We shared a lot, before we became survivors.

We shared a father, who liked to fly around in a single engine or two, tilting his wings, as if to say, “Take that!” to malevolence and arrogance, like Cyrano tilting at windmills.

And a father whose father scarred him by putting him down for not being sufficiently obedient.

We shared a movie-star gorgeous mother, intelligent, ambitious, idealistic, and frustrated.

We shared a brother. We both knew his sparkling brilliance, his sweet clarinet, the idealist, the radical we both revered and even emulated but without risking anything, staying safe and within bounds while, helplessly, watching him self-destruct.

We shared a mantelpiece at Christmastime, under which the presents were strewn, for lack of a Christmas tree, because that was Christian.

We shared a one-story house our dad and grandpa built with a wall of picture windows in the living room and a wall of windows in each of our bedrooms on an acre of wooded land, with circular driveway on a slope which made a perfect chute for our sleds and saucers in winter and which embraced enormous magenta and pink rhododendrons that blossomed like Alice’s Queen of Hearts in the spring.

We shared piles of leaves we raked when the oaks and maples shed in the fall and we jumped into them, our brown hair with reddish highlights, braided by our mother, flying.

We survived our mother’s deep depression. My sister had a modest wedding in our living room, with a party at the local Holiday Inn, overshadowed by our mother’s emotional paralysis.

We survived our mother’s sickeningly premature death, from ovarian cancer, at age 55.

We survived our brother’s years of wild swings between mental hospitals up and down the East and West coasts, his descent into seeming drug-induced submission, and then death by leukemia, possibly brought on by antipsychotic meds.

We have survived our father, who, it turns out, may win the longevity sweepstakes in our family, having lived, robustly, until 96.

We survived the flowering of our sisterly competitiveness, repressed for decades as we strove to not unravel along with the rest of the family. We both wrote novels, feeding on and trying to make sense of the family treasures and diseases.

Sometime since then, assuming we would live indefinitely, we swore to become feisty old ladies together, letting loose, flaunting and reveling in our genes of resistance.

We were the survivors and we would stick together.

Sometime last year though, things began to go awry and on February 11th of this year, my sister was diagnosed with an aggressive glioblastoma. On March 20th, she died.