That we disagreed about Kathy Lee Gifford is telling, perhaps says it all.

“She’s so fake, so self-righteous and could she please shut up about Cody?” I yelled to my sister, who was in the kitchen basting a turkey.

“She’s a good Christian who defends family values!” she fired back.

That cracks me up, the memory of two sisters born a decade apart, bickering back and forth about the co-host of the then “Regis and Kathy Lee” TV show, my sister’s new daughter-in-law looking on in first holiday-with-family horror.

My older sister and I had nothing in common back then but the Slovenian genes that made for thick calves and cravings for ethnic bakery, like potica, with butter.

She was born in 1947, a year so prosperous the demand for consumer goods outstripped U.S. supplies. She was the first in the family to graduate from college, as a scientist no less, in an age when women still wore aprons and girdles. She was geeky and never dated in high school, preferring to stay in her room, studying the periodic tables and theses by Martin Luther. She was most passionate about her science and her God.

I, on the other hand, skipped classes, shunned organized religion, and lived just this side of the fringe. I played iconoclast to her sacraments.

For years, maybe 20, our sisterhood was marked by little more than special occasions, bar-be-ques and birthdays and babies being born.

Then came the devastating news that her ongoing flu-like symptoms was really stage 3 ovarian cancer.

“Why shouldn’t it be me,” was her science-based answer to the standard cancer question.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. It was autumn and within six months my mother would be dead. My sister would have to leave her own hospital bed to attend the funeral, wearing a god-awful wig, and bright red lipstick against her pale skin.

“I was talking about me,” I wanted to tell her. “Why should I be left in a world without the sister I never took the time to get to know?”

For the next six years our sisterhood, once based on petty differences, found common-ground. By then, of course, Kathy Lee was brought down off her perfect pedestal when her husband had a sordid affair. I didn’t even say “I told you so.”

When it came time to plan her funeral, she told me not to make a scene if her hair wasn’t done just right, making sure to include a photo of herself in the pre-arranged funeral planner. That was our last good laugh, remembering how, gathered around my mother’s coffin, I exclaimed loud enough for everyone to hear, “MY GOD, SHE HAS NO BANGS.”

“So Sharon doesn’t freak out again,” read the little post-it note stuck to the photo of her hair.

Our last meal together was grilled cheese. By then her calves had grown thin, and she told me that now I had to be the one in the family who makes the potica for Christmas. But I would never make it again, not without her.

I’m proud to say I knew her as my sister, and figure she probably spends her time now grilling Archimedes and Albert Einstein instead.

I just hope when the time comes, someone loves me enough, like a sister, to make sure my hair is poofy, with the right amount of frizz.