The irony couldn’t be more Meghan Markle if she’d gift-wrapped it, sprigged it with holly, and tied it with a bow. Just as the Duchess of Sussex unveils her Christmas Netflix broadcast, declaring this a time for family, her estranged father, Thomas Markle, is perilously ill in intensive care.
Cue the world and his wife demanding: “Will she attend what could be his deathbed?” Then issuing a Mexican wave of horror that the answer looks like: “No.”
Markle Sr, who lives in the Philippines, was taken into intensive care on Tuesday, undergoing amputation surgery a day later. He now requires a further procedure.
“If Meghan doesn’t visit her seriously ill father now, she will regret it,” threatened one commentator. “Unforgivable!” thundered another. Comparisons to King Lear abound. For a woman so fascinated by inspirational quotes, the collective message was clear: “Drop the celebrity fake friends and get your ass to Manila.”
The duchess and her husband both have form with this – but so does their generation. Here, the millennial intolerance for so-called “toxic” behaviour and passion for “boundaries” has led to what some refer to as an epidemic of familial, not least parental, ostracism. This gets blamed for being a therapised response, yet it appears more about Instagram counselling, rendering this private form of cancelling a routine response. In a book on the topic, Cornell’s Professor Karl Pillemer estimated that 67 million Americans are estranged from a relation – and that was five years ago, before the Insta-spurning trend took hold.
Even in this context, the Montecito royals have impressive form, having shunned first an ex-husband and former friends, then their parents, siblings and an entire nation. Still, is it right for any of us to tell any adult with an ailing parent that she must do her “duty” and see him? Hell, no. This is a private relationship in which private s*** has gone down.
As for the contention that Meghan’s father “wasn’t abusive”, thus doesn’t deserve this treatment – who are we to judge? Only a couple of months ago, a close friend of some 25 years confided that her father had sexually abused her, in addition to all the other damage he had inflicted. She still spends time with him, which is her call. Just as it is Meghan’s call not to do so with her parent.
Meghan Markle and her father, Thomas, who is in gravely ill in hospital following amputation surgery (Getty/ITV)
If I sound as if I have skin in the game here, I hold my hands up to it. I’m not saying my family invented “cut-off culture”, as they call it in the United States, but the Bettses were certainly early adopters. My father never spoke to my mother’s father (who opposed their union). My mother’s parents cast her off in my early years, then again when I was in my teens, while my father refused contact with his twin for the final quarter century of his life. I myself have been on the receiving end of such edicts, not least my mother excommunicating me from the fold for a decade for something I hadn’t done. She relented when I was 42. Six months later, she was dead.
This act blighted my thirties, f***ing me up in precisely the ways Philip Larkin details in “This Be the Verse”. You’d think this would make me an opponent of cut-off culture. And, it’s true, I would do anything for the Bettses not to replicate this practice in future generations. Still, I defend the right of every human being to decide who is and isn’t in their life.
The Ten Commandments voodoo about parental honouring be damned. We needed kin to survive back in the Bronze Age when said commandments were composed. These days, that kin can feel more of a stranglehold.
Just because someone shares your DNA doesn’t mean they’re allowed infinite opportunity to mess with your mind. Forget the EastEnders cry of “faaam’ly!”, or the proverb that “blood is thicker than water”. People can do things that are beyond the pale, and those people can be related to you. You, in turn, are allowed to draw a line. Your clan, your call.
Cut-off culture may be a generational shift in what constitutes abuse, but that’s for every generation to decide. Some of these spurnings may be “snowflake” neuroticism. However, like divorce figures, they will also conceal a refusal to be driven to despair, death-bed drama included.
As so often, the opening lines of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina spring to mind: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Just as one can’t judge a marriage from the outside, so it is impossible to judge a family. I’m lucky. I was reconciled with my mother before she died, nursing a redemptive act. However, Meghan Markle is at liberty not to choose this course, and the rest of the world should butt out.
