A few weeks ago, my sister fell down in her house and changed her hip. I realized tonight that it was past time for me to write about it. The fall has changed both of our lives.

Jane lay on the floor of her kitchen for 45 hard minutes until she could get to a phone and call her neighbors for help. She couldn’t believe for the longest time that she couldn’t stand up on her own.

The neighbors couldn’t get her on her feet and called an ambulance, and she was taken to the hospital.  She’s still there.

Jane never knew what she was worth because nobody ever told her. They did tell her what was wrong with her – just about every day of her young life.

The message from our parents was that she wasn’t worth a lot, as my father loved to say to both of us, “you are not living up to your potential.”

I noted then that he never asked why; perhaps he was worried that he would find out that he was the one who was not living up to his potential.

When I was named executive producer of the CBS Morning News, my father told me he couldn’t imagine how I got that job.

Every morning for years, he drove my sister and me to school, and my sister was in tears every morning by the time we got there. By then, I had given up listening to him.

I spent the early part of my life worrying about her and trying to get her help, but that is not love, it is something else, and our connection was broken until I let her worry about herself, which she is pretty good at.

My sister has had a complicated life, full of highs, lows, suffering, joy, and a very long struggle for ratification. Our relationship never fully recovered, but there it is; we are joined at the hip in experience and trauma.

I haven’t seen her in five or six years; she lives in a remote corner of New York State, hundreds of miles from the farm. She moved there to start a new life, as I did and has been cut off from her family and children.

We were close all through childhood, and then life took us in different directions. We had our struggles and issues, but we never gave up on one another or our relationship.

When I cracked up a decade ago, she was the one who helped save me – that was not easy for her. I called her five or six times a day; we were the only ones who knew what happened to the other.

We used to run away together almost weekly when we were kids.

But we never got farther than my grandmother’s apartment and some penny candy she always had waiting for us.

In some ways, I couldn’t bear to get too close to her; it was too painful, I think, for both of us.

I knew how to be a little brother who wanted to help, but I didn’t know how to be a grown-up who didn’t know how to help and confused concern with love.

They call that co-dependence.

Love is always hard for me; I am just beginning to learn how to do it.

My sister and I have great love and feeling for one another, but it will always be difficult; neither of us wants to go back to that place. It is difficult to be at ease with one another.

We have both worked so hard to get to where we are, to survive.

Yet we have closely bounded because we are the only two who know what happened to the other, each the only witness to the other. We have respect for each other.

That is better than crazy glue.

In recent years, Jane has worked hard, but as she got older – she is 75 – life began to overwhelm her.

Her house needed repairs; she had five big dogs, two of whom were a handful, and she struggled to cope with life by herself.

In her new life, she has made friends and loved them; I haven’t met most of them and am not sure who they are. I love talking with her friend Cookie and her husband Lenny, we have become friends too during this trouble.

But I am at the periphery of her life, not the center. That is how it turned out. We have stayed in touch.

This year, Jane seemed for the first time to be exhausted and discouraged; she never saved a lot of money and had no family around to back her up. For the first time, she began to worry about what would happen to her.

My sister has an iron will, that is why she is alive. It had begun to weaken.

She had pretty much given up on selling her house. She made plans to move in with a close friend and work on building a new family, one which could love her and support her.

I sensed that things were getting away from her; she was frightened and worn out by a lifetime of hard work and emotional struggles.

Life is like that sometimes, it just wears us down and overtakes us.

She had decided to stop working; her supermarket cashier job was too much for her now and too dangerous during the pandemic. For the first time, she didn’t have enough drive to work every day.

She never asked for my help. She wouldn’t take too much of it, and I couldn’t give too much of it. It would have damaged both of us. We both knew I could go only so far.

Jane made a lot of mistakes, as did I, and she paid a heavy price. I saw her as being very much alone, but that was not true. It turns out she is full of goodness and gets the same lift I do out of trying to do good for people.

It wouldn’t take a shrink to figure out why.

While she was in the hospital, a miraculous thing happened. Her friends rallied and rushed to help her. They have plotted and schemed to fix up her house, they have lifted her spirits and showered her with love.

