We made the promise when we were children, sitting on the back steps with scraped knees and sticky fingers. There were three of us—triplets—and we swore, in the way only children can, that we would never let each other go. It sounded like a game then, a secret handshake of the heart, but it became the rule by which we lived.
Growing up, people treated us like a single unit: the three of us in matching coats, the three of us in the same classroom. We fought like siblings do—over toys, boys, and who got the last slice of pie—but we always came back to the promise. When one of us fell, the other two lifted her. When one left town for work, the other two wrote letters and saved pennies for visits. Our lives braided together: marriages, children, jobs, losses. We learned to share joy and to divide sorrow so it would feel smaller.
There were hard years. War took husbands, illness took jobs, and time took the sharp edges off our plans. We argued about money and about who should move closer to care for our aging mother. We forgave each other more than we thought possible. The promise wasn’t a chain; it was a choice we renewed every morning—a quiet decision to show up.
As we aged, the promise changed shape. It became less about physical proximity and more about presence. Phone calls replaced sleepovers. One of us became the steady caller, another the planner, the third the storyteller who kept family history alive. We learned to read each other’s silences. We learned how to hold hands across a hospital bed without saying anything at all.
On our 100th birthday, we sat together in a sunlit room surrounded by grandchildren and great‑grandchildren. A century had passed since that scraped‑knee vow, and the world had changed in ways we never imagined. Still, when the nurse asked if we wanted to hold hands for a photo, we did it without thinking. The camera clicked, and for a moment the years fell away. We were those three kids again, promising forever.
Not everyone makes it to a hundred, and not every promise survives every storm. But ours did because we treated it like a living thing—fed it with forgiveness, watered it with laughter, and sheltered it with loyalty. When the end came for one of us, the other two kept the promise by keeping her memory alive: stories at dinner, her favorite song on the radio, a chair left empty at holidays.
We never let go. That was the promise, and that was the gift.
