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Someone once said to me, “The family is just a program anyway.”
She said it as though she were offering liberation—as though family were merely one more inherited structure to recognize, dismantle, and outgrow.
And of course, families do contain programs.
We inherit roles before we understand them. We learn who is allowed to speak, who keeps the peace, who carries the blame, who must remain strong, and which truths are never to be mentioned. We inherit loyalties, silences, wounds, expectations, and ways of loving that began long before we arrived.
But something in that sentence made me deeply sad.
Because a family is never just a program.
It is also the first place most of us were held. The first faces we learned to recognize. The stories that existed before our own memory began. It is the people who knew us when our bodies were small, who remember versions of us that no one we meet later will ever know.
Family can wound us more deeply than almost anything else because it reaches places formed before we had language.
But it can also carry memory, belonging, obligation, forgiveness, and continuity across generations.
To reduce all of that to programming does not merely expose the family’s conditioning. It quietly strips the family of meaning.
And once something has been stripped of meaning, it becomes easier to discard.
Something is happening to families now.
I hear about it constantly. Parents whose adult children have stopped speaking to them. Mothers and fathers cut off not only from their children, but from grandchildren they once held, cared for, and loved.
Holidays pass. Birthdays pass. Years pass.
There is no funeral, yet grief enters the house and never entirely leaves.
The person is still alive.
The relationship is not.
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This piece is for anyone grieving someone who is still alive—and trying to understand how distance became the only language left.
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