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GROWING UP IN A LARGE
family—and maybe in any family, but certainly in ours—meant living in an atmosphere of competition, a sense that there was not enough to go around. Each of us tried to get more of our parents' (and each other's) love and attention in ways befitting our personalities. In old family movies I can see a preview to the whole story: Katy jumping around, acting out, placating my father, angering my mother. Me noting what did and didn't work with Katy, strategically trying to be what I thought would please my mother—a serious girl, a smart girl. Maggie and Jo waiting like nice little mice in the background, sharing the thin air, their big sisters having already taken up most of the oxygen.

Only now do I understand how much we have competed with each other over a lifetime of being sisters. While our childhood brand of competition might not have taken the form of a football game, we had our own ways—overtly or covertly—of pushing our weight around in order to get the validation and love we longed for. For much of my adult life, I thought of myself as a noncompetitive person, not understanding how I had dragged the same unconscious tactics I used with my sisters into adult relationships, how I had blindly re-created the rules and roles of our sisterhood wherever I went. If there were a twelve-step program for covert competitors, now would be the time for me to ask for forgiveness from people like my ex-husband, my current husband, my friends and colleagues. Now would be the
time to say I am sorry for trying every which way to feel loved and valued, respected and taken seriously, instead of the one way that works the best: telling my truth and asking for what I need.

One evening, after an unhappy phone call with Katy, where neither of us seemed to be telling the truth and asking for what we needed, I hear a noise in the living room. It's my husband, hammering in the storm windows, using an old favorite book of mine he's taken down from the shelf.

“Hey! Don't use a book as a hammer,” I say.

He looks at the book's cover and hands it to me. “Here,” he says, “maybe it's a sign from the universe.” It's a book by the Mexican author Don Miguel Ruiz,
The Four Agreements
. I haven't read it in years. As I recall, it's about the power of simple, honest, and bold communication. I decide to read it again, because I need it again, because there is nothing simple about putting simple wisdom into practice. This is true with so many of the “self-help” books I have loved over the years. I don't know what else to call the genre. I'm not referring to superficial books that give pat answers to life's unsolvable mysteries. I'm talking about an ancient genre—the literature of wisdom, the philosophy of living, the books that bear reading over and over. I'm talking about books that place an arm around your shoulder and in a comforting voice say, “Look, I've walked a few steps ahead of you, and I see what's around the bend, and even though you are going to stumble into the same wilderness that I have just scratched my way through, if you take a few minutes, my words may help you avoid some of those same traps and thickets.”

Just like religious texts are for some people, or Tolstoy was for my father, or Walt Whitman for my mother, some of the books in my home are my scripture. Sometimes I reread them. Sometimes all I have to do is pass the shelves in my living room and a book
catches my eye, and I have a Pavlovian response to its title:
Strength to Love
,
A Room of One's Own
,
Being Peace
. I stand up straighter, I breathe more deeply, I remember my inner dignity, and I vow to spread love and do good work.

This time, the book was being used as hammer. The irony isn't lost on me. I am in need of a clonk upside the head, of an infusion of soul, of courage, of direction. I reread
The Four Agreements
. Don Miguel Ruiz asserts that if you slowly metabolize and practice each of the agreements, over time your relationships will become more truthful, peaceful, graceful. And this will bring joy to you and everyone in your life. Good timing.

The four agreements are:

        
1. Be Impeccable With Your Word

        
2. Don't Take Anything Personally

        
3. Don't Make Assumptions

        
4. Always Do Your Best

Don Miguel Ruiz explains in more detail the nuances of each of the agreements, and how to live by them. I've been trying to live by the four agreements for years, and when I actually practice them, they help me immeasurably with my husband, my kids, and my colleagues. But there is one arena where I most often forget to apply them, and that is with my sisters. I know I'm not alone in this oddest of human conditions—where the family members we love the most are the ones with whom we behave the worst. Be impeccable with your word at Thanksgiving dinner? I don't think so. Don't take anything personally with your siblings? Don't make assumptions even though you are pretty damn sure you're being unfairly judged? Do your best even when you're worn out from
trying to do just that? Years ago, at family gatherings, my most fervent prayer was “Oh, please, dear God, help me hew to these agreements and not revert once again to a paranoid meltdown over something one of my sisters has just said or done.”

If I could only practice one of the agreements, I would choose the third: “Don't Make Assumptions.” In describing that agreement, Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement you can completely transform your life.” This promise may sound like hyperbole, but try it. And try it not only with your family but also with people at work, with people you don't even know, and with the world itself. Stop assuming things—especially the worst things—and you will be surprised how even your most meager attempts will bring welcome changes. Instead of assuming, ask questions; instead of reacting or judging or shutting down, first find out what is really going on in the heart and the life of the other person. Invariably, it is not exactly as you have imagined. First of all, there's a good chance it's not personal to you (see the second Agreement). And if it is, you can approach any problem with the heart of an explorer, with the faith that if you bring enough patience and love to the conversation, both people will benefit in the end.

