In family estrangement, the mud and dirt gets everywhere, Kathryn Heyman writes. And it is very hard to undo what has been done
Years ago, when I lived in Scotland, my neighbour had fallen out with her mother. Although they lived mere streets from each other they hadn’t spoken for three years, and my friend had no idea why, nor any inclination to ask. Once, I asked her what she would do when her mother died, what it would be like if she found out afterwards. It seemed a terrible loss to me, the idea that she might not know about the death for weeks or months. It would have seemed impossible to me then that I would enact a similar estrangement decades later.
In 2020, every time I saw my sister’s name pop up on my phone, I’d brace myself, wondering if this was it. V had been living with cancer for 15 years, in and out of remission, each return marked with a new metastasis. This time, she said only that she needed a meeting of The Sisterhood, which was what I’d named our group chat. Four sisters in the family, but only three at the meeting; there was no question of inviting our fourth sister who, anyway, lived in another country.