It’s been two weeks since my sister-in-law passed away, and we are still grieving her loss. We knew she had been battling lupus for 19 years, but knowing about her illness was different from imagining a world without her. We knew she was fighting, but we never thought her fight would end two weeks ago.

Our relationship was not particularly close during our younger years. We first met during my grandmother’s wake, at a time when I was already struggling with the thought of forming new friendships. Four years later, I lost my own mother, and once again, I found myself dealing with grief while trying to navigate relationships. I was also busy building my own family and pursuing my career. Living in separate provinces made it even more difficult for us to develop a closer bond.

Still, I had always regarded her as family because she was my brother’s wife and my niece’s mother.

When lupus entered her life, I silently prayed for her healing. My niece was only two and a half years old then, and I could not help but think of the little girl who needed her mother. I prayed even harder from December 2020 to January 2021, when my sister-in-law became critically ill. Thankfully, she survived that difficult time. From then on, I made it a point to include her in my prayers every day. She eventually became the number one person on my prayer list.

Looking back, time seemed to move so quickly. Our 21st year as sisters-in-law turned out to be the most beautiful chapter of our relationship. This year, we even started making plans for our retirement, imagining the years ahead and the things we could still look forward to together.

It never occurred to me that she might leave us before I did. Perhaps, because she had survived so much, I had grown accustomed to thinking that she would continue to be there. I knew she had lupus, but somewhere in my heart, I had made room for a future where she would grow old with us.

That was the future I wanted for her.

I never imagined that the best chapter of our relationship would also be its last.

There is something particularly painful about realizing that the years when you finally grew closer to someone were also the years you had the least time left with them. Just when we were beginning to make plans for the future, that future was taken away from us.

I used to wonder how losing an in-law could hurt so much. I understood the grief of losing someone related to you by blood, but I had not fully understood that family could also be formed through the years we shared, the prayers we offered, and the affection that quietly grew between us.

I thought I loved her because she was my brother’s wife and my niece’s mother. But as the days passed after her death, I began to understand that I loved her for who she was, beyond the roles she held in our family. She had become someone I wanted to keep in my life, someone I had hoped to share more years with.

If there is another life, and if my brother and she are meant to find each other again, I hope I will be given another chance to be part of their story, too.

This time, I would use those 21 years more wisely. I would not wait for the right moments to become closer, nor assume that there would always be more time. I would want to fill the ordinary days with conversations, laughter, and memories that we could carry into old age.

Because now I understand that sometimes, you only realize how precious a chapter was when you reach its final page.

Our story as sisters-in-law may have ended, but I will always be grateful that, somewhere along the way, we found our way to each other.

And if life had given us another book, I would have gladly read every page with her.