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| 4th of July 2026 Family Reunion |
While I would hope that I can maintain meaningful connections with every member of my extended family, I am realizing that now that I am in my early 60s, not all relatives maintain closeness over time, not even with their first cousins.
(I'm waving to you, Cathy, as the only exception among my first cousins.)
I need to do better with accepting that each person chooses to invest with relatives in different degrees of closeness. Even full siblings over time sometime reduce their connection because of distance, day-to-day responsibilities, or reduced shared interests.
(I am just going to ignore issues such as abuse, grudges, jealousy, and injustices over money and other resources distributed unequally by older relatives. That's too much to cover, and I have zero past drama with any of my first cousins. God bless you, dear reader, if you have to manage such conflicts.)
The catalyst for this post is a disappointing experience at a family reunion with cousins I had not connected with since the early 1980s.
