EndGameNYC

Thanks alpha. And thank you for your kind words.

It's a crappy way for the Universe to serve it up, and I don't generally believe in silver linings or, on the other end of the clichè spectrum, "wake-up calls," but this all seems to have propelled my sister to another dimension of reality.

As I've disclosed before, Mary Ann has worked herself to exhaustion for most of her life. She's been a chain smoker since adolescence and prior to her brain surgery in early March, she'd picked up the habit of drinking virtually every night for about a year-and-a-half that I know of. My father died of lung cancer about twenty years ago, and I'd been dreading the day when Mary Ann would be told that she has lung cancer as well.

I started spending more time with her in September of 2013 after she was the victim of down-sizing at her bank. She was older, had a salary deep into six figures, and banks were no longer paying that kind of money anymore. It took her about ten months to find a job that was right for her. In that time, she did a lot of volunteer work, took a class to improve her skills and her rèsumè, and helped me out as I'd just started a new job. She also re-connected with friends.

Though I'm well trained and well practiced in grief work, this time it's my sister.

It's sometimes difficult for me to find meaning during an ongoing crisis, but I'm intensely grateful that I can be there for her. The rest of me is just angry and sad, though it's also very clear to me that what I've learned in sobriety, and the process of achieving sobriety itself, have both helped me a great deal in terms of managing my life through all this and helping my sister to work through it.