Leah is my little sister. At the moment, I’m sitting here in her hospice room as she sleeps (we’re at the place where that’s most of her day) while Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull plays on the TV for what is I’m sure the 3rd or 4th time today and I’m trying to figure out the right way to describe a life that in many ways I fundamentally just don’t understand.
Leah came along in December of 1979. She and I are both adopted and my parents wanted multiple kids, so while I’m sure that it had nothing to do with me, I like to believe that we got her because I was jealous that my friend Douglas had a sister and I told my parents that I wanted one too. Whatever the reason, Leah joined our family just a few days after she was born and it’s been her and I ever since.
Our childhood was what I’ve always thought of as pretty normal if not privileged. We grew up in a nice neighborhood, spent every day during summers at the neighborhood pool, and were fortunate to have attended a top notch private school by virtue of the fact that my mom was a teacher there. Looking at it now, I think that one of the reasons all this is so hard for me to get my head around is because I spent the majority of my life believing that the experience I just described as my experience of childhood was also her experience of childhood. It wasn’t. See, my mom, for all the good that she did in her life, had a lot of emotional scars from her own upbringing that unintentionally shaped her expectations for a relationship with her daughter that didn’t exist for me as her son. In fact, while I was oblivious to it for pretty much my entire life, the only expectation that those scars had created for me was simply that I didn’t leave her. The net result of that dichotomy was that I was free to pursue my interests and passions - and was celebrated when I found any success - while Leah was expected to meet a set of emotional needs that mom couldn’t really even articulate, let alone consider whether any of it was fair. When you add to that mix the fact that my sister is both incredibly smart and fiercely independent, it’s entirely unsurprising that she and my mom had a turbulent relationship from a very early point. And while I didn’t know about any of it until relatively recently, Leah became the easy target for my mom’s fears and insecurities.
In spite of all of it, Leah graduated high school and matriculated to the University of Texas. As I mentioned, she’s incredibly smart - as in, Mensa-level smart. However, as I’ve spent some time reflecting, I think that there’s a point where intelligence shifts from being an asset to more of a liability. Intelligence can be a great gift, but genius an equally great burden, because in genius, the world looks fundamentally different and navigating it is clumsy and unintuitive. For Leah, that along with everything preceding it created a deep social anxiety. Alcohol was an easy way to dull the anxiety and college was the perfect environment to mask real problems with run-of-the-mill youthful indiscretions. By the time any of us realized that there might be a real problem, it was in a lot of ways too late. And yet, in spite of it all, she was able to get a bachelors degree, a couple masters degrees, and even a PhD. While she had a rocky start, I had some hope that she had found something new that was bigger than the past trauma and companion coping mechanisms.
Then, in 2014, our mom committed suicide.
I’ll never forget the phone call from my dad - I was in San Francisco getting ready to speak at a conference. I flew to Houston as quickly as possible, but had a day of transition where I was still a bit removed from the trauma. Leah was not so lucky. She was there with my dad that night at the house. She absorbed the shock directly and those emotions combined with all of the fights, insecurities, and shame that she had already been carrying around since she was a kid. The anxiety was overwhelming - the addiction deepened. I had no idea about any of the underlying reasons but I knew that she was drinking - a lot - and I hated the interactions that resulted between us. For the next two years, she and I really didn’t talk at all, which was pretty easy since she was in Houston and I was in Seattle. During that time, her liver failed and she was rushed into an emergency liver transplant. I was so angry with her (in reality, I was likely angry with my mom more than I was her) that while I regret it, I never once reached out to her during this time - even though she came close to dying more than once. Thankfully, dad was there with her and she recovered with a new lease on life thanks to the liver transplant. My assumption was that this would have been the event that would cause her to quit drinking - after all, she nearly died as a result of it. It turns out that the addiction was stronger than I could have imagined and what actually happened was that it just went underground.
