My father-in-law is 81. He worked in computers from the early fifties from when computers were the size of buildings and required lots of cooling equipment to remove all the heat. He was a math genius. He could fly a plane. He had an Indian motorcycle before he married my mother-in-law. He sold the motorcycle to get the money to buy her an engagement ring. His family lived in California. I was told that the family was a family of professional gamblers. He was one of eight kids.

It was about 45 years ago or more that he cut his family of origin
off. My mother-in-law was in agreement with the decision not to have
anything to do with them. She is such a sweet person in so many ways.
She has friends forever going back to her high school class. She stays
in touch with people. She is creative and funny and outgoing and
talkative and nothing if not friendly. Yet she was in agreement that
her husband never have anything to do with his family again. Everyone.
Brothers, sisters, mother, father.

He didn’t go to anyone’s funeral or wedding. He didn’t write to them
or hear from them. My husband is his only son. My husband had met some
of those relatives when he was a kid. He doesn’t have bad memories of
them although the memories that he does have are odd. Like the one
where he remembers the uncle who would eat the entire wrapper off a
candy bar. Or that one of them lived in a house with a dirt floor.

It seemed that the relatives were always asking them for money and
the relatives were gamblers. Since my own father was an addicted
gambler and I know what gamblers do with money, then I can imagine that
the demands for money might have been endless.

My father-in-law has worked hard in his life to get somewhere, to
educate himself, to be somebody who made a difference, to develop his
talents. He has worked hard. When he was a young man with a family, it
must have been infuriating to be expected to finance a gambling family
in California.

He has never spoken of this estrangement with me. I only know the
little bit that my mother-in-law has told me. My father-in-law has gone
out of his way to help other people that he knows. He is a quiet
reserved man who is now suffering from a dementia. There will be no
reconciliation with any of his family. My husband no longer knows who
his uncles, aunts, and cousins were although sometimes we are curious
to whom he is related and what happened to those people from whom his
father is estranged.

Then there is the estrangement in my son-in-law’s family. I know
less about this one. All I know is that his biological father cut
himself off years ago from all of his children from his marriage to my
son-in-law’s mother. I don’t know how someone can do this to young kids
but I know it happens all the time. I don’t know anything more about
this estrangement. It is possible that someone may have been reconciled
in the years since I first heard about it.

Snicks