We can never fully know another person's life story -- and it takes great hubris to think we can... In my mother's final years, she kept asking me to "please make peace with your brother." I told her that it takes TWO people to make a peaceful situation and that I refused to engage with a person who willfully speaks only in the language of conflict, bigotry and confrontation. I told my brother the same years ago, after he bizarrely claimed that "Bill Clinton killed my father!" [Never mind he was speaking about OUR father and Bill Clinton certainly didn't kill him.) Reconciliation, like respect, cannot be commanded into existence without the hard work that goes along with it. I admire how the author of the article simply thanked (well-intentioned? clueless? bossy?) people telling her to go to her sister's death bed and made no pretense of taking any of the actions they demanded of her.

I love it.