Loss of a Sibling

Today would have been the 52nd birthday of my brother Charles, had he not died when he was 8 years old.

Death of a sibling in childhood is one of the recognized 'big traumas', along with death of a parent and divorcing parents at a young age.  I don't know about the trauma of the other two--my parents are still alive well into my middle age and they are still married--to each other, no less.  But I do know that losing a sibling is a very big loss.

My brother had polio as a baby and was in a wheel chair as long as I can remember.  A wheelchair-bound sibling is one that is home a lot.  I have always been a home body myself, and so I spent much of the 8 years of my brother's life that was not spent sleeping or in school in his company.  So the losses were many fold in my case.  First is that someone you love dies.  Second is that your parents have lost one of their children--which does not improve their parenting skills.  I should know.  Not that I had a sense of it at the time, but when my own son had cancer I became a very marginal parent--I was so upset that I couldn't get any more upset.  What that meant is that I was unable to respond normally to normal things.  That change in personality in a parent is very distressing to children, who like their lives to be predictable and stable.  So a little bit of the parent dies.

The third emotional challenge in having a sibling die when you are a child is that you are not an emotional adult--so every year or two you change dramatically in terms of emotional maturity, but does your grief grow more mature with you?  Not in my case.  Every new emotional skill that I gained growing up meant that I relived the grief I felt about my brother dying.  I was well into my 20's before I finally got old enough to stop starting over again with my sense of loss.

I have another brother, one who is much younger than me--which makes it look like I might have been an only child for a very long time and suddenly got saddled with a little brother.  That was not the case at all.  While I am sure I played the irritated elder sister role to perfection when he was a child, he saved me from being an only child, which would have been yet another loss.  Every life is filled with triumphs and losses--it is not so much the things that happen to you, said Emerson, but what you do about them.  The ultimate Romantic, which is not exactly my world view, but that sentiment does resonate with me.

If I am lucky, I will live long enough to have many more losses, but in some ways my brother's death gave me an armor that I carried with me through adolescence and beyond.  I felt like I understood surviving loss, that I was less vulnerable for having made peace with myself and the loss of my sibling.  I was completely wrong about that--I discovered when my son was diagnosed with cancer that no amount of loss prepares you for the next one.  But I was able to be fooled about that for many years, and it helped me through the growing up process.  I wish I could see my brother, know what he would have been like as a grown up, have him as a sibling once again, but since that is not possible, I remember him and thank him for the things he taught me and the strength he left me with.  Happy Birthday in the hereafter.