“What happened?” Scott, 82, asked Bruce, 78, when his younger brother picked up the phone and called him after a 15-year estrangement. “I grew up,” Bruce said. “I’ve been stupid and I really miss you.” The brothers had missed a decade and a half of each other’s birthdays, milestones and memories made, but here they were, talking again as though no time had passed.
A quarter of the adult population describe themselves as estranged from a relative; 10% from a parent and 8% from a sibling, according to research by Karl Pillemer, professor of human development at Cornell University and author of Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. But when decades pass and rifts remain unhealed, what drives family members such as Scott and Bruce – or, rather more famously, the Gallagher brothers – to repair their ruptured relationships?
