There are certain pains that arrive not as a single dramatic blow but as a slow unraveling — the moment you realize that the life you thought you were living was not the one everyone else was living. Dear Abby has always been a place where people bring those exact pains, and the letters from two women, one in Illinoand one in Indiana, capture two very different but equally heartbreaking forms of family estrangement. The woman from Illinoistois a 72-year-old wife who has been married for 25 years to her 80-year-old husband, a second marriage for both. Until three years ago, she believed she shared a warm, close bond with her husband’s family. Then a new daughter-in-law named Jean entered the picture, and with her came a young granddaughter named Sophie, and suddenly everything the woman thought she could count on began to crumble. The woman from Indiana, meanwhile, is grieving the death of her eldest son, Mitch, who passed away six months ago; she has five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, but since her son’s death she has not heard a word from any of them. Her daughter-in-law has told her she is not needed in their lives, that she needs time and space, and the woman is left wondering whether she should force her way back in or accept a permanent exile. These two letters, side by side, remind us that family can wound us in opposite ways—one through manipulation and betrayal, the other through silence and rejection. Yet both women share something essential: they have been cut out of lives they loved, and they do not know how to fight back without losing themselves entirely.
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The Illinois woman’s story unfolds like a quiet nightmare. She and her 80-year-old husband have weathered rocky years because of his health, but he has now announced that he wants a divorce. She insists she has done nothing wrong—though her husband accuses her of cheating, which she says is false—and her husband’s entire family has begun ghosting her. What makes it worse is that she believes Jean, the daughter-in-law her husband never wanted his son to marry, has been deliberately engineering this outcome for years. According to the wife, Jean brought with her a granddaughter, Sophie, who is now four years old, and Jean quietly fostered a secret relationship between the little girl and the woman’s husband. The first time the wife saw it with her own eyes was on her husband’s birthday last year, when Jean and Sophie came over. Sophie was all over him, calling him “grandpa” and clinging to him, and the wife was shocked. It was instantly apparent that this had been going on for a long time, behind her back. She felt humiliated at being excluded, but she swallowed her feelings because she had been looking forward to getting to know the child herself.
. Now she believes Jean has her eyes on her husband’s money. She suspects her husband used their joint checking account to buy a life insurance policy with little Sophie as a beneficiary. She believes Jean thinksthat her husband andshe should foot the bill for Sophie’s college education. In other words, this Is son merely a new family member; she is a strategy, and the husband decided to be an active participant in that strategy. The wife is left with a terrible dilemma: how do you fight a liar who has already rewritten the story of your marriage? How do you prove what happened in your own home when everyone around you has decided to believe another version? She cries out from a place of isolation, feeling that she did nothing wrong and yet is being punished as though she did exactly that. Her plea is not just for legal advice—it is for someone to tell her that she still matters, that the truth is still real, that she is not crazy for noticing the pattern nestling itself around her life before she could stop it.
Dear Abby’s response to the Illinois woman is direct and unflinching: dealing with a manipulator like Jean can be a nightmare, and if the woman has not already consulted a divorce lawyer, she must do so now. But Abby does not stop there. She tells her, with carefully chosen urgency, that the insurance policy should be the first thing she mentions to her attorney. This is a crucial insight, because the Illinois woman has been thinking of this as a family betrayal, but Abby gently reframes it as a legal matter. A lot of her story, Abby acknowledges, is Jean’s word against hers—he said, she said, whispered accusations and gaslighting. But a life insurance policy taken out on a joint checking account without the wife’s knowledge is not merely a story; it is a paper trail. It is a document, a financial transaction, a possible violation of marital trust that could matter in a divorce proceeding. If such a policy was created without the wife’s knowledge, Abby says, her husband could be in big trouble. It may be of utmost interest to her attorney, and it could change from “she said versus he said” to “here is what actually happened on paper.” This is the kind of cold, concrete truth that is protect you from the chaos of a manipulator. The advice also carries a deeper human message: when you are reeling from emotional betrayal, it is easy to forget that you can take back control through practical, boring steps. A lawyer’s office is not where you want to be when you are heartbroken, but it is where you need to be when someone is quietly rewritingthe financial reality of your marriage. Abby is not dismissing her pain; she is telling her to protect herself before the grief demolishes her entirely.
