If you go back just a few generations in anybody’s family, the tree widens. Folks tended to have more babies last century, and even if fewer (percentage-wise) survived to adulthood, enough made it that everyone had cousins, and many came from blended, adoptive, or fostering clans.

If you poke around in the histories, you find plenty of opportunities for argument, from disagreement to disowning. And maybe this is an evolutionary thing, but you find less examples of forgiveness than of feuds.

My father’s father, for example, was one of four children. According to what I remember my mother saying, only two of them spoke to each other as adults. My grandfather then married a champion grudge-holder and they spawned five kids who were readily indignant (at best) and not above shunning one another when things got sticky.

Even now, among my first cousins on Dad’s side, J doesn’t really talk to her brother S, and SJ stopped speaking to P over a missed bar mitzvah invitation. That’s kind of funny, given how little P ever cared about religious rituals or about SJ. But it’s not that weird – SJ stopped speaking to our other cousin A decades ago, right before A left the area and the family himself.

Dad moved away from his family too, which may be how I lucked into growing up on the forgiving side of the brood. Like my parents, I would never go to the awkwardness or trouble of not speaking to someone; that would be harder on me than on whomever I wanted to punish. And I don’t know whose idea it was, but my parents taught us never to go to bed mad. For me it was connected to that “now I lay me down to sleep” idea – what if I never woke up? What if I didn’t have a chance to make it right?

The thing about people is we’re the only species that says goodbye. We’re the only ones apparently aware that we might not get another chance. That’s why it makes sense to forgive what’s necessary as you go along. No clogs. No regrets. No elephants.