It can take a long time and some painful reckonings to move through assumptions and into the bigger, blessed truth. But this is the path. You can't go around the hard parts if you want to get beyond “misunderstandings, sadness, and drama” with the people who matter to you.

I began to make all sorts of assumptions soon after I tested positive as Maggie's marrow match. I couldn't tell if I was being para
noid or if the resentment I felt coming from Katy and Jo was real. Was I imagining a hostile tone in a phone call, a snide remark, a lack of warmth? Was I taking things too personally? I had a tendency to do this with my sisters, and especially with Katy, whose love and acceptance I had craved as a little girl, finally gained in adulthood, yet in some deep, childhood place still feared I could lose. Could Katy and Jo possibly be jealous that I was a marrow match and they were not? Did they think I was purposefully leaving them out of caring for Maggie? Is it time now to bring all this up or just let it pass?

“Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love,” Don Miguel Ruiz writes when describing the first Agreement: “Be Impeccable With Your Word.” Maggie and I had kept that agreement when we met with the therapist. We had used the power of our words in the direction of truth and love. We had busted up assumptions. And as promised, it had transformed our relationship. But I have resisted doing this with my other sisters. I don't want to create a fuss that will only backfire on Maggie. On top of that, I am exhausted and afraid—afraid to tell the truth to my sisters about their hurtful behavior, and afraid to discover things about myself I don't want to see. Am I indeed leaving them out? Are we reenacting the ancient sisterhood competition? I don't know if I have the bandwidth now to take on one more emotional challenge. But as scared as I am, I am more tired of the tension between us. If there has ever been a time when the sisters of the revolution needed each other, it's now, here at the edge of heartbreak, here at the edge of losing one of us. What the heck, I think. I'm already up to my neck in the ocean of emotions; I might as well go all the way under.

MY GOAL IN CHILDHOOD WAS
to win Katy's favor. She was the big sister, the It sister, the cool sister. I desperately wanted to prove my cool—but my bookish nature and the four years between us guaranteed I would never catch up. Katy loves to remind me of an event, one late afternoon in March, when I was a pudgy sixth grader and she was a stylish freshman in high school. It was the end of the day, the end of the weekend, and once again the family was packing up the car to head home from Vermont to Long Island. We were in the muddy parking lot of a ski resort that my father's ad agency represented, where he dragged the whole family each weekend.

As the other sisters loaded skis onto the car's roof rack, I leaned against a tree near the car, by the side of a river, kicking clods of snow into the raging waters. It had been a sunny day, and the cold air rippled with currents of warmth. The foggy moisture rising from the river smelled like spring. I kicked clump after clump of snow into the water, marveling at the way everything changed: snow into water, winter into spring.

Quite suddenly, my loosened ski boot flew off my foot and into the river. “Oh no!” I cried, standing still, watching the boot float downstream. Katy raced to the bank, slid down into the freezing-cold and churning water, and retrieved the ski boot. “And that,” she
said, tossing the boot at me, “is the difference between you and me.”

Even though our differences have shrunk as we have grown—even though I have become less dreamy and more practical, and Katy has, in her own words, become more “pink”—we are who we are. It will always be Katy's nature—her Juno, her soul's fingerprint—to dive into swift-running rivers to save a drowning ski boot, or a drowning person, which I once watched her do. Just knowing that Katy is in this world makes me, and everyone who knows her, feel safer. She's a powerful businesswoman and the matriarch of her family. She's my reference point, my North Star. But Katy can also be impatient and annoyed when something can't readily be fixed, and this makes her less suited for the long and bewildering process of caring for an ill and dying person.

My contemplative nature served me in the slow, dark nights of midwifery, and it is serving me now as I care for Maggie. But the same trait that makes me a good midwife in birth and death has also made me a serious person, one who can't stop herself from going deep, even when it would be more appropriate (and fun) to splash around at the shore with the other happy kids. I know this about myself. I know that being insistently introspective—
deep
—both inspires and irritates other people. Sometimes they just want to chat or joke around or play a card game, for God's sake. Thank goodness for growing older and wiser—I have actually become younger as I've aged.

Sometimes, when my lofty pontificating irks Katy, she will snap her fingers and bark, “Ski boot!” and I'll shut up and get busy. And when Katy races down riverbanks even when the boot is still on the other person's foot, I'll say, “Katy! Pink!” and she'll soften and slow down. We have earned the right to do this with each other,
because over many years, we have cultivated a different kind of love than the one we experienced as children. We have come to rest in “human love,” as Anaïs Nin calls it. “Where the myth fails,” she writes, “human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.”