The second letter comes from a woman in Indiana who is carrying a different kind of pain—one of grief made even sharper by abandonment. Her oldest son, Mitch, from a previous marriage, died six months ago. He left behind five children and two grandchildren. She admits frankly that shehad not been the most attentive grandparent over the years. She got along well with them, but she was not always around because she was was raising her own family. Now, in the wake of her son’s death, she has not heard a word from any of his children. His wife has made it known that the woman is “not needed” in their lives, that she needs time and space. The grieving mother is tryingto respect that boundary, but she is not happy that she does not get to see one of her great-grandsons. She asks Abby whether she should force the issue and show up at her daughter-in-law’s door one day, or whether she should let go forever. She feels herself becoming invisible, “out of their lives forever,” as she puts it, and she is deeply saddened because she misses her son just as much as they do—yet they seem not to care about her at all. There is a subtle, painful honesty in her letter. She does not pretend to have been a flawless presence in her grandchildren’s lives. She knows she was absent, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, because she was busy with other obligations. But absence isnot supposed to be punished forever, issit? And now that her son is gone, the finality of it is unbearable. She is not asking to replace their grief; she is asking to be allowed to grieve with them,to be recognized as someone who also lost the same man. But his widow has closed the door, and the grandchildren have followed her lead. The woman in Indiana is not only mourning her son; she is mourning the grandchildren she never truly knew and now never will, thememory of the great-grandchild she has only glimpsed, and the future family gatherings she will never be invited to attend. It is a long, slow grief, one that does not come with a funeral and a casserole; it comes with silence, andthe silence has a voice of its own.
Dear Abby’s response to the Indiana woman is gentler, but perhaps even more difficult to hear. Abby picks up the woman’s own phrase: you mentioned that you “weren’t the most attentive grandparent” over the years. Then she asks a quiet, probing question: Did this include forgetting them on birthdays, Christmas, graduations, and so forth? If the answer lies between”maybe” and”yes,” Abby says, then it shouldn’t be surprising that your grandchildren learned to do without you in their lives. That is a hard sentence to read. It does not accuse the woman of being evil; it simply connects the dots between past distance and present distance. Grandchildren, like all children, learn from what they experience. If a grandparent is absent during the ordinary days—the birthday candles, the christmas mornings, the graduation ceremonies—they may gradually stop expecting that grandparent to be present during extraordinary ones, like funerals and mornings after loss. Abby is not saying the woman deserves this; she is saying the pattern makes sense. And then she offers a constructive path forward: rather than showing up unannounced at the daughter-in-law’s door, which would almost certainly feel invasive and likely make things worse, it might be more effective to reach out to the grandchildren individually. Send a letter, make a phone call, or try a quiet conversation with one person at a time. Do not demand access. Do not force a return to a family structure that no longer exists. Instead, open a small door of connection and let them decide if they want to walk through it. This advice is deeply humane because it acknowledges both the grandmother’s longing and the other family members’ autonomy. It does not tell her to give up; it tells her to change her approach—from demanding a role to offering presence, from asking “Why am I excluded?” to saying “I am here if you need me.” The distinction may feel painful, but it is also wise. We cannot force anyone to love us or to make room for us in their grief. But we can make sure they know our door is open, that our heart is still available, andthat we see them as individuals, not as a collective wall of rejection. And perhaps, over time, that single thread of outreach can become something more.
When we step back andlook at both letters together, we see two women standing on two different battlegrounds, each fighting for a place in a family that seems to have decided she does not deserve one. The Illinois woman is trying to fight a liar who has worked her way into her marriage like a slow poison; the Indiana woman is trying to fight the natural consequences of years of distance, and she knows it. Onethe enemy is another person; the other enemy is herself, or at least her own past. Yet both women need essentiallythe same thing: to be seen, to be heard, to know that their love—flawed or not—still meaningsto someone. Dear Abby has been offering that kind of witness for decades. The column was founded in 1956 by Pauline Phillips, and for nearly four decades Jeanne Phillips has penned itunder the name Abigail Van Buren, giving generations of readers a place to bring the questions too painful to ask out loud. And in these two responses, we hear the voice of that long tradition: practical, compassionate, unsentimental, and rooted in the belief that people can survive betrayal and grief, though not by pretending their pain does not exist. To the Illinois woman, Abby offers the weapon of truth: gather your documents, find your lawyer, protect your finances, because you need to fight for yourself when no one else will. To the Indiana woman, Abby offers the mirror of honest self-reflection: look at your own history, apologize where needed, reach out without demanding, because sometimes the only path forward isthrough humility rather than force. Neither answer is easy, and neither woman gets the ending she originally hoped for. But both are reminded that they are not powerless. Even when a marriage collapses around a lie, a woman can still take legal action to protect herself. Even when a family closes its door, a grandmother can still decide how she will approach that door going forward. These are not small thingsover. They are, in fact, the only real choices we have when people we love hurt us: we can fall apart, or we can gather the small pieces of our dignity and find a way to go on. The Illinois woman may never make Jean tellthe truth; but she can make sure the truth has consequences. The Indiana woman may never be invited to hold her great-grandson again; but she can let her grandchildren know she holds a place for them in her heart, one small word and one small gesture at a time, until either they open the door or she finds peace in knowing she did what she could. That is the deepest wisdom in these letters: we cannot make people love us, but we can choose to act with honesty, grace, and self-respect—and in the end, that is the fight worth fighting.
