My cousin, my self

Yesterday I was scrolling through FB when I saw a posting on my cousin Julie's wall. Only she hadn't written it. It was her son, trying to spread the word that Julie had unexpectedly collapsed and died the night before. He couldn't get into her phone, and it was only by chance that her computer was logged into FB.
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Julie and I were born only a few months apart, and as a result, we were always compared with each other. Who was taller? (She was, but not by much.) Who had better grades? (We ended up at the same middle school and taking the same self-paced science class, only in different periods. I used to cheat and look at her answers in the notebooks we all stored in the classroom. I don't think I ever admitted that to her.) Who told better stories? (One story she had about a night of babysitting that went terribly wrong—the sink that fell off the wall, the hamster and then the child who went missing—was so funny that I have often repeated it, sometimes even pretending it happened to me.)

Like most families, you had to come from mine to truly understand it, good and bad. Our shared history meant that I could go months without hearing from her and still consider her a friend.

On her birthday last December, Julie posted she was the happiest she had been in a long time. Her last email to me was full of concern for someone else.

Life is short. Tell people you love them. (And let someone else know the passwords so that if there's an emergency, they'll have a way to communicate.)