The Ache of Loving a Sister You Can’t Reach

Today is her birthday again.

I know the exact date without looking at a calendar. Some things just etch themselves into you. I wake up, go to pray for her, and there it is—another year where the words “Happy Birthday” sit heavy in my chest as words I’m not allowed to say to her anymore. I type them out in my notes app. Delete them. Type them again. Then close the app and go make lemonade, because reaching out isn’t an option anymore and all I have left are these lemons. She asked me to leave her alone. And I’m trying—God, I’m trying—to respect that.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to communicate with her every day and she would communicate back with me each day. For years we were close as a brother and sister. We used to see each other often. Enjoy doing fun activities. We used to talk. Regularly. I’d wish her not only happy birthday but wish her happy feast days, baptismal days, confirmation anniversary days - days she didn’t even know were happening that day until I’d wish it to her. It didn’t used to be silent.

But then came the end of her high school years and the first stretch of college. She was figuring out who she was, and some of those figuring-out years involved decisions that hurt. Immature ones. Ignorant ones. The kind of choices you look back on and wince at when you’re older and have more life under your belt. She mistreated me in ways that cut deep—small betrayals that added up, words that landed like punches, absences that felt louder than any fight. Decisions that hurt her far more than they ever even hurt me. I tried to be patient through it. Offering olive branches and trying to be understanding. But unfortunately, with a brain injury, I didn’t stand a chance when she wouldn’t let me be a brother anymore after months and months of trying.

I was already carrying my own stuff, and when my reactions came, they weren’t perfect. I snapped. I said things I wish I could take back. I let the pain spill out messily because I didn’t know how else to hold it. Like a toddler trapped in an adult body, I cried out in the only limited ways I had available against the mistreatment and absence I was experiencing. Those were a couple of poor reactions she still holds against me. I own them. They weren’t right. I’ve apologized many times for them. But they also didn’t happen in a vacuum. She had started to cut our family out of her life prior to the end of her high school years and before I had gotten hurt with my TBI. And in the years that followed, she never tried to create a friendship together ever again. But the TBI made it so instead of just her making the wrong decisions as a naive high schooler lacking guidance and direction in her life, she no longer knew how to communicate and relate to this new TBI recovering version of myself even in the moments she recognized her faults and harm caused. As she accumulated those decisions, I wasn’t able to respond with the grace I otherwise could have and she never sought to make amends and be real again with me either. TBI can cause you to lose many people in your life. But for her, she already chose to leave us before I ever got hurt, which makes a path to reconciliation that much more challenging with the struggles of TBI now as she continues to choose separation. My TBI isn’t what caused her to leave our life, that was all her poor decisions. But my TBI symptoms seem to be a challenge for why she continues to be unable to re-enter it. Perhaps the biggest obstacle on my end for her to approach is my emotions and issues related to that from my TBI.

Traumatic brain injury. One moment, one accident, and suddenly my emotions don’t come with volume control anymore. What used to be a manageable wave of frustration or sadness now crashes like a storm surge. I feel everything at eleven. Joy explodes. Grief hollows me out. Anger, when it shows up, shows up loud—even when I’m trying to whisper it. I’ve learned to pause, to breathe, to text myself instead of texting others when the intensity spikes. But brains don’t heal on a tidy timeline, and my sister made it clear: my intensity is “too much” for her. The emotional load I carry now, the way I process (or sometimes fail to process) the world since the injury—it overwhelms her. So she drew the line. She cut me out. She asked me to leave her alone. She has chosen a life without our family to “protect her peace”.

And I did.

That’s the hardest part to explain to people who haven’t lived it. I love her. I miss her laugh, giving her a drink or snack, and the way she used to roll her eyes at my dumb jokes or simultaneously appreciate and hate the pranks. I still remember some of the inside stories only we share from the years of hunting with her, taking trips to visit her sister with our family, and having her stay with our family for weeks on end. But love, sometimes, means honoring a boundary even when it feels like it’s carving out a piece of your heart every single year. Especially on her birthday. Especially when every fiber of me wants to send one stupid text that says I’m still here. I still care. I hope you’re happy.

Instead, I sit with the silence. I sit with the grief that has no tidy resolution. I sit with the self-doubt that whispers maybe I really am too broken with a brain injury to be loved by the people who once loved me most. Because the truth is, I think one of her most difficult realities in her teenage rebellion even before I got hurt was her inability to process that a brother could genuinely love her so much when others in her life - that should have loved her - weren’t loving her how she wanted and needed.

TBI families are complicated enough; add estrangement and it feels like trying to hug someone through bulletproof glass. You can see them. They can’t hear you though. You can ache for them. You just can’t get close. It’s prison. It is talked about how frequently TBI survivors lose people in their lives they thought they would have close to them forever. The impact of each one of those losses the TBI survivor experiences is more difficult than words describe. A silent birthday wish is one microscopic example of the pain of these ongoing losses.

But here’s what I’m holding onto, even on the hardest days: people change. Minds open. Hearts soften. She’s still young in the grand scheme of things. Time might one day reveal to her my TBI not as a burden she has to carry, but as something she can understand without needing to fix or flee from. One day she might see I loved and love her, but love without knowing her anymore will soon be empty. I’m doing the work on my end—getting better at regulating, learning new tools, becoming more of the brother I want to be even if she never sees it. I tried to be the best brother I could for her for the entire time of knowing her before I got hurt and that has never changed. Maybe one day she’ll look back and see that the sister who once needed space was allowed to grow up too. Maybe she’ll remember the good stuff before the hard stuff. Maybe she’ll eventually send a message first. Or maybe I’ll get to send that birthday text in a future where her boundary against our family has gently shifted because understanding grew on both sides.

I don’t know when or if it will happen. Hope isn’t a guarantee; it’s a quiet companion that walks beside the grief. It’s what keeps me from letting the silence turn bitter when I can manage to keep hope present. It’s what lets me still light a candle some years, blow it out, and whisper the words anyway—even if no one ever hears them. That candle is a dim light in this current fog. But it is still light.

Today in the silence of the relationship that is no longer, I sent again a message to myself instead of her:

I hope your cake is perfect. I hope the people around you make you laugh until your sides hurt. I hope life is giving you the softness you deserve. And when you’re ready—if you’re ever ready—my door isn’t locked. It never was. In fact, like a joined hotel room, my door has been open on my room’s side this whole time. Ready and waiting for when your door would open up once more. I love you. Happy Birthday!

Until she changes her life and decisions, I’ll keep respecting the space and keeping our family out of her life. And I’ll keep hoping. Or trying to hope anyway.

Because some birthdays are worth waiting for.

— A brother still in the stands, still cheering quietly in this silence from afar, even with this brain injury.