Today my sister turns seventy-years-old.

Let’s start with this: My sister should be dead. Some years ago Cathy was diagnosed with aggressive stage four ovarian cancer. She had to undergo treatments in Philadelphia, knowing the odds of surviving even for just a couple of years were slim. She continued to work daily in Princeton, New Jersey, forty-five minutes from home, and she battled the monster. To the point: If you know anything about my sister, you know that ovarian cancer, even stage four, didn’t stand a chance. That was more than ten years ago, and not only did she defeat the cancer, not long ago she was told she is completely cancer-free and doesn’t need to return.

Of course. That’s Cathy. One of my heroes.

I thought about telling “Cathy stories” here, like how she got my copy of the then-brand-new Let it Be album by trading me a Bobby Sherman album. Or how she let me use her guitar all I wanted. Or how she sent me care packages, made me ceramics like a seagull mug and another of a seagull standing on one wing, a beautiful rug she made of a seascape, and a pillow she made of Fozzie the Bear. How she introduced me to the music of John Denver which carried me through some difficult nights as I went out on my own, and how she sent me a plaque she made with the lyrics to John Denver’s “The Eagle and the Hawk.”

She doesn’t recall but I do how during the Watergate fiasco, my history-major sister quizzed me relentlessly in who the primary players were at the hearings. I was thirteen and she was in college, so I didn’t really see her too much after I turned twelve. But I ended up at the same college some years later to discover she had left a mark at our alma mater, graduating seven years before I did, but her former professors knew who I was because of her. I let them know quickly I was not my sister; an always straight A student who excelled in her studies, particularly in history, eventually earning her doctorate at Notre Dame where she met her loving and devoted husband, Greg.

I’m not going to provide details of the myriad times she ended up being the butt of my jokes and those of our brother Fred. I will say she is such a fine cook and baker that her food should be in restaurants, she is an excellent writer of both history and other subjects, authoring the fine and definitive book Agenda for Reform, about Winthrop Rockefeller. I’ll not embarrass my sister with stories of her dancing to the “Hokie Pokey” at a resort in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, or bring up the complete drenching she received on the Roman River Rapids ride at Busch Gardens in Virginia, where she apparently didn’t know she’d get wet, to which her son replied, “Ma! It’s Roman River Rapids! What did you think was going to happen!”

I’m going to save the story of calling her one August day in 1988 just seconds after she received beautiful news that would change her life; how she became a committed and loving mother; a passionate grandmother, which only deepened her love for her husband and the rest of our family.

And I’m going to keep to myself the history we’ve shared not solely as brother and sister but as friends. And readers do not need to be reminded of what it means to have an older sister; how she is counselor, surrogate mother, teacher, patient audience, how she teaches scared younger brothers how to care about others, how to show compassion, how to think of others first. Few people with an older sister don’t already know she is a security net for the most challenging of emotional events, how she listens, how she is tolerant.

“Life is paper thin,” my friend Toni Wynn once wrote. Sometimes we all take each other for granted, forget to check in, see how life has been treating us. On the one hand we might talk often enough to know our sisters are there if we feel like calling. On the other, we don’t let them know nearly enough, not nearly enough, how much they mean to us.

Happy Birthday Cathy.

But I can’t avoid this one, just for old-time’s sake:

For Cathy: