I woke up in the middle of the night wondering if there’s such a thing as an estranger and an estrangee. Or if it’s just the two-way street of the estranged. That’s where you and I live now, but at this very moment I lay still in bed next to my husband who sleeps so silently, politely really… I have to listen close to hear if he’s there beside me or perhaps out in the garage fixing the broken generator I know has been on his mind. We have a freeze coming, we all have a lot on our minds.
A few months ago, I read an article on Oprah.com called Eulogy For My Estranged Sister, Who Lives Somewhere In Boston. The author, Amy Neff, writes about the questions she carries now that her sister has cut off contact: where her sister is, what her days look like, who she might be becoming. Without a way to reach her, without even a social media account to quietly check in on from time to time, the loss of her sibling feels like a door closed, locked, and drywalled over.
But our estrangement is different, isn’t it.
Because I don’t have to wonder where you are or what you think of me. You tell the internet exactly how you feel about me. You leave breadcrumbs of your anger and certainty everywhere.
And here we are.
I was scrolling back through my camera roll looking for pictures of you and me. There are so many, of course, that my phone recognizes your face and has built an entire album called Lauren without asking me how I might feel about that.
I stopped on this one, a photo from our hike to Granite Falls in Washington, 2018. In my mind, this was our last really great time together.
The hike was a challenge. Four miles scrambling up the mountain to get to the beautifully still Glacier Lake. We were triumphant and a little feral in the way that we giggled ourselves up that mountain. We set up snacks on a smooth boulder with a view to rest. When I think about what we packed (because we’re always thinking about snacks), all I can remember is Peanut Butter M&M’s, which absolutely tracks for us.
Back then, we had an ease that only exists between sisters. The kind of ease that made us text each other C2G — cradle to grave — as both a joke and a promise.
But again, here we are.
Now we get to the hardest part. The part I don’t quite know how to write about because confusion colors so much of it.
I could feel the distance between us creeping in sometime in mid-2019. By 2021, it had planted real roots. I look back now at some of the emails we exchanged during that time, and I can see that we were both trying to stay connected, but the erosion of our bond had already begun.
In 2024, I invited our entire family out to Texas for Thanksgiving. What only Mom and Dad knew, was that it was also going to be a very small, very surprise wedding on the front lawn between me and Will. We invited you. We had a room ready for you. I truly thought you might come.
I didn’t yet understand how far down a different path you already were. I didn’t yet understand how close the erosion had come to catastrophic.
I think I realized it when you posted about Dad on Instagram.
We’ve always been a family with a wide range of political views. We range from very liberal to very conservative, and for most of our lives, we made a quiet agreement that what we had in common mattered more to us than where we differed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was loving.
I understand now that this idea no longer worked for you. I understand that as adults, we all get to decide for ourselves what our boundaries are and what we can and can’t live with. I don’t think you’re wrong for needing a different framework for your life.
The part I still can’t quite make sense of is what came next.
You stopped speaking to me. But you didn’t stop speaking about me.
Since 2024, I’ve watched you take to message boards and social platforms. You announce yourself as “Joy’s sister” before launching into lies about my life, my marriage, and my character. You use our sisterhood to add weight to your words. But so much of what you say is unkind and untrue.
I don’t think you see it that way.
I also see how much support, validation and belonging you receive in those spaces when you tell those stories. I can see how strangers gather around you and tell you that you’re brave, that you’re doing the hard and necessary thing. That kind of attention might feel like oxygen when you’re lonely or hurt or trying to make sense of your own life
What I don’t know how to live with yet is the part where speculation about my life becomes the raw material for your growth. Where my name, and my character become the story that helps carry you up and forward. I see how your engagement spikes when you drag my name and falls again when you’re just talking about ice cream. The internet was built to feed that sort of drama, and the price is high.
You’ve blocked me everywhere and without the dignity of a hard conversation, it all feels rather cowardly.
I’m not MAGA, as you so confidently insist. I didn’t vote for Trump. What’s happening in Minneapolis — the shootings, the fear, the way federal enforcement is playing out in neighborhoods — is horrendous. I want ICE out of these communities. I’ve donated to food justice efforts in the Twin Cities, and before that to Second Harvest in New Orleans and the Louisiana Parole Project, not because I’m trying to prove anything, but because that’s how my values show up in my real life. When you stopped talking to me, you also stopped having the kinds of conversations where you could actually see those values up close.
In the past, I’ve chosen not to respond. Not because it doesn’t hurt, and not because it doesn’t feel deeply unfair, but because I don’t want to turn my life into a public argument with someone I still love.
You wrote online this weekend about going “scorched earth.” I sat with that phrase for a long time. I tried to imagine saying it about you, and I couldn’t. But yes, I think you can cross it off your list.
Will and I were seated in the living room for a quick dinner last night. I had been looking forward to roasting a chicken all week, but with this whole mess you’ve placed in my lap, on top of another killing in Minnesota by a Border Patrol officer, I found myself just going through the motions to get it in the oven. My mind was everywhere else.
With a few bites of chicken left on my plate, Will noticed me staring past him at the place where the wall meets the ceiling. He asked me what I was thinking about.
I said, “I don’t know how this ends between us, between all of us.” And my eyes filled with tears for the third or fourth time that day.
And here we are.
At the end of so much, but without an ending.
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