1. The Seed Of This Stir
Everyone tells me I should forgive my sister. I should forgive her for cutting me off—for doing it without a conversation, without an argument, without a single spoken incident I could point to and say:
There. That's where we broke.
I have spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened. Looking backward. Replaying conversations. Searching for the moment I missed.
There was no blowup. No terrible fight. No final exchange of words we couldn't take back.
There was simply a relationship—and then, suddenly, there wasn't.
So naturally, people tell me:
You need to forgive her.
But lately, another thought has been stirring. One that is considerably less comfortable.
What if, before I decide whether I need to forgive my sister...
I need to ask whether I owe her an apology?
There is much more to unpack here. More history. More hurt. More questions.
And I will.
But I want to begin here.
Not with what she did.
With what I may have done.
2. The Should / Shouldn't
You should forgive her.
You should be the bigger person.
You should stop trying to understand something she refuses to explain.
You shouldn't apologize when you don't even know what you did.
3. The Stir
I don't know why my sister stopped speaking to me. That is still the truth.
And because I don't know, I have spent a great deal of time filling in the blank.
Maybe it was this. Maybe it was that. Maybe it was our mother. Maybe it was our father. Maybe it was money. Maybe it was the estate. Maybe it was resentment accumulated over years. Maybe it was something I said. Maybe it was something I didn't say.
Maybe she simply stopped liking me.
Maybe she never did.
I've considered all of it.
What I do know is that she was hurting. What I don't know is why. And without a conversation, I won't assign that hurt to myself.
But I am willing to ask whether any part of it belongs to me.
That's different.
Taking responsibility for someone else's unexplained pain isn't accountability.
Being willing to examine my part in it is.
Maybe my directness—my desire for us to confront and heal some of our shared childhood trauma, to grow and evolve rather than simply carry it forward—felt like judgment.
It wasn't.
My sister didn't talk about difficult things. Everything had to look okay. Maybe even perfect—especially from the outside. I knew that about her.
After years of therapy, I had learned something different: healthy relationships require uncomfortable conversations. You can be angry with someone and still love them. Conflict doesn't have to mean rupture. Saying you hurt me can be the beginning of repair rather than the end of a relationship.
I tried to share some of that with her.
Maybe knowing how to communicate wasn't enough if I couldn't somehow make it feel possible for her to communicate with me.
And maybe I assumed there would always be more time to figure it out.
Because she wasn't just my sister. She would someday be the last remaining link to my natural family—the only other person who had lived the beginning of my story with me.
When everyone else was gone, there would still be her.
There would still be me.
It was always supposed to be us.
Or so I thought.
4. What The Stoics Tell Us
"If anyone can refute me—show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I'll gladly change."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
There is something profoundly uncomfortable about applying that principle to ourselves.
It's easy to examine someone else's behavior.
It's much harder to hold the mirror.
Stoicism doesn't ask us to assume blame for everything that happens to us. It asks us to examine honestly what belongs to us.
Her decision belongs to her. Her silence belongs to her. The way she ended our relationship belongs to her.
But my conduct within that relationship?
That belongs to me.
And if I am going to build an entire philosophy around pausing, examining, and choosing, then I don't get to skip the examination simply because I might not like what I find.
5. The Unpacking
So perhaps before forgiveness comes apology.
Not an apology for something I don't know I did. Not:
I'm sorry for whatever I did.
That would be hollow. And it would make me responsible for an accusation that has never actually been made.
I mean something different.
I could apologize for the possibility that I wasn't the sister she needed me to be. I could apologize for any time I hurt her and didn't recognize it because hurting her wasn't my intention.
In my family, we didn't know how to talk about difficult things. We knew how to make things look okay. Appearances mattered. What was happening behind closed doors was one thing; what the outside world saw was another. We learned to live with what wasn't said rather than risk the discomfort of saying it.
And I had spent years in therapy learning another way.
I had spent years learning a healthier way to communicate. But knowing it and creating a relationship where someone else feels safe enough to practice it with you are two different things.
I tried to teach her some of those things.
But maybe I didn't do enough to show her.
Maybe I didn't create enough safety between us for her to experience what I had worked so hard to learn.
I would have wanted her to know she could come to me and say:
You hurt me. I'm angry with you. You disappointed me. I resent you. I think you're wrong. I need something different from you.
Anything.
And if she didn't know that—or didn't feel that—then perhaps I have something to be sorry for.
One of us was supposed to bury the other at the end of two very long lives. But for whatever reason, my sister ultimately decided that leaving my life felt easier or safer than having a difficult conversation with me.
I don't know what part I played in that.
And I may never know.
6. The Final Word
People keep telling me:
You need to forgive your sister.
Maybe someday that will be part of this story.
But I'm beginning to think forgiveness may not be where my work starts.
Maybe it starts with humility. With leaving room for the possibility that my experience of our relationship wasn't necessarily hers. With understanding that good intentions don't guarantee that we didn't cause pain.
And with being willing to say:
If there is something I need to own, I want to know.
If there is hurt I caused, I want to understand it.
If there were moments when you needed a different sister than the one I knew how to be, I am sorry.
That doesn't erase what happened. It doesn't make the way our relationship ended okay. It doesn't require me to accept responsibility for things I didn't do.
And it doesn't mean there isn't anything for me to forgive.
There may be.
There is much more to unpack on this one.
But perhaps unshoulding means being willing to question even the should that everyone agrees with.
Everyone says I should forgive her.
Maybe.
But first...
maybe I should apologize.
Until next time...
Pause. Examine. Choose.