Why Would You Go Back?

My younger brother and I have not spoken in nine years. The reasons are old and I will not bore you with them. He has never apologised. I do not miss him, exactly.

But our mother is eighty-one. And last month a friend my own age died of a heart attack on his morning walk. Since then I keep thinking about ringing my brother, and then I think: why should I be the one? Why would I do him that favour?

Girish, do not do it for him.

The selfish case

The sociologist Karl Pillemer tracked down a hundred people who had been completely cut off from a relative and had found their way back. In Fault Lines he calls them the reconcilers. He asked each of them why they did it.

He expected to hear about duty or forgiveness. What he heard most often was “I did it for myself.”

One man had not spoken to his brother in eight years and had fully written him off. After they reconciled, he still found his brother’s visits exhausting. He was glad anyway. What he described was relief, the feeling of putting down something heavy that he had carried every day. Another man, after twenty-five years of silence, suddenly realised that the thought of his brother was no longer sitting at the back of his head.

Pillemer connects this to what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. You are sure you were right to walk away. A quieter voice keeps saying that this is not right either. Living with both is tiring. I think that is where you are.

Four things people got back

The reconcilers named four gains.

The first is freedom from regret. Research suggests that imagining a future regret is a sound guide to a present decision. Several of Pillemer’s interviewees made peace with very little time to spare. One woman wrote a last letter to her brother, was reconciled with him, and not long afterwards lost him to a stroke. She could not imagine, she said, what she would be feeling now if she had not written.

The second is the family itself. An estrangement makes every wedding and funeral a problem in logistics. Who can be invited with whom?

The third is practical. Two sisters who had not spoken in twenty years ended up nursing each other after operations. Family, Pillemer reminds us, is also a supply of help.

The fourth is time. We live long now. A brother in his fifties may be in your life for another thirty years, or absent from it for that long.

And of all the people he interviewed who had reconciled, Pillemer reports, not one regretted it.

It does not have to be warm

Many of these restored relationships were modest. Phone calls about a parent’s health. Two visits a year. Politeness. The reconcilers counted that as success. You are not being asked to become close. You are being asked whether you want this weight for another nine years.

Three signs you may be ready

Pillemer borrows from research on how people make large changes. Before acting, we spend a long time in a stage called contemplation, weighing and wavering. The reconcilers described three nudges out of it.

Circumstances have changed. A difficult spouse is gone, a parent is frail, someone has moved.

You catch yourself planning. What would I say first? What if he puts the phone down?

And something lands. A sermon, a film, a remark from your child. Pillemer is not being mystical about this. When a question is alive in you, the world seems to keep raising it.

A friend dying on his morning walk is that kind of event. You have already begun composing the call. The choice is yours, and he is clear that being estranged does not make anyone a bad person. But you are not as undecided as your letter suggests.

This is a case for trying again where the trouble was conflict, pride or distance. It is not a case for returning to someone who was violent or abusive towards you. Keeping away from harm is not a grudge.