Recouping the Steep Cost of Divorce: My Parents' Split Cut Me off from an Extended Family, and a Rich History, That I Have Now Come to Cherish

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I did not meet my grandmother Mary until seven years ago, when I was 37. As the two of us sat alone in my father's living room in Brooklyn, N.Y., she took my hand, squeezed it and said, "We'll have fun yet." Perhaps she sensed my feeling of loss at meeting her so late in our lives, long after the usual familial bonding of grandchild to grandparent. Squeezing my hand was an act of reassurance, a humane way of closing those lost years, of bringing us into the present.

I had lost my grandmother Mary, and, for a while, my whole sense of family, because of divorce. My parents split up when I was 9 and my brother 12. We stayed with our mother in Chicago while our father eventually moved on to New York, where he …