Yesterday afternoon, well into the evening, I had a long conversation with a family member who, for complicated reasons, I had never had the opportunity to speak with before – and, thanks largely to Covid-19, we had a video chat that lasted for over 3 hours. Before Covid-19, we may not have even bothered.

It was worth every bit of time for me. It helped me put together things that had puzzled me about my own life, and it put the lives of others into a deeper context than I would have expected. It put me in a context when looking through the eyes of those now dead, and what some of the things they said that made no sense to me at the time actually meant.

Pretty vague, isn’t it? Well of course it is. You don’t have to know everything about the conversation.

We spent a lot of time talking about mental health in those we knew – some mutual, some not, about growing older and how our perspectives change. We knew insane individuals, but to what degree their insanity? Where is the line drawn? And what good is being normal when being normal should drive people insane?

It made me think as I lay in my bed that we don’t discuss these things enough. There are many things we don’t understand and ignore but we should understand and should not ignore, particularly in our own family histories.

To do otherwise is… insane.