Families Don’t Break All at Once

What Happens When the Backbone Is Gone

Families don’t break all at once. They drift — mine did too, and I didn’t see it happening until now.

Growing up, game nights happened at my brother’s house, or ours — Friday or Saturday, whenever the time could be made, depending on what was going on. Cards, laughing, the whole family in one room. My dad and my brother would shoot pool down in his basement. Somewhere in the middle of the evening, my dad and my brother would end up off in their own conversation, just the two of them, and I’d sit there quietly, just listening. I was little. But I felt like I was part of something big, being included in a conversation that mattered. Not just one of the guys — better than that, because it was my brother and my dad. My father was the reason all of that existed in the first place. He was the backbone, even though nobody would’ve called him that at the time. He just was.

A Backbone Nobody Named

After he passed in November of 1983, I remember watching my friends and their families and feeling something close to jealousy. Their family still had that structure — the gatherings, the routine, the reason everybody showed up. Mine didn’t, not the same way. I wanted it back so bad. I wrote about that loss more fully in The Man I Still Look Up To and The Day I Lost My Father

When You Become the Thing You’ve Been Missing

Here’s the part I didn’t expect to be writing. I’m 55 now — the same age my dad was when I lost him. I’ve got my own kids, grandkids. And as I’ve been writing this, I’ve realized I’m guilty of the exact thing I’m complaining about. Families drift apart quietly, and mine is proof. It’s almost impossible to get all my kids at my house at the same time. Somebody always has plans — and half the time, so do I. Nobody’s sitting down and saying, let’s pick a date, let’s actually plan this.

I see the same thing happening in my wife’s family, too. It’s not that anybody stopped loving each other. It’s that nobody’s doing what my dad did without ever announcing he was doing it — making the gathering non-negotiable.

That’s the thing I got wrong for a long time. I thought the family was strong because my dad was strong — like the closeness was just who he was, and when he was gone, it went with him. But I don’t think that’s actually it. I think he was strong because, again and again, he chose to do something nobody else was choosing to do. He made those Friday and Saturday nights happen, and made showing up non-negotiable. It wasn’t personality. It was a decision, repeated on purpose, over and over, until it looked like it was just “how our family was.”

None of this means everybody has to think alike or live alike. My family is spread across different careers, different stages of life, and different opinions on plenty of things. That was never the issue. A family doesn’t need to agree on everything to be strong — it needs to decide that the relationship matters more than the distance. That’s the foundation. Not sameness. Commitment.

What Scripture Actually Says About Showing Up

Scripture doesn’t treat family closeness as something that happens to you either. “Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed” Ecclesiastes 4:9, NLT — this isn’t poetry about how nice it is to have family. It describes what gathering is actually for: showing up so somebody isn’t carrying it alone. “How wonderful and pleasant it is when brothers live together in harmony!” Psalm 133:1, NLT — wonderful and pleasant, not automatic.

And Hebrews doesn’t tell us to feel warmly about togetherness. It tells us not to get out of the habit of it: “let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do” Hebrews 10:25, NLT. As some people do. Scripture already knew this would be the temptation.

The Slow Drift Away

Families don’t break all at once. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to stop being a family. It happens the way mine has been drifting — one skipped Sunday, one canceled plan, one “we’ll get everybody together next time” that keeps getting pushed to next time. Golf, hunting, boating, somebody’s schedule, my schedule. None of it looks like betrayal. It just quietly adds up to distance.

My brother and I do this too. We say we need to get together, and we agree, every time. And then somehow it just stays a conversation instead of a plan. My nephew Brian wrote about our family’s own backbone from his side of it in The Man Who Built More Than Things.

The one thing that actually proves this isn’t about love — when we do get together, neither one of us can shut up. We could talk for hours and still not be done. Somebody eventually has to call it, not because we’re tired of each other, but because life doesn’t stop for us. That’s not a sign we don’t care about each other. It’s a sign we’ve let “we should” replace “we did,” and at some point “we should” stops meaning anything at all.

The Loneliness Underneath

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think a lot of people reading this have their own version — a brother, a sister, a whole side of the family they love but somehow never see. Different jobs, different towns, different lives that all pulled in different directions until “we should get together” became something we say instead of something we do. And somewhere underneath all of it, if we’re honest, there’s a loneliness we don’t talk about — missing people we haven’t actually lost, just drifted from. That loneliness is trying to tell us something. It’s not a flaw in us. It’s a sign the foundation was never supposed to hold this much distance.

I Don’t Want the Next Reunion to Be a Funeral

I don’t want my family’s next reunion to be a funeral. Not everybody standing around afterward saying “remember when,” trading stories about a person instead of having spent time with them, or sitting there thinking about the visit we kept meaning to make and never did. That’s not togetherness. That’s regret wearing a nice shirt. If it takes somebody dying to get all of us in the same room, I have to ask why we kept waiting while they were still here.

And here’s the part I can’t get around: money was never the real excuse, not for my dad and not for me. A get-together doesn’t require anything except everybody agreeing it matters enough to show up.

If this piece does nothing else, I hope it gets one family to pick a date instead of just talking about one.

Starting Small

I don’t have this fixed. Can’t tell you I’ve already turned it around, because I haven’t. What I can picture is cookouts, gatherings where people came and went — but not one time in years where we were all just together. Not rushing anywhere, not checking a phone, just eating, laughing, being social, in the pool, hanging out because we wanted to be there.

My wife and I were both raised believing family is everything — you love each other, take care of each other, stand beside each other through thick and thin. I wrote more about that in God Has Given Me A Godly Wife. I don’t want to hand my kids and grandkids anything less than that, and right now I’m not sure I’m handing them anything at all — a promise I tried to put into words in What I Need You to Know — A Letter to My Children.

Turning the whole family around isn’t something I know how to do yet. But I know somebody has to start somewhere.  So I’m starting small — planning one or two days a month with the people I can reach right now, making the time instead of waiting for it to show up on its own. That starts with my nephew Brian. We already talk, we already work together on things — but “we talk sometimes” isn’t the same as making it scheduled, on purpose, because he matters and he’s family too. He needs that as much as I do. I don’t have the rest of it figured out. But I know I don’t want to look back on this stretch of my life and realize I let it keep drifting because starting felt too small to matter.