For Annie

A Love Letter

She was my keeper, my first protector, and the one who saved me before I even knew I needed saving. This is a love letter to the sister who’s still fighting — and still showing up.

Annie, young and beautiful, the keeper of everyone she loved. She still is.

Annie and Charlie were ten when I was born. They were the first, I was the last. For as long as I can remember, Annie was my keeper. She hauled me on her hip around our neighborhood in South Dallas more times than my mother ever did. She rocked me to sleep at night and got me dressed in the mornings. She loved me.

She would get so frustrated when I was five and fully capable of walking with them to the store, but I would lie in the street and demand Annie carry me. She would huff, push her brown hair back, but every time, she reached for me. What a sight we must have been. I was half her size, dangling from one side of her body.

It never dawned on me that Annie would someday be gone. But she was. She grew up, got married, and moved away. I was bereft. She had abandoned me. I swore I’d never forgive her.

But, even from her distance, she wrote me letters. She was working while putting her husband through Texas A&M, and they surely had no money. But, at times, I would go to the mailbox at the end of the hill we lived on and find a package addressed to me from her. She sent all sorts of treasure. She knew Mama wasn’t one to waste money on clothing, so she sent me this orange terry cloth short and top set. I loved it and wore it most of that summer.

Her generosity didn’t stop there. When I made the drill team in school, Annie paid for my uniform. Same with cheerleading. She bought my letterman jacket. I still wonder what she gave up for herself to give those things to me.

Once, while she was at A&M, she had a terrible toothache. She needed to go to the dentist, but it was going to cost $60 to get her tooth filled. She asked Mama to borrow the money; Mama said no. Annie found that the dentist gave a discount if the tooth was just pulled.

So, Annie sacrificed for me. She always has.

When I say she saved my life once, I mean it plain. I was four, small enough to still believe the world was kind. Mama had left me with someone she shouldn’t have, and by afternoon I’d run home alone—twelve blocks through Oak Cliff heat—to the promise of a frozen cupcake in the chest freezer. I climbed up on a bucket and reached too far, the lid pressing down across my back. Another minute and I’d have fallen in. Then a pair of arms yanked me out. Annie’s. She didn’t know what danger I’d escaped, only that something in her told her to come home right then. That’s the kind of sister she’s been all my life. She doesn’t ask what happened. She just holds on.

She has sat with me through many crying sessions, through surgeries, and was there when I had my babies. Mama was not. Annie was the one who came to my high school graduation; Mama did not. Annie came to my college graduation; Mama did not. I wore Annie’s wedding dress to my own wedding.

She has been my rock, my counselor, and mostly, my best friend, as well as the only real mother figure I’ve ever known.

So, it was so hard to see her cry in that hospital bed last week when she had a radical double mastectomy.

Her cancer was found, oddly, from a fall. Annie had never had a mammogram. But when her right breast was hurting from the fall, she felt a lump. She thought it was just a bruise. Her daughter forced her to go to the doctor. The mammogram showed two tumors in her right breast, but nothing in her left. The biopsy came back as cancer.

The doctors scheduled an MRI for her right breast, but you lie down on your stomach and the MRI captures images of both breasts. That’s when they saw the two tumors in her left breast, as well. They had been totally hidden in the mammogram!

So, Annie did what she had to do–she got the double mastectomy with no reconstruction. She decided she didn’t want to put anything back in that could mask any type of cancer.

It was so hard that morning to watch her as they prepped for surgery. Fear in her eyes, which were welling with tears. The whole gang came to be with her because that’s what you do when someone like Annie is in trouble. You circle the wagons and show her all the love that she’s given to so many over the years.

It’s very rare to get simultaneous cancer in both breasts, about a two percent chance. We haven’t received the pathology results yet to determine if it has metastasized or not. That may take another week. But Annie has put on a brave face. She’s a warrior, the strongest woman I’ve ever known.

She will be alright.

She has to be.

—Carol

Author’s Note: Annie’s name has been changed for privacy. Some of the scenes in this essay will appear—woven deeper and darker—in my novel-in-progress, Psalm of Lies.

© 2025 Carol Countryman. All rights reserved.
This piece is part of Psalm of Lies and the ongoing series Tales from East Texas.
Please share the link, not the text. Reprints, excerpts, or readings by permission only: carolcountryman@gmail.com.