Sisters sharing joys and pains

I have focused on the marriage and parenting elements of family life for some time, but it now seems to me I’ve neglected another important element the sibling relationship.

We talk of brotherly love, but maybe in too abstract a way. The Afrikaans word naasteliefde is something like it, but is also more general, also seems to concern neighbour more than brother. In our asexual way of speaking, brotherly love doesn’t really speak to me about brothers. Or maybe I don’t understand brothers so well as I never had any. But sisterly love is something else.

Fifty years ago a young widow with three little girls arrived in South Africa to start a new life. She was helped and supported by her own sister. The shared life of those two my mom and my aunt came full circle in the last months of my aunt’s life; the two came to live together as many sisters do, caring for one another in their declining lives sadly not for long, and my mom was left behind.

The three sisters, once little girls and now living far apart in different parts of the country, recently celebrated their 50 years in South Africa with a week’s holiday together. Two of us are widowed and the third, with some opposition, left her husband to spend this precious time with her sisters. We shared a small holiday flat, a tiny kitchen and one bathroom, also many memories of the years together and the times apart.

We filled many gaps in our lives as a family unit and poured out many private hurts. We acknowledged our mutual support, but also situations when we’d not been fully accepting of one another. Still, the bond had always been there. We had common roots, background and early life experiences and values, and many interests in common. After long living far apart, we’d taken a break, and knew we’d be welcomed back. We had trusted each other with confidences we couldn’t share with others. So we thanked God for one another and the blessings of sisterhood.

It’s said that hindsight is the only 20/20 vision, and now I wonder if that was enough. Since that precious, healing week our little sister became ill and died peacefully, surrounded by her husband and children. All who knew Ineke will miss her and remember with joy her warmth and tireless generosity.

I am reminded of that time even before we came to South Africa when our father died, leaving behind his young family. The message on his commemorative prayer card reads: “God’s ways are not our ways. He gives life, and when life’s task has been completed God takes it back.” Who can read the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counsellor?

In childhood days we learned that God created us to know him, love him and serve him in this world and be happy with him in the next. I now believe that God, in his wisdom, created human beings to live and love here on earth first, and families are his gift for teaching us about life and love. On completion of the task assigned to us we return to him and are reunited with those whom we have loved here on earth too.

Furthermore, if we have learnt well the true qualities of family life we can treat all humankind as sisters and as brothers. That for me is the message of August Women’s month on the International Year of the Family calendar. Women are wives, mothers and daughters, sisters and aunts all relating as women do to other women and to men and children.

On the national feastday of the Assumption we ask Mary, assumed into heaven as patroness of South Africa to help women come to an understanding of this true womanhood as we become ever more fully human and fully alive through our relationships. Not so, sisters?