The refrigerator broke a year ago; the gas stove was dangerously damaged, the house needed a thorough cleaning, rails had to be built, a plumber came to fix a two-year leak in the basement, a new refrigerator purchased, a truckload of things thrown out, the yard cleaned and raked, the fences repaired,  her beloved dogs taken to friend’s homes and groomed and fed, bags of dog hair cleaned up.

All of this has been done.

The house, which she loved and worked so hard to keep up, was getting away from her.

My sister despaired of selling her house; she didn’t have the money to fix it up and get it ready to sell. She was sliding off to a scary place.

But all kinds of people — Cookie, Lynn, Lenny, Kenny, Diane – came running and appeared from nowhere and helped in ways she could never have accepted from me and that I couldn’t offer. It did feel like a miracle, even from the other side of this huge state.

I wondered what I could do to help, but there is very little left for me to do.

Her friends didn’t need to be asked; they just went to work and turned her reality upside down. She was overwhelmed with gratitude and finally understood that she is worthy of being loved, something she never really believed.

I never appreciated this devoted community around her.

Well, it’s about time you were happy, I told her tonight. I didn’t know what else to say.

I was brought in on the decisions, conference calls, and frantic work to get her house ready when she comes home, which will be in a week or so.

I’ve been permitted to help in small ways, made some suggestions that were taken and some that were not, I helped to pay for small things, and she asked me to be her patient advocate in the hospital.

Twice, I called her nurses and argued for the medications she said she wanted and needed. I know that people need advocates, even in the best hospitals.

I’ve hovered over this drama like a traffic helicopter, always on the outside, but watching closely. She is working like a fiend to get better, walking and exercising, again and again, each day.

We spoke for a long time tonight. Jane is happier than I have seen her in a long time. She got her covid vaccine, her rehab is painful and difficult, but she is doing well and is walking and standing up, and getting dressed by herself.

She is staggered and deeply moved by the friends who appeared like angels and showed their love and admiration for her. They even brought a realtor over who said she could sell her house and make some money. Don’t give it away, she said.

The house is clean, repaired, and ready for her.

Her dogs are groomed and well-fed at a friend’s house and ready to come home. Her new refrigerator is coming to the kitchen this week. The local Lion’s Club is building a ramp this weekend so she can skip the front steps.

Another friend is building rails in every room. Another is stocking her refrigerator. Another found an electrician to come and fix her dangerous outlets. A cleaning crew has been hired to scrub the house from top to bottom. She’s hard-working and inexpensive.

She told me tonight that our relationship had never been better and that she was grateful for my help. We speak every day, and I harass her to look ahead and make good plans.

She had a bruising battle with a stubborn Nurse Rachett who wouldn’t listen to her or help her with a medical problem. I got to play little brother and call her up and persuade her to talk to my sister and work it out.

I told my sister that her fights with the nurses were a precise re-enactment of her fights with our parents, who never listened to her, knew her, or saw her. She thanked me and calmed down, and got to work.

This was something only a brother could know.

She never knew how loved she was or how many people are eager to help her. She never knew for sure what she is worth. She is learning now.

And I am relieved and liberated. I can let go of this enduring sense that she is in trouble and that I must save her. Of course, she is saving herself, the only way any of us can be saved, and as she always has, with the help of a few good friends.

Jane is coming home in a week and she will come home to a new reality, a rebirth and renewal.

Tonight, she said she was as happy as she had ever been. Life is so full of crisis and mystery. It often takes pain and trouble to wake us up and help us learn and grow.

“I can’t believe it,” she told me tonight. “All these people who love me and have helped me,” she said. “This is affirming. I got there; I got where I wanted to be. It just took a lifetime.”

This is wonderful, I  said, it seems strange to say it, but I’ve never seen you so happy.

“I’ve never been so happy,” she said. And then she added. “I guess we lived up to our potential, didn’t we?”

A part of me wanted to cry, but I didn’t. There was no reason to cry for her.

Yes, I said, I guess we are meeting our potential.