We didn't start out this way. I came into the world bearing the handicap of being the second-born. Katy took on the role of the eternally pissed-off older sister who resented my very existence, and I responded by being the needy little sister, clamoring for contact and approval. It went on like this until we hitchhiked our way through Europe and survived some harrowing experiences on the road, gaining each other's respect and trust. And although we still misread each other's behavior and hurt each other's feelings, we have learned how to return to love over and over. We are saved by our stubborn devotion and a sense of humor (sometimes).

I know it won't take much for Katy and me to get through the feelings that have hardened around the stress of Maggie's illness. We know how to do this; we have done it before. But still, we break the first three agreements all the time. We take things personally. We make assumptions. And no matter how close two people are it's hard to be impeccable with your word—graceful and truthful at the same time. That's why I've been afraid to have an honest conversation her. But that's why the fourth Agreement is “Always Do Your Best.” It's never too late to try to do your best again.

On a cold afternoon in late November I call Katy. I am home. It is four p.m., but it's already dark. Just like me. I am dark and at my wits' end. I call Katy to ask her advice and to commiserate. An oncologist—a friend of a friend—at a renowned cancer hospital in Los Angeles is suggesting a new and promising regimen that
Maggie may try even though it seems we're at the eleventh hour of her life. This remarkably generous doctor is willing to consult with the team at Dartmouth. I have been chasing down Maggie's doctors all afternoon to see what they think, and whether insurance will cover the treatment. Time is of the essence. But everyone I talk to puts me on hold or suggests I talk to someone else. Am I pushing too hard? Should I stop trying to find one more way to help Maggie live? I am getting tired of making these decisions, I tell Katy.

“You're a saint, Liz,” she says in a tone I cannot read. Does she mean it? Is she mocking me? Is she insinuating that I am knocking myself out in order to prove how good I am (and how bad she is)? Instead of just wondering, this time I take a deep breath, and I ask her.

“What do you mean, ‘you're a saint'? Are you making fun of me? Are you questioning my motives?” My voice wavers and I feel perilously close to falling apart.

I am met with a resounding silence.

“Katy? Are you there?”

A long sigh, and then, “It's OK, Liz,” she says, as if I'm a jumpy dog she's trying to calm. “Let's not make a big deal out of anything right now. We're all on edge, all right?”

“No, it's not all right,” I say, getting louder. “I want to talk about this. It's been bothering me and I don't have the space for anything to bother me except for Maggie. I need you to be in this with me, Katy.”

“Huh,” Katy grunts.

“What do you mean, ‘huh'?”

“I'd like to be more in this with you,” Katy says. “But you keep telling me to stay away.”

I feel heat rising in my face, and a truth-ache churning in my belly. I want to yell angry, injured things, but in the back of my brain I hear Don Miguel Ruiz saying, “Be impeccable with your word.” Oh, rats. It would be so satisfying right now to release a tirade of heartbreak on Katy. I don't do it.

Instead, I say, “Katy, do you really think I want to do this all alone?”

“It sure feels that way sometimes. Like you do it better than anyone else, so why would you need me?”

I start to cry. Forget it, Don Miguel; forget impeccability. I'm too upset. I let loose a long string of tearful, irate words—about how judged and unappreciated I feel by Katy and Jo. And how confusing it is when Maggie asks me to be the gatekeeper. How I second-guess my instincts all the time. Am I doing this right? Am I keeping people away unnecessarily? Am I a control freak? Do I secretly enjoy being the special one, the one in charge? I end my rant with a flurry of feelings I didn't even know I had: that I'd been abandoned by Katy during the marrow harvest; that I had been scared and needed her; that I'd been hurt when she minimized the procedure and didn't check up on me afterwards. I feel like a little girl throwing a tantrum to get my mother's attention.

“Why didn't you come to the hospital to be with me? Were you mad at me?” I cry.

“What in the world would I be mad at you for?” Katy asks.

“For being Maggie's perfect match!” This unexpected statement takes us both by surprise.

“Oh, honey!” Katy says. “Of course I wasn't mad. I was thrilled at least one of us matched. I was relieved. I was glad it was you. I didn't want to have
my
bone marrow harvested. You seemed so brave. You went into your smart-girl research mode and left me in
the dust. I guess I felt inadequate. I feel inadequate now. You know how to be with Maggie. The whole thing terrifies me. I want to fix it and I can't.”

Now we're both crying.

“And I didn't know you wanted me at the hospital,” Katy says. “I thought you just wanted Maggie there. I should have been there for you, Liz. I didn't know you wanted that.”

