Okay, I'll admit it: this piece convinces me there should be a national holiday devoted to brothers and sisters. Along with Mother's and Father's Days, there should be a Siblings' Day. Enough of Cain and Abel! Cinderella's sisters, get lost!

Following this week's discovery of Senator Edward Kennedy's malignant glioma, Nanci Olesen's drop-in about her sister's brain cancer seems particularly noteworthy. Olesen diagnoses something about her sister quite different from what we've heard about Ted Kennedy. Before her cancer, Olesen and Kid Sis had the sort of "normal" close family relationship that involved squabbling, forgiving one another and laughing so hard they all but wet their pants. Now that she's undergone numerous surgeries, her shaved head seems to be wrapped in more than a bandage. She appears "vague, unfocused, forgetful" as never before -- which leads Olesen to question whether a person's identity centrally involves the way the person's brain works.

If it's true that Descartes' axiom, "I think therefore I am," defines who we are, Olesen sees her sister, whom she never names, as a person quite distinct from the Amy, Janet, or whoever she was before the onset of her illness. Kid Sis's transformation brings to mind Robert Lowell's lines depicting Czar Lepke, a 1950s gangster on death row, as "Flabby, bald, lobotomized, / he drifted in a sheepish calm, / where no agonizing reappraisal/ jarred his concentration. . ."

Not too many people have so clearly and poignantly described what Olesen sees is the change in her sister: her inability to process emotion. I doubt that we'll have access to this kind of close observation and information vis-a-vis Ted Kennedy's glioma. Most important of all, Olesen's sororal love has no bounds. Given the epidemic of sibling rivalry that continues to infect so many families, Olesen's love song for her lost sister is an aria and a paradigm.