Yesterday’s essay named these surges: grief that goes off like fireworks, the flash arriving before you can brace for it. Dr. Therese Rando calls them subsequent temporary upsurges of grief. Naming them is one kind of relief. Writing to them is another, and that is what this set is for.

This weekend I heard fireworks near my home just after a thunderstorm, and the fireworks of grief came to me anyway: the flash of memory put me in the backseat of our dad’s car with Tony, the whole night ahead of us.

These twelve prompts move from the burst itself, into what living under a loaded sky has cost you, through what you are building now, toward the bond that keeps lighting the fuse. Each one stands on its own, so take them in order or go straight to the one that is pulling at you, in one sitting or across the week. Nobody is grading this. Write messy, write slow, write once and stop. All of it counts.

A note before you begin. Not every sibling relationship is one you want to stay close to, and these prompts do not assume yours is. If your sibling was not safe for you, if the relationship was harmful or complicated, or if you have deliberately stepped back from it in your grief work, some of these prompts will ask for a closeness that does not fit your story. Skip them without apology. Stepping back is grief work too. If it serves you, these prompts can also be used to draw the lines you need.

🐺

NAMING

01

Grief has a signature in your body. Write about what a surge feels like from the inside, from the first flash to the last of the smoke, so that someone who loves you could recognize one from the outside.

If you want to go further: Notice what you usually do while it is bursting. Push through, step away, distract, or let it come. No judgment. Just notice.

02

Some fuses or grief triggers make sense: the song, their name, the date on the calendar. Yet, some make no sense at all. Name one trigger that surprised you, then trace it backward in writing: what it brings up, then what that brings up, one step at a time, until you arrive at your sibling. However long the fuse turns out to be, follow it to the end.

03

Where did you learn what to do when grief goes off in public? Who taught you to hold it in, or to let it out? Write about the rules you follow when the flash comes somewhere it wasn’t invited.

The remaining nine prompts are for paid subscribers.

Read more

“Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”
~ Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

You were going about your day, in the grocery store line, at a red light, at the edge of someone else’s celebration, or preparing for a holiday gathering. It’s not that you aren’t often thinking about or grieving your sibling, but sometimes something catches you and the grief surges. Perhaps, a cereal box, a song, a laugh, or a smell stirred the grief up in your chest or your eyes before you could brace for it.

🐺

If it has been months, or years, the people around you probably assume the show ended a long time ago. Some days you assume it, too. Then an ordinary evening changes, and you find yourself crying in a parked car or feeling a heaviness you had forgotten could feel so real over a commercial, a ballgame, a stranger’s voice, or seemingly nothing at all.

You begin to wonder what is wrong with you. I am here to let you know nothing is wrong with you.

There is a name for this. The grief researcher Dr. Therese Rando calls these moments “subsequent temporary upsurges of grief,” or STUGs, for short. Yesterday, I called them what they feel like: fireworks.

A firework is quiet until it isn’t. As an onlooker, you cannot see the fuse from where you stand. The flash and beauty come first. The boom arrives later, followed by the tears of children, the barking of dogs, and the echo felt in your chest. Then it is over.

The way your body reacts to a grief trigger before your mind understands what lit it is much like the experience of STUGs.

🐺

Temporary is a word Rando chose on purpose. The burst fades. The smoke drifts. The sky goes back to being the sky. What stays is the memory of the image, maybe even a photo or video of it, long after you look away.

A sibling runs through the ordinary parts of a life: the kitchen, the backseat, the inside jokes, the arguments over the remote, the roles in the family. That is why almost anything can serve as a fuse. Every week, somewhere in the world, fireworks go up for a national holiday, a festival, a wedding, or a new year. Every day, your own life moves through those same ordinary parts. The dark sky between bursts is not absence. It is loaded.

A surge like this is not a malfunction. It rises because the bond with your sibling is still alive, and something ordinary reminded your body of them before your mind could explain it. People who have never lost a sibling, or anyone significant, might call that a breakdown. I would call it a light, the kind you can still see them by.

🐺

This weekend was Independence Day here in the United States, and I did not celebrate it for a multitude of reasons. I did not host or attend a cookout, and I did not go to a parade.

When we were kids, our dad would often drive our family of four to the fireworks. Tony and I were in the back of the car, which Dad strategically parked so we could avoid too much traffic on the way home. As we got older, Tony and I marched in parades on the holiday for many years, and later in the day we went to the fireworks. By the time we were older teens and young adults, we sometimes skipped the crowds altogether and watched the fireworks on television.

This year I stayed home, and the fireworks of grief came to me anyway. I was sharing memories of holidays past with my husband when we heard fireworks nearby, just after a severe thunderstorm. Soon thereafter, the flash of memory put me in the backseat of our dad’s car with Tony, the whole night ahead of us: me anxious, Tony beaming with joy in his beautiful smile.

The boom came late, the way it does. As the memory faded, the afterimage it left was Tony, and the lingering smoke was the heaviness of having grieved him for nearly six and a half years.

I have stopped asking the sky to stay dark.

🐺

If any of this landed, write on this:

• Think of the last time grief went off in you without warning. What was the flash, what was the boom, and what image stayed with you once the sky cleared?

Take whatever time you need. No editing, no judgment. Just let it come.

The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme arrives tomorrow, twelve prompts that move from the burst itself toward the bond that keeps lighting the fuse. The first section is open to everyone. The rest is for paid subscribers.

Thanks for reading Wild Grief. If this reached you, send it to someone who might need it, or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.

Subscribe now

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain Broken Pack resources, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Learn more about The Broken Pack.

Grief researchers have written for decades that the bond with the people we love does not end when they die. It changes shape. We keep them with us, we keep talking, and the relationship continues even when only one of us is in it. Clinicians call this a continuing bond. Asking for signs, noticing the ones that come, talking to our person, these are some of the ordinary ways we tend that bond. