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Page Two of On Losing a Sib

• He was not interested in competitive games; I loved them all.

• He had a serious pitching arm; I threw like the girl I was.

• We were both avid readers, but where I loved Nancy Drew, his only request for his 12th birthday was an out-of-print book titled: The Biology and Ecology of Aquatic and Semi-Aquatic Hymenoptera. Once we were grown, our politics were poles apart, and each of us thought the other hopelessly naive.

Given his intimidating brilliance, I may well have set out from the very beginning to avoid competition and find my own ways to gain notice in the world. There would never have been a chance of beating him at his own game.

This did not, of course, preclude argument. Trying to convince him of his follies was just as impossible as his convincing me of mine; when we weren’t best friends, we were worthy opponents. Usually we just avoided deep confrontation. We valued each other too much to indulge in anything that would have caused a real rupture; it seemed easier and wiser just to shut up and proceed in our own ways. And to trust that we loved one another.

It wasn’t hard to be every bit as proud of him as I was annoyed by him. He seems to have returned the favor.

At need, my brother was always there for me. When our parents divorced, he was 11, and I was 8. We leaned pretty heavily on each other. We united in silent dislike of our stepmother, dislike that gradually dissolved into acceptance, if not affection. We also found ourselves in agreement more often, perhaps because our mother (who was usually called on to referee our arguments) was already under enough stress. The two of us became a pretty formidable support team.

I was 12 when our well-loved Great Aunt Martha died. Mother told us of it while we were squashed into the front seat of our old Ford, en route home from a happy vacation. We were stunned by the first death of someone who lived in our household, and I just instinctively reached over to him, to find his hand reaching over to me. My tears spilled over, but it was that hard hand-squeeze that got me through the next few days.

We found ourselves sticking up for each other in all sorts of situations. When our father made an affectionate but offhand remark about my adult brother’s driving, I reminded him that he had been the teacher. When my grandmother fussed over my being allowed to go out on an evening movie date (I was 14), he asked her: “What’s the matter, don’t you trust her?”

When my first husband announced that he didn’t want to be married any longer, my brother drove 500 miles overnight to show up at my front door. “What on earth are you doing here?” I asked in astonishment.

“You’re my sister,” was all he said. It was enough.

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©2009 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com

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