Family Reunion with Distant Cousins

 

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. 

This summer, one of my sisters ran into a cousin of ours (Denzel) who we have not seen for decades. He is a grandson of our step-grandmother, the only grandmother on my mother's side that we knew. Our maternal grandmother died in 1964, and a couple of years later, our grandfather married a woman who was living in Canada. He met her through mutual friends because she was a widow, living in an area that was part of his mission where he served in the 1920s.  

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, my mother, my sisters and I visited our grandfather in Lehi, Utah on average twice a year when we were children. After graduating from high school in 1980, I attended Brigham Young University (BYU) in the same county as Lehi. Consequently, I was able to spend a lot of time with my grandparents including but not limited to holiday dinners held at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. My grandmother was quiet and hardworking, and I did not thank her nearly enough for her hospitality. 

It was during my college years at BYU that I met several of my cousins who were the grandchildren of my step-mother. 

I found these cousins to be interesting and charismatic. Some of the grandsons were accomplished athletes: football players at BYU and professional hockey players in Canada.  Some of them were children of established attorneys who were law-school bound themselves. My female cousins were beautiful and stylish. It was always interesting hearing what all of my cousins from my step-grandmother's line were doing.

Despite my frequent contact with them at our grandparents' house in Lehi, we did not maintain contact outside of our grandparents efforts to host us simultaneously.  I had not seen any of them regularly since the 1980s, and I only briefly saw them at our grandmother's funeral in the early 2000s.  We have not exchanged Christmas cards or followed each other on social media. 

Because we "lost touch" for decades, I was eager to catch up at this family reunion, one that they have nearly every 4th of July. 

Well, they did not remember me. They kept confusing me as one of the cousins who grew up on the farm in Lehi, the farm our grandfather established before his son, my uncle eventually ran by himself.  

I am very social, so I went from person to person, asking them to remind me about their parentage and to inform me of their current place of residence. I was doing my best to keep track of my first cousins' children and grandchildren. And as they are wont to do, these younger relatives (first cousins once removed or twice removed) were engaging with their agemates. The were either engaged in deep conversations with each other (the descendants in their 20s) or they were zooming around the backyard (the descendants who were tweens and younger.) These younger relatives were all amazing people, even at a distance. 

My first cousins from this branch of my extended family were all very charming.  However, during our "catch up time," no one asked me for my contact information or for information about my socials.  On my way out the gate back to the driveway, I did foist my number on the hostess (and aunt by marriage because she married one of my grandmother's dynamic, handsome, and accomplished sons). I did so in the context of "hey, maybe we can exchange Christmas cards." However, I knew that she wasn't going to pass my phone number on to any relatives from this branch of the family. (She did not even like my follow up text thanking her again for hosting).

Sigh. It's evident that none of my first cousins are going to follow up with efforts to renew our (admittedly tenuous) connections from the 1980s. The silver lining is that I did get to spend an afternoon with them. And now I have the invitation to accept that not all relatives seek a relationship with their cousins over time.  

In place of relationships with relatives, I have for decades reached out to friends to function as fictive kin, given that I have lived in nine US states across four time zones. I did not choose to live in states where I grew up (California) or the state with my deepest roots (UT, although I have returned as of 2024).  

Until recently, I did not live near my mother or sisters. (My father is in Texas.) I did choose to spend almost every vacation in my 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s traveling to see family--meaning my parents and their spouses, my siblings, and my in-laws). They are strewn across four different states, so I do have some connection with them based on that travel. However, I did not travel to visit my Canadian cousins (many of whom now live in the US). Why would I expect they would be part of my life in my 60s? 

Next year I will be spending the 4th of July at a powwow with a friend from Ephraim who is functioning like a sister.  (I spent this holiday in 2025 with her at her tribe's annual powwow.) We have taken each other as fictive kin, and I need to focus on how blessed I am to have her and a handful of very close friendships with people from various places where I have lived previously. I spending part of Thanksgiving with a dear friend from my time in West Virginia, someone whom I have seen several times since I moved away from Shepherdstown.  

Thank heavens for close friends! And God bless all of my first cousins! 

(PS: Cathy, I appreciate your efforts to stay connected, the only first cousin who reaches out to me across the years and across the miles. You even read my blog posts!)