If it’s true, as advertisements for Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums proclaimed, “Family isn’t a word, it’s a sentence,” there’s a sense in which the sentence is for life. Even when a family member is estranged, or dead, the impressions that they made on us—the lessons that they taught us, the memories they left with us—remain.
This is particularly the case with our parents. Our relationship with the people who conceived or adopted and then raised us—who are “supposed” to love us more than anyone else could—can’t help but shape our psyches and our lives.