yours to send. I would tell your father before you send it. You are informing him. You are not asking permission, and you are not hiding it.