After she’d been pulled under the third time, she thought: So this is how it ends.

She’d been excited about the canoe trip. She’d listened carefully when the guide called a warning back to the group to paddle like crazy to the far side of the stream when the river bent around huge boulders up ahead.

She saw them, felt the current picking up speed, and the next thing she knew, somehow she was clinging to limbs wedged into those rocks, her canoe long gone. The tighter she held to the last branch, the lower she sunk into the swirling vortex sucking her under.

She was pretty damn sure she was going to die here. As she relayed this story to me afterwards, I kept waiting for the punchline, given who she is… my father’s illegitimate daughter whose stridently sarcastic sense of humor isn’t even a little bit funny. It’s a coping mechanism of sorts, I guess, for one not sure where or to whom she belonged. Uncharacteristically, she just stopped mid-sentence and shook her head like she was reliving the stunned moment when—soaked and gasping for breath—she surfaced.

Well, I had to ask, “How did you do it?”

“I let go,” she said. “I gave up and I just let go.” Then she got sucked under, but only for a few moments before the current popped her out several yards downriver, sputtering and alive.

Normally, I cut a wide berth around my sister over our vastly different politics and religion, but I have held onto her story for dear life more than once myself, gratefully.

“Little sister,” she nodded at me, “Eventually, letting go is the answer to pretty much everything. In the end, it’s sometimes the only way to save your own life.”

© Liana 7/24