To show up

I grew up with two younger brothers, who I adore. But I cannot lie, I did long for a sister – an imagined ideal of a a person who would read the same books with me and brush my hair and share secrets and laugh late into the night.

Luckily, my mom raised me to know sisterhood – to understand the care and support it could offer, its comfort, its demands, its nuances. Kay is my middle name and my mother’s sister’s name. My mom obviously thought sisterhood important enough to have me carry it with me my whole life.

And last year, we lost one of our sisters.

My mom’s cousin Myra (pictured left, center), who was like another aunt to me, died in September last year. I was honored – along with her 90-year-old mother and my cousin Brenda – to be by her side as she took her last breath. Myra had been by my mother’s side when she did the same.

My cousin and I were there because we both learned that sisterhood means to show up, and Myra needed us. The last seven months of her life, in which three brain tumors debilitated her ability to live independently, were a massive disruption to her sense of self.

And those life-altering, change-everything moments of life are when “sisters” – either through blood relation or choice – show up.

I must say whew that sisterhood, as defined by “showing up when the chips are down,” is not constrained to any gender or biological tie. To be part of offering and receiving the care of sisterhood is available to everyone. (And unfortunately white women have been inept – at best – in extending this care to our sisters of color.)

One of the roles within the sisterhood after Myra’s diagnosis was to continually remind her that she was not a burden, that she was worthy of all the care and love she had offered our family and neighbors and friends to come back to her in her time of need. I wonder what our (great) grandmother Antke “Anna” Caroline Saathoff Fredricks (pictured left with her sisters and cousins, lower right corner), would have told Myra about relying on the sisterhood.

Of our two generations of sisterhood, only three of the five people pictured above remain here on the planet. It feels too soon for us to be separated by death, and yet we must surrender to its inevitability, as something that must be accepted not denied. It feels like I still need the sisterhood that these five women share. And it feels like I still have it.

Because of this bond between us and because of the witnessing of showing up for each other, again and again, I know that I carry sisterhood in my bones, in my relationships, in my work, in my coaching, in the spaces I’m a part of, in the conferences and events we help dream up, in the books we create. It’s there, despite the centuries of oppression and overwhelming strain of capitalism that tries to break it with the imposition of the nuclear family and the weakening of extended familial and community ties through war and migration and…

No small thing. Sisterhood, I believe, contains the technology for our shared survival – even and especially – as one (or many) of us is dying. We all deserve spaces and people with whom we are seen and heard, where we are safe and celebrated, where we can breathe and rest and flail and face down our biggest challenges…together.

I never needed a sister to share so-called “girly stuff.”

We all need the sisterhood to show up and face whatever life brings.