How does it feel to lose a sibling?
It's actually the backstory of Siblings Day. Plus, Warren Zevon + our Substack Live on managing bureaucratic nightmares.
Yesterday was Siblings Day. You probably gleaned that from social media posts splattered around the Web with pictures of happy, hugging children from days bygone and sentiments such as “my best friend 💙” and “I don’t know what I’d do without her!” Given all that, you’d think this was just yet another Instagram Holiday.
Yet, even though Siblings Day first went viral on Twitter (a platform I no longer use) in 2012, most people don’t realize it stems from enormous loss. A freelance paralegal professional named Claudia Evart was moved to create it way back in 1995 – what my son calls “the olden days,” even though it was the year Clueless came out – after both her brother, Alan (35), and her sister, Lisette (19), died in separate accidents.
According to the Siblings Day Foundation, the day is meant to honor “siblings and the bond that is forever a special gift,” and to consider April 10 as legitimate as Mother’s and Father’s Day.
I don’t know what it feels like to grieve a sibling – one who died or one who was never born (not to mention one who is no longer in your life for other reasons). But I’ve tried to understand it better. I’ve read Little Women. I’ve watched The Bear, Maniac, and Charlie St. Cloud.
However, I’ve learned the most about what it can feel like – and especially how overlooked grieving siblings can feel by society – by simply asking people who are living through it. For this newsletter, I asked some more:
I wish people understood that after losing a sibling you’ll never be the same, no matter how desperately you try. How could you be? When a sibling dies, they take a part of you with them. A piece of your foundation is missing.
– Annie Sklaver Orenstein, author of Always a Sibling: A Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief
When someone dies (especially a young person) immediately all of the attention goes to the parents. They lost their child, a person they made and raised, their flesh and blood. But you know who else helped make them and shares all the same DNA and memories and inside jokes? The siblings.
Domenique Osbourne (check out the Instagram account she started as a way to share all the dumb and funny stuff she’d normally send to her brother.)
When a beloved sibling dies, they take a piece of our childhood, our present, and our future. They're a mirror to our experiences, and, if we're lucky, a best friend and an ally, too. The devastation of that loss is not, I think, well understood.
Nikki Reimer (read about how everything in her hometown suddenly felt wrong after her brother died and her digital elegiac project.)
It’s one thing to be an only child from the day you are born – to have all of the attention, shoulder all the expectations, receive all the accolades and all the criticism, all the gifts and all the burdens. When it’s all you know, I imagine you become accustomed to it. But it’s another thing entirely to have only-child status thrust upon you out of nowhere, as in hey, as of right now, you are on your own.
Sarah Kravits (read about what it feels like to suddenly be the only kid in the family…at the age of 48)
I’m still confused by how society can treat the death of someone I’ve known since I was born as anything other than what it is: devastating…a sibling’s death is not incidental grief, regardless of how ‘close’ we were.
Anne Pinkerton (read about how having a dead sibling is full of contradictions and also her book, Were You Close?: A sister's quest to know the brother she lost.)
Siblings are often invisible or forgotten mourners. People tend to focus on your parents and their pain of losing a child -- which is excruciating. And yet, the sibling's loss is enormous too, because it's one of the only relationships that was meant to be lifelong. When you lose a brother or sister, you lose a link to your childhood and your imagined future together. For me, losing my brother suddenly, it felt like we had all this unfinished business. I took for granted that we'd have more time.
Gina DeMillo Wagner, author of Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss and Finding Home
And a final sentiment from Kellyn Shoecraft about how enduring Siblings Day in the digital world hits hard:
What is hardest for me about SD? The attitude around it feels flippant. People post embarrassing childhood photos of their siblings and I know that they, as I did for many years, assume their sibling is a lifelong constant. Now that I’m of an age where friends have multiple children, I often see photos of tiny siblings, with captions about how they’re partners in crime for life. Hopefully they will be…but maybe they won’t.
Have something to share about your own experience? Please do it:
This week’s song-for-thought
Sometimes when you're doing simple things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile
You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse
Keep me in your heart for a while
I love Warren Zevon’s music, full stop. But The Wind is his masterpiece. It’s his twelfth and final studio album and came out in August 2003, two weeks before he died from inoperable pleural mesothelioma. Warren decided to record this most poignant goodbye – not just one to himself and his loved ones, but to us all – shortly after his diagnosis. I constantly get lost in the tracks, on which appear a host of favorite friends, including Springsteen, Dylan, Petty, Emmylou Harris, and so on. But one of them is my hands-down, number one song about wished-for memory keeping. And that’s this one. What a gift.
April 16: Substack Live with legacy organizer Rachel Donnelly
I’m forcing myself to delve deeper into this platform’s bells and whistles so am cordially inviting you to our first Substack Live AMA (that’s “ask me anything”) next Wednesday, April 16 at 1 pm ET.
I’ll be speaking with Rachel Donnelly, author of the new book Late To Your Own Funeral: How to Leave a Legacy and Not a Logjam. I invited her to help our community out because she makes a living helping people navigate the administrative maze of estate settlement and legacy planning. What mourners need most isn’t another Edible Arrangement but rather a guide through the insulting, absolutely insanity-inducing bureaucracy that comes along with it.
This event will be accessible to paid subscribers and will take the place of next week’s Zoom check-in (simply consider it a more seamless way to use your membership instead of having to register for a Zoom). In order to join, you must have the Substack app. You’ll immediately be notified when we’re online, but best to make a note of it somewhere. And if you haven’t become a paid subscriber yet, consider whether being able to directly ask an expert these questions might be the thing that encourages you to do so.
If you are a paid subscriber, please feel free to reply to this email and send in any questions you want answered.
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