Two years later after the death of my brother, I am finally coming to terms with the dysfunctional relationship between my cousins, who are all brothers, and the relationship they have with me. For one of them, the relationship is pretty much non-existent unless someone dies. With the second, it’s superficial and we only talk about surface things, and with the third, well, it revolves around his young son. I’ve finally learned to accept that I will never have the relationship I wished we could all have as adult cousins, and I’ve stopped taking the things they do personally. It only took about 29.5 years to get to this point.

In two weeks, one of these cousins, who lives in Brooklyn, will be going out to visit San Francisco for the first time since Ed’s funeral, which is over two years ago now. This time, he’s bringing his wife and son. He texted me yesterday and today to let me know that despite the very much in advance notice he gave his two brothers, his brother who lives in Redwood City and has a wife and two kids has let him know he has no time to see him. He’s just too busy, he said. There was a lot of needless and fruitless back and forth. Finally, it took a ‘secret’ conversation when he called my Brooklyn cousin to squeeze in a quick lunch together. His wife was not with him when this conversation took place.

Two years ago, I probably would have thought about this for days and thought about how stupid my Redwood City cousin is, how he lacks balls and how stupid it is that his selfish wife controls his life and doesn’t even want him to see his own brother, who he sees about once every two years at this point. Today, I laughed it off and decided it wasn’t worth a single thought, other than that I am so happy that my own life doesn’t have even a tiny bit of that type of dysfunction.