My sister and I didn’t speak for six years.
It started over something stupid—an argument about our mom’s estate after she passed. Grief does strange things to people. We were both hurting, but instead of holding each other up, we tore each other down. Words were said that couldn’t be taken back. I told her I never wanted to see her again.
And for six years, I didn’t.
Then I got cancer.
Stage 3 breast cancer at 41.
I remember sitting in my car after the diagnosis, staring at the steering wheel, thinking about all the things I hadn’t fixed in my life. I thought about my kids. I thought about unfinished dreams. And yes—I thought about her.
But I didn’t tell her. Pride is a stubborn thing. After six years of silence, how do you just pick up the phone and say, “Hey, I might not make it”?
So I stayed quiet.
I started chemo alone. My husband had to work that morning, and I insisted I’d be fine. I checked in, sat down, and tried to act brave. But when they hooked me up to the IV and the cold medicine started dripping into my veins, I felt anything but brave.
When I woke up from my first chemo session, groggy and nauseous, I saw her.
She was sitting in the waiting room.
Older. Tired. Nervous. But it was her.
For a second, I thought I was hallucinating. But then she stood up and walked toward me, and I saw tears streaming down her face.
“I should’ve come sooner,” she said.
I found out later a cousin had mentioned my diagnosis at a family gathering. She didn’t hesitate. She drove four hours that same night.
We just stood there for a moment, six years of anger dissolving into something much smaller. Regret. Love. Fear.
“I’m sorry,” we both said at the same time.
It wasn’t a dramatic movie reunion. There were no grand speeches. Just quiet understanding. We had both lost our mom. We had both said things out of pain. And now we were both afraid of losing each other too.
From that day on, she didn’t miss a single treatment.
She sat beside me during chemo, brought snacks I couldn’t eat, held my hand when I was too weak to pretend I was strong. When my hair started falling out, she showed up with clippers and shaved her own head first so I wouldn’t feel alone.
Cancer took a lot from me. My strength. My energy. My sense of control.
But it gave me my sister back.
After months of treatment, surgery, and radiation, the words I’d been praying for finally came: remission.
The first person I hugged was her.
We can’t get those six lost years back. We can’t erase the hurt. But we learned something neither of us will ever forget:
Life is too short to let pride speak louder than love
