The Mid-Life Friend I Didn’t Know I Needed
Photo by Alicia Brock
By Rachel King
I was in my apartment one morning in early spring when my phone rang. It was my brother. As always, he was the one who had phoned me. “Can you do me a favor?” he asked. “I need your help. I’m doing a New York Times crossword puzzle and a lot of the clues are about New York.” At last, the request made sense — I knew nothing about puzzles, but I had lived in New York for decades.
In the three years since that video call, we’ve continued to meet over Zoom every week, joined by his wife and two of his friends. We’re now on our second book of New York Times crosswords. I never thought I’d become a regular player of crossword puzzles; now I plan my weekends around them.
When we were younger, there were a variety of impediments to closeness: a 12-year age difference, the awkwardness of our blended family (our father married my mother after his mother’s death), and physical distance (we both grew up in the Northeast, but he’s lived elsewhere for most of his adult life).
To better understand how a simple game could make such a difference, I turned to the book Adult Sibling Relationships by Geoffrey L. Greif and Michael E. Woolley, both professors at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. They advise siblings looking to forge closer bonds to “consider trying new experiences together.” The reason? People often fall into old patterns of behavior when interacting with their families. This is exactly what was happening when I failed to initiate phone calls with my brother. I was regressing into my role as the entitled younger sibling, always taking for granted that my responsible older brother would call me. Greif and Woolley say that “experimenting with new environments can help siblings break out of uncomfortable interpersonal expectations.” Turns out my brother, who never studied psychology, has good instincts. While I’m sure he really did want help with a crossword puzzle back in April 2000, he’s always been the one who was reaching out and looking to strengthen the sibling bond. This time it really worked: By trying something novel, we finally succeeded in building a shared social life.
I called one of the book’s authors, Dr. Greif, for more insight.
He told me that the conditions of contemporary life make it challenging for families to stay close. “It was much easier 500 years ago where you married somebody in your village who your parents knew and who you knew growing up and you lived in the village or on the farm for your whole life.”
In other words, it’s still a recent phenomenon for people to stray so far from home. Our ancestors likely saw their extended families regularly. Their relationships were built 365 days a year; they didn’t rely on once-a-year, high-stress holiday gatherings. Now our time with family is more limited, and our expectations more unrealistic. “The Norman Rockwellesque view that all families have to be loving at Thanksgiving, and that everybody is getting along well — that is not going to be the case in the large majority of families.” In other words: If you feel apprehension about an upcoming family gathering, you are not alone.
The important thing to remember is that whatever does or doesn’t happen this holiday season, those gatherings don’t need to define our relationships with our siblings. My experience proves it. It may work far better to try to connect with them during the rest of the year. There are a variety of ways to remain — or become — close.
Greif and Woolley’s book is not sitting on an especially crowded shelf. The amount written about brothers and sisters in adulthood is dwarfed by the enormous volume produced about parents, spouses, and children. Still, adult sibling relationships are important because of how ubiquitous they are (more than 80 percent of us grow up with siblings) and because of how long they last. If all goes well, our siblings are the people who are with us cradle to grave. Research suggests that closeness to a brother or sister can improve our health by mitigating loneliness in later years, after children have left home or marriages have dissolved. Often, they are the sole link to the earliest years of our lives. That’s why these relationships can grow richer as we age. In their book, Greif and Woolley describe what has been called “the hourglass of closeness,” noting that there’s a kind of default closeness of childhood, during which we have no choice but to share a house, favorite toys, and parental attention. Then, in young adulthood, we break away from our families to establish our own identities. Later, in middle age, it may become easier to reconnect as we’re no longer struggling to define an identity separate from our families of origin and are less likely to still feel competitive with our siblings. At age 40, 50, or 60, we’re much more apt to know who we are — and we can, at last, choose what we want to share with our siblings.
I value the opportunity to explore our shared memories. For example, my father has been dead 25 years, and now there’s no one in my life but my brother who knew him. I can quote my father’s witticisms to my husband or friends as much as I like, but my brother is the only one who can respond by chuckling, “That sounds just like dad.” When he does this, I find myself with a lump in my throat, a little surprised by the tears I’m blinking back. Sharing my memories with my brother makes our father — and our grandparents, too — come alive for me again. What’s more, being in touch with my brother is the best way I can think of to honor them. Truly, nothing would have made our father happier than knowing that my brother and I were spending time together.
I am still not good at crossword puzzles, but since they’ve given me so much over the last several years, I’ve come to appreciate them. I like the fact that the longer you work on one, the easier it gets. As you play, the puzzle isn’t just being solved — it’s teaching you how to solve it. Each answer holds the key to others: 29 down helps in solving 39 across, and vice versa. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s camera (Leica) and the 2001 Grammy Best New Artist winner (Alicia Keys) may appear to have nothing to do with one another, but in fact they are inextricably linked.
And so, two words that seem to have nothing to do with one another are connected, like my brother and me, siblings whose paths in life have crossed only briefly. We share a last name, a hometown, and the bad eyesight we both got from our father. We have always vaguely known that we shared more than that but what, exactly, remained a mystery — one that I’m finally starting to solve.