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• Thursday, April 26, 2007 07:22 PM

  My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend

  The other day I heard the end of a radio program about a book called 'My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and Breaking Sibling Bonds' by Dorothy Rowe, whose book on Depression is terrific. She had a troubled relationship with her sister all her life. They're now in their eighties, and it sounded like she ended up with a grimly realistic set of expectations about such relationships that is nevertheless not entirely gloomy. I plan to buy it myself. I feel at once very close to my siblings by virtue of the fact that we have a common origin, but very far from them because we've gone on divergent paths like branches radiating from a single stem. It makes me sad because nothing can take away the fact that we grew up together, yet time has taken away that period of our lives. Not that it was idyllic. Far from it. It's a very complicated and sometimes dark kind of intimacy that I share with them, and from my perspective some of them appear to be lost. When we get together every year or two, we slip back into the old roles, but we've become different people now, and the old costumes no longer fit, so there's something grotesque about it all, and I find myself wondering which of us will die first, and unable to imagine the universe without the existence of these people whom I hardly ever see, and don't even know that well anymore.

  —yehudi Read yehudi's other letters
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