There's a particular weight to family estrangement that a faded friendship doesn't carry. A friend drifts and the world shrugs. But cut off a parent, a sibling, an adult child, and there's a chorus, some of it in your own head, insisting that family is family, that blood matters, that you really should fix this. So you sit with the urge to reach out and the guilt about not having reached out, unsure how much of the pull is yours and how much is the script you were handed.
Untangle that first, before you write anything. Why do you want to reach out? Because you miss them and want them in your life, or because you've been told that good people reconcile with family and you feel like a bad one for the silence? Those are different reasons, and only one of them is a good basis for a message. Estrangement is sometimes the right call, the healthy one, especially when the person hurt you in ways that didn't stop. You do not owe someone access to you because you happen to share DNA. Reaching out to perform reconciliation for an audience of relatives is not the same as wanting the person back, and it tends to end badly, because you'll be doing it resentful and they'll feel the lie in it.
So decide for yourself, with the volume on the family chorus turned down. If the honest answer is that you want to try, then reach out in a way that protects you and asks for very little.
Keep the first message small. The instinct is to make it carry everything: the history, the hurt, the apology you're owed or the one you want to offer, a full accounting of the lost years. Don't. A reach-out across an estrangement cannot resolve the estrangement, and trying to make it do that in one text guarantees the other person gets defensive and the door slams again. One small, honest opening is enough.
Don't relitigate in the opening. Whatever happened, the first message is not the place to assign blame or demand they finally admit what they did. Even if you're right. Especially if you're right. Lead with where you are now, not with the case for the prosecution.
Something low and human:
Hi. I've been thinking about you. I'm not trying to reopen everything, I just didn't want more time to pass without reaching out. If you're open to it, I'd like to find a way to talk. No pressure either way.
It opens a door without shoving anyone through it. It doesn't pretend the history isn't there, and it doesn't drag it into the first line. It gives them room to say yes, or to say nothing at all.
Then protect yourself, because this is the part people skip. Reaching out can reopen a wound, and the other person has every right to not want contact, the same right you'd have. They might not reply. They might reply with the old pattern that drove the distance in the first place. Go in having decided that you can survive any of those answers, because you reached out for your own peace, not to secure a particular outcome from someone who has never reliably given you one.
You get to decide whether to cross this distance. Not the relatives, not the script, you. And if you do, cross it small and honest, ready for any answer they give.