“I didn't know either,” I say. “I was too freaked out to know anything. And we're our parents' girls. We don't ask for help.”

“God forbid,” Katy says, quoting our mother. “God forbid we ask for help. That would mean we need it. Or deserve it, or something like that. That would put a burden on other people, which is something that one just doesn't do.”

“You know what's funny?” I say. “All this time, I've been trying to get Maggie to ask for what she needs. To convince her that she deserves our help, our love, our care. And look at me! I couldn't even ask you for help, the one person who would do anything for me.”

“You shouldn't have had to ask,” Katy says. “I should have known.”

“How would you have known I needed you when I didn't even know it myself?” I say.

“Well, I'm sorry, anyway,” Katy says. “Tell me what you need now, Liz.”

I think for a while. “I guess what I need most is for you to trust that I'm doing the best I can.”

“You're doing more than that, Liz. I really meant it when I said you're a saint. I'm grateful every day. I'm sorry I don't tell you that.”

“Yeah, but I'm also a control freak. Have I been all control-freakish these days?”

“Yes,” Katy admits. “You have been a tad controlling. Just a wee tad.”

“I'm sorry. I just don't know how to do it any other way.”

“Me too,” Katy says. “It turns out saving a sister is harder than saving a ski boot.”

We laugh. The field of love opens. We walk in. I tell her about the doctor in Los Angeles and the new protocol, how the FDA just approved it and only one lab makes it and it will take some effort to get it in time. Katy helps me make the decision to encourage Maggie to try one more time, with one more drug, to live.

“I want to say one more thing, Liz,” Katy says. “And don't take it the wrong way.”

“What?”

“What I want to say is that we're all Maggie's perfect match. In our own ways. You are, I am, and Jo is too. Do you know that?”

I let those words settle in my heart. I remember what I said to four-year-old Will when I was driving him home from school, and he was struggling with his little ego's need to be the special one. “Everyone wants to be special, Will,” I told him. “So either everyone is special, or no one is.” Ah! There's some truth here for me. It stings, but I let myself feel it. I give my own four-year-old ego a nod; I recognize that she's still hanging around, still trying to feel special in a family of four special girls. I pat her head. I tell her she is indeed special, and so are Katy and Jo and our beloved Maggie.

“Thanks. I needed that,” I say. “We're a perfect match. All of us. We're KaLiMaJo.”

As we get off the phone I feel the thread of unconditional love
making another stitch in the mother-loop. Why Katy and I waited to talk things out is as mystifying to me as why any two people or groups or nations forgo communication and instead allow assumptions to morph into hard feelings, loss of love, or, worse, hatred and violence. How many wounded relationships in our wounded world could be healed if people would only risk being vulnerable and honest? And hurt and angry too, but angry in a way that leads to positive resolution. This is possible. It's difficult, it's risky, but it's possible. And the opposite has a terrible track record. I like the way the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee puts it: “Anger is like liquid, like water—it's very fluid. Pour it in a nonviolent container, or pour it in a violent container.”

The opposite of violence is not a world without anger, not a world without conflict. In fact the fear of conflict often leads to violence. It leads to unexplored assumptions, dishonesty, and backstabbing. Nonviolence is the ability to be in honest, patient conflict with another person, to hold each other's flaws up to the light, to talk it all the way through and to discover that, although none of us is perfect, still we can be each other's perfect match. This is the “human love” that Anaïs Nin speaks of. This is what happens when we stop taking things personally, when we stop making assumptions, and when we are impeccable with our word.

And never forget the fourth Agreement: “Always Do Your Best.” You will need the fourth Agreement. My phone call with Katy was the result of years and years of trying and failing, trying and failing, doing our best even though it sometimes looked like our worst. I used to think I would never get to Rumi's field—the one beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing—with Katy. I used to think we would always make assumptions and take things person
ally and withhold our truths and be stingy with our love. But we worked hard for that phone call on the dark November afternoon, in the eleventh hour of Maggie's life. And afterwards, things change between us. We become more courageous with our words—more honest and, at the same time, more kindhearted. We don't want to leave the field again. This is Maggie's gift to us.

It will not be as easy to mend the hurt with Jo, and to pour our assumptions out of the cup and fill it instead with love and forgiveness. She is angry at being excluded. She blames it on me. She's tells me this one day after I tell her not to visit Maggie. She accuses me, and I say all the wrong, defensive things as I try to make her see it my way. We are unpracticed at being each other's perfect match. Perhaps this is what doing our best looks like now. But I make a promise to myself that in Maggie's name I will follow Rumi's directions for as long as it takes and hope that Jo and I will meet in the field.