We have not always been easy together.
That is the honest beginning. We grew up in the same house and grew into different people with different ideas about how the world works and different tolerances for ambiguity and different relationships to the parents we share, which are complicated by different memories of the same events, which is one of the stranger facts of siblinghood, that you can both be there and come away with accounts so different that you wonder if you were in the same room, which you were, but were in different rooms within the room, which is what it is to be children together, separate interiors in a shared building.
But now we are doing this together.
The parents. The appointments and the medication and the phone calls and the decisions that are starting to need to be made about things that none of us wants to decide but someone has to decide and the someone is us, the children, which is another version of the role reversal that no one fully prepares you for, the moment when you understand that the adults in the room are you and your sibling, that you have become the generation that makes the decisions, that the generation above yours is now the one that needs the decisions made for it.
We are better at it together than I expected.
We have found the thing we are actually good at doing side by side, which is this, which is the practical love of a parent who needs it. She is better at the logistics. I am better at the emotional temperature of a room. Between us we have most of what is needed and where we do not have it we figure it out, imperfectly, with the occasional disagreement that is handled with the bluntness of people who have known each other their whole lives and do not need to manage the impression they are making.
I did not know she would be my person for this.
I am glad she is. I am glad that the same house that made us different also made us related, made us the specific two people who share this particular weight at this particular time and can look at each other across the room where our mother is sleeping and say, without words, just with the look: yes. This is hard. I see you. We are doing it. Keep going.
