On Family

Reflections on “Family,” from my book You’re Already Dead

“Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever.”

That line from Michael Corleone in The Godfather opens the chapter on Family in my book, You’re Already Dead.

When I chose it, it wasn’t random. It was a mirror of something I was already seeing… a fracture forming, a betrayal brewing beneath the surface. It spoke to what was happening then, and what has now resurfaced in an even more painful way. I wasn’t trying to pay tribute to loyalty using the mafia as a metaphor, I was warning against the loss of it. Those words were never abstract to me, they were lived experience.

“Consider yourself lucky if you have a family, and even luckier if you have a good family.” That’s how the chapter begins. I meant it then, just as I do now, only now I see how fragile that truth really is. Because not everyone born into your family carries the same definition of what that word means.

“We all come into this world with a certain capacity.” I wrote that as a reflection on how two people can grow up under the same roof yet walk entirely different paths. Some take the lessons of humility, sacrifice, and love and let them shape them into something better. Others twist them into self-interest and pride. It’s simultaneously moral and spiritual. A lot of hurt comes from pretending otherwise. We can grow up under the same roof, but we don’t all grow in the same way.

When I wrote Family, the cracks were already showing in mine. I saw what happens when ego replaces gratitude, when love becomes conditional, when loyalty turns into performance. The chapter wasn’t a prophecy, I wrote it while experiencing a trial in my own family, but in some ways, it became one.

I wrote: “It’s easy to pick and choose, or go back on, values when they suit the narrative we construct.” That line has followed me like a haunting truth. Because that’s what betrayal inside a family often is, a rewriting of the story so that one person can still see themselves as the hero.

Family should be “your first and last line of defence.” It should be where you turn when the world feels impossible. But sometimes, it’s where the first wound comes from. And there’s no shield for that, no prayer that makes it make sense.

Still, I stand by what I wrote: “Nothing should come before family, not money, jobs, or influence from a partner. It’s family first.” But family first only works when everyone agrees on what that means. When one person decides that love is leverage, the bond dies a little. When someone abandons truth to protect their own reflection, it’s not family anymore, it’s theatre… i’ve often said (and have been quoted by many people) “you cannot reason with the unreasonable.” “You cannot ration with the irrational.” Even if they are your family.

In that chapter, I also said: “Being part of a family doesn’t mean conforming to extreme beliefs or practices that harm individual freedom and growth. In such cases, it might resemble a cult more than a family.” At the time, it was a warning, something lurking underneath the surface of my family… some unfinished business… Now, it reads like an explanation, of how good people can get pulled into something small, cruel, and self-serving, all while calling it love.

The irony is that even in brokenness, family teaches you. It teaches you what you won’t become. It reminds you of the standards set by those who came before, people like my father. He was a man who led with humility, never ego, who carried faith quietly, not as a weapon but as a compass. His strength was never about control, it was more so about care and preserving the teachings that were passed down to him by his own father.

He embodied the five pillars of our Druze faith long before I ever named them elsewhere: truthfulness, brotherhood, purity, humility, and trust in God. He lived them until the end. Even as his body failed him, he unified the people around him. I vividly remember being in a tiff with my brother-in-law. I was pissed at him for some reason or another and we weren’t talking, all while my dad was in palliative care. But as Jim lay in a coma, his death rattle growing louder, my brother-in-law embraced me, and we shared a deep cry one that comes from way down like a howl, and we buried the hatchet as we prepared to bury my father. That’s what real family does, it doesn’t divide… it gathers.

That’s why I wrote, “Family isn’t always about blood, it’s about the people who accept you, love you, and grow with you.”

Because sometimes blood fails the test. Sometimes, the people who share your name forget what it stands for. And sometimes, you have to mourn the living, not because they’re gone, but because they’ve lost their way.

Michael Corleone’s warning still holds true: Don’t ever take sides against the family. But what happens when someone takes sides against the truth itself? Maybe that’s the question I was always writing toward.

Because when blood turns its back, you don’t abandon the word family. You just learn to redefine it, through those who still know what it means.

Family is a bond, not a shelter from truth.

Thank you for reading.