Who Have You Told?

My brother lives forty minutes from my flat. When people at work ask about him, I say he is in Dubai. It is easier than the truth, which is that we have not spoken since our father’s funeral six years ago.

Last month, at a cousin’s wedding, an aunt asked how he was. I said, “Busy, you know how it is.” She nodded. I do not think she believed me. Everyone I know seems to have a normal family. What is wrong with ours?

Sudha, I would like to begin with a number.

About a quarter of the room

The sociologist Karl Pillemer, who teaches at Cornell, went looking for research on family estrangement and found almost none. So he did what survey researchers do. He asked 1,340 American adults, chosen to represent the country, whether there was any relative with whom they currently had no contact at all.

Twenty-seven per cent said yes.

About one in ten had no contact with a parent or a child. About eight per cent had stopped speaking to a brother or sister. The rest had lost cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. Pillemer treats his figure as a floor, because some people will not admit to a rift even on an anonymous form.

Were these people who had simply drifted? He checked. When he removed everyone who said the silence did not upset them, the figure fell only to twenty-two per cent. Most had been out of contact for more than a year, and half for four years or longer.

He also looked for the kind of family this happens to. He did not find one. Men and women, every level of education, every region and ethnic group he could measure reported it at similar rates. His survey was of Americans, and I know of no equivalent count for India. I suspect the wedding hall you were standing in was not very different.

Why nobody says so

Across hundreds of interviews, Pillemer says, one sentence kept returning: “I thought I was the only one.”

How can something this common feel this rare? His answer is stigma. We are raised on the idea that family is the one tie that cannot break. When it does break, the listener wonders, silently, what must be wrong with you. So people learn the vague reply. “We are not close.” “He is abroad.” “Busy, you know how it is.”

He opens his book, Fault Lines, with a family you would never guess. The real Christopher Robin, the boy in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, became estranged from his father, and the two stayed that way. If that rift is not common knowledge, why would you know about the one in the next cubicle?

There is a second reason. Pillemer cites the psychologist Alexander Jordan, who found that people consistently feel more alone in their troubles than they are, because everyone hides sadness in public. Think of the family WhatsApp group. People post the Diwali photograph. Nobody posts the person who is missing from it.

What the secret costs

The story about Dubai is not free. You have to remember it. You have to keep your colleagues and your cousins from comparing notes. You brace a little every time someone says “your brother”.

It also keeps you from the one thing that reliably helps. Pillemer argues that when people compare hard experiences, three things happen. They become more realistic about the problem. They pick up ideas for coping. And they feel less, in the word several of his interviewees used, weird.

You cannot compare anything while he is in Dubai.

This is not a verdict on your family

Pillemer is careful to hold two facts together. Most parents and children get through life without a break. And a very large number of people do not. Both are true. Yours is an ordinary family with an ordinary wound.

I am not asking you to ring your brother. That is a later question, and it may not be the right one for you. The first step is smaller. Stop treating this as something to hide.