They Stay

A story about sister love.

There are blood sisters, and there are sisters that float into my life that bring unmistakable sister energy with them. Friends, female cousins. Sometimes those sisters walk out a door through which they don’t return. Chapter complete. Sometimes they outlast several chapters.

I won the sister lottery with my blood sisters, Linda and Valerie. We were children together, shaped similarly by the same father, mother, and grandparents. We are a low drama, loving family.

They stay. Knowing they are with me in all the ways they are gives me comfort that I hope never to take for granted.

Our lives together are quilts, many colored threads reaching into and out of sister weekends, group chats, cancer, lupus, work, parenting, divorce and death. The patches shift as we age, as they have for decades. We grow through shared experiences, adding color and wisdom to the tapestry.

Circumstances change; our bond does not. We are the history of one another, the blood bond a constant that remains unchanged. When something is missing for any of us, the others provide it without asking. We have one another’s backs.

Lifelines for one another in a literal and a figurative sense, we live interconnected – a bond we chose before our physical bodies landed here in these flawed and perfect experiences of life. We are a triangle which needs all three angles to survive, or at least to thrive.

Cousins who share extended family remain as structural support. There is something about families and shared history that anchors me. Close female friends offer scaffolding too – for those moments when truth can be told without filters. All on purpose, part of the larger system integral to my life.

Back to my blood sisters. Let me tell you about them and how we got here.

Linda is seven years older than me, first born child and grandchild of Grandma and Grandpa Sharkey. She was around the least when I was growing up, both because of the age gap and because she was often with friends, disengaged from Jeff and me. In the hard years with dad, she was an unruly teenager, not to be bothered by me. I imagine she was affected by dad’s leaving, and perhaps she wanted to escape.

When she married at the age of eighteen, she had her own struggles, and she shared them with me. We grew closer as adults, though I sometimes still feel tiny fissures of judgement cast upon me as the younger sister being seen through her older-sister eyes.

Linda lives close by, and when mom was in her final years, she stepped up to help whenever I asked. She spent days with mom in order to give us a break from caregiving. She was always willing to fill in when I needed her to, cooking meals or taking mom to dinner. A helping hand just when I needed it.

Valerie is five years my senior, and was instrumental in my childhood as a care taker, teacher, and adventurer. She literally kept me alive at times. We think alike and share the same kind of heart. We are different in many ways, and the same in the ways that matter.

She lives a few hours from me, and by default from mom when she was alive. Val had compassion and a deep appreciation for what it took to keep mom safe, fed and entertained. She’d often give Mike and me a reprieve when we wanted to travel to visit grandchildren by staying in our home with mom.

From this experience, she got a close-up look at what it really meant, 24/7, to care for mom. Once when we got back home from a trip, she looked tired.

“Whatever money mom has left when she dies, it goes to you. I can’t believe how hard it is to care for her.” This was validating. It really was hard, and she got it.

She offered help when she could, even through the distance of geography.

She is wired like an artist, carefully curating the dish she’s bringing or choosing just the right clothes to wear or the perfect pastry she often brought for mom. Delays are simply part of how she arrives.

Linda and Valerie are my biggest cheerleaders. We love spending time together, and all of us crave those sister weekends long before we finally make them happen. I can’t imagine my life without them.

We have grieved together, each differently and still together. We share photos and experiences, through both sadness and celebration. We laugh, we mourn, we love, we cry, we remember, sharing the best and the worst of our lives together.

We are branches of the same tree, and our sisterhood abides.