Turning Point Blog Series

I didn’t expect the call—not for either of them. My older brother, with his infectious smile and beer-offering hospitality, and my younger brother, who always kept me wondering about his thoughts and made everyone laugh with his dark humor. Two funerals, and one quietly terrified sister left standing in the middle.

That sister was me.

At 58, I thought I had time. But suddenly, time felt like a trapdoor.

In the silence after loss, I felt everything and nothing. Shock. Denial. Guilt. Love. Mostly, though, I felt a question humming low and relentless beneath it all:

Am I next?

Before the death of my two brothers, I was a-okay finding out if I was medically at-risk the hard way, but my family was not. So, I got checked. 

I walked into that clinic not just for myself—but for my children, my grandchildren, and the ghosts of the two men who were special to me—my bros.

When the blood tests came back, the truth landed with a whisper, not a bang; I’m not as healthy as I’d hoped.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t panic. I knew my eating habits, my nonchalant lifestyle; I knew the years of abuse on my body would eventually catch up to me, but still holding on to the years of working out, being a jogger, drinking gallons of water every day would help me. 

But, still, I just stood in that moment, knowing it was a line in the sand. A beginning, not an end.

But maybe this fear started long before my own results.

At my younger brother’s celebration of life, in the middle of grief and what-ifs, my youngest brother asked something I wasn’t ready for:

“Do you think we avoided doctors because of Dad?”

He meant our father—who died of leukemia at 36. I was six years old when he went to the hospital. One day, he was laughing at the dining room table with my mom, the next… gone. No explanations. No warning. No goodbye. We didn’t even know he was sick.

Maybe we were too young to understand.

Or maybe we were never told.

Then came the question that still sits heavy in my chest:

“Do you think we were medically neglected?”

I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t.

But I do know this: whatever story we were told—or weren’t told—about illness, about genetics, about bodies, about fear… it shaped us.

And now, I’m trying to rewrite it….

It was a regular Tuesday—the kind of day where nothing feels urgent until everything does. 

I sat in a waiting room, trolling TikTok videos, trying not to think about why I was there. Just a check-up, I told myself. Just making sure.

But in truth, I already knew.

I lost my older brother too soon. Then, my younger brother. Back-to-back losses that cracked something deep inside me and broke me. 

People say to “get checked” like it’s just another item on a to-do list—right between buying milk and returning that Amazon package. But when you’re the one left standing, a sibling left above ground, it doesn’t feel like a task. It feels like a mission.

So I went. I sat. I waited. And then the doctor walked in with the results.

High cholesterol. Elevated risk. Genetics, most likely. “But manageable,” she added, as if that softened the blow.

I didn’t cry in that moment. Not yet. I nodded, asked a few barely remembered questions, and walked out clutching a printout of my future.

It hit me in the car. Not the diagnosis—that I could handle. It was the weight of what I’ve already lost. Two brothers. Two people who knew my childhood, my laugh, my flaws, and loved me anyway. Feeling completely alone, now it was on me—not just to live, but to stay.

For my granddaughters, who remind me that life is beautiful. For my grandson, whom I haven’t even met yet. For my husband, my kids, and the version of me that still wants to dance, drink, eat, write—LIVE.

This blog series is my promise. To them. To me. To stay above.

So this is where it begins. A woman in her fifties, heartbroken but still beating, learning to eat differently, move more, love harder, and let go of every excuse that once made sense.

Because Tuesday was the day I got the call.

And Wednesday was the day I answered it.