Fast-forward to 2018. Things seemed to be starting to normalize after mom’s death. Dad seemed to be processing through everything in healthy ways - he had even taken on an active role as a mentor in the Scouts organization (he was an Eagle as a kid and the organization meant a lot to him). Leah and I still didn’t have an active relationship but from what dad told me, things seemed to be going much better with her. I can’t remember what time of year it was (I know it wasn’t winter, thankfully) but dad was driving from Houston to Missouri to attend a college reunion. Dad was a road-trip kind of guy so nothing about this seemed to be any departure from what would be normal. You can imagine, then, how surprising it was when Leah called me late one evening in a panic because dad was lost. At first, I thought she was being overly dramatic - however, when I couldn’t get a hold of him after a couple hours I started realizing that something was off. After multiple hours on the phone with various folks and finally engaging the state troopers, we discovered that dad had gotten off the highway somewhere in Oklahoma and ended up completely lost. The troopers found him and got him somewhere safe where family members met him and got him back to Houston.
With the alarms sounding, Leah and I reconnected in order to start figuring out what was going on with dad. A number of doctor visits and tests confirmed what we had suspected but didn’t want to say out loud: dad had Alzheimer’s disease. At that point I realized that there was no way that I could do a good job taking care of him from 2500 miles away so in 2019, my family moved from Seattle back to Texas. As it turned out, Leah had also fallen on hard times financially and so eventually, she ended up moving back into our childhood home with dad and kept him company as the disease progressed. At that point, I managed all of the logistics and finances for dad - and now for Leah since she had none of her own resources.
Dad was able to stay in his house - which was an important desire for him - until 2022, when the disease had progressed to the point where a traditional residence wasn’t able to provide the level of safety and features that he needed. So at that point, he moved to a memory care community which was 5 minutes from my house in Austin. While the disease is horrible, that time period was one I’ll always remember fondly as he and I got to spend a good bit of time together. During this time, I also restarted my relationship with Leah and things between us started feeling really great. However, Leah was now alone in dad’s house without any community to support her. The addiction accelerated. When dad died in 2024, she inherited resources - which sent the addiction into overdrive. By this point, however, she was exceptional at hiding it, and none of the family had any idea that even after the liver transplant, she was still drinking - certainly not in the amounts that we later discovered. I think that many of us had suspicions - I know I did - but I largely ignored them as a tradeoff for keeping the relationship that she and I had rebuilt.
Everything came to a head about 4 weeks ago. Leah had called me to tell me that she needed some help moving around the house - so I drove down to Houston to help her out. I wasn’t prepared for the reality. In her mind, I think that she was telling both me and herself that she just needed some temporary help getting around the house. Deep down, I think she knew that everything had fallen apart, and she needed my help so that she wouldn’t die alone in that house. I was able to get her to the hospital, then to hospice.
Leah passed away 8 days after I started writing this post. I called the hospice that morning to check on her status and they informed me that her blood pressure had dropped dramatically over the night, and that I should plan to drive down. 3 hours later, they called me back to say that she was gone. So now, I’m spending my spare time picking up the pieces, organizing what’s left, and completing the final tasks in my 15 year role as family COO. I’ll be honest - for every degree of sadness I feel, there’s an equal measure of relief. I know that there’s going to be a lot of thoughts and emotions that I’m going to need to work through over the coming years, but right now, there’s one persistent thought that I struggle with the most:
In ignoring or downplaying my suspicions about her addiction, was I choosing to give up on her in order to have a relationship with her?
I think that intellectually, I know that I did the right thing and that had I not taken the path I did, she would have had a far worse outcome - but as I’m sure you all know, what you think and how you feel don’t always line up as cleanly as you’d like. So for the moment, this is just where I happen to be.
During a 2019 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the great philosopher Keanu Reeves caught everyone including Colbert off guard when asked the question, “What do you think happens when we die?” Reeves paused and replied, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” There are a million things that I wished had been different with Leah - there are a million things that I’m angry about and sad about - there are a million “what if” kinds of questions that I can ask. But right now, I just want to sit in that space of missing her.
I will miss the 2 hour long phone conversations driving back from the ranch
I will miss all the jokes and stories about our dogs
I will miss the ridiculous novelty gifts
I will miss the deeply esoteric conversations about theological topics like preterism vs dispensationalism
I will miss all of the book and TV show recommendations
I will miss all of the funny texts and Instagram story shares
I will miss her incredibly detailed memory of our childhood and her recounting of so many stories I had long forgotten
I will miss a million little things that will pop up randomly to remind me of her
I will miss my sister.
