I have had a tumor that was not benign. My stepmother has had heart issues that have hospitalized her. My father has had emergency surgery on his stomach. My mother has a plethora of health issues that she can’t afford to solve. My grandmother has been left on the cold tile floor, unable to get up, putting her closer to death.

And yet I’m most scared of my little sister dying.

I’ve looked at her with serious eyes and a half-joking voice and implored her not to kill herself, told her to tell me if she gets the urge. Not because she shows the signs. Not because she can’t leave her bed. But because she is the last survivor of the home that I and my sisters and brothers endured.

She is 18. She is only months from leaving this house. She is popular, with a kind boyfriend and lots of friends. She is active in sports. She’s earned a plethora of scholarships.

But she grew up in the house that I did, even though the walls and foundation are different, the bodies inside are the same and that’s all that matters.

I know what it is to ache so terribly that death will take you and with it your pain. I watched as my brother was taken to the mental hospital after his feelings were dismissed again and again. I watched my stepmother roll her eyes and hang up the phone when my stepsister called her and told her she wanted to die. I have quietly stood over my mother’s bed and fiddled with the gun on her nightstand, sat in the bath and clutched the box cutter from under the sink. I have sprawled on my college room floor on the phone with my father, sobbing that I want to die, and he, afraid of examining his own flaws, his own errors, spits that it is my fault. My sister was the green light that kept me hoping, alive. My greatest fear when I left the home was that she would be alone. In that house.

And she has been alone. For years now, maybe even while I was still living under the roof, when I would slip away to my friend’s nostalgic befrooms or my mother’s “cracker box” home, as named by my stepmother, scoffing at the squalor my father left her in. They are shaping her into a monster with their words. She cannot recognize herself in the mirror, only they can name her. They have named her Manipulator, Gullible, Selfish, Brat, Ignorant, Useless. She is not allowed to be anything else, there is no jury, only two gods puppeteering, They speak and so it is.

They are the gods, expecting reverence, always holy, right, good. It is only natural that those cast from heaven yearn for the creator’s approval. She is not worth their looks. She speaks and she is ignored, she makes herself known and is cast a withering glare. She loves and is sucked dry of loyalty and admiration and is left wanting.

So when she averts her eyes from mine and laughs out an “okay,” doesn’t reassure me, doesn’t argue back, I can’t feel hopeful. I can only feel terrified and pray to a god I have not believed in for many years, but that she still does, that she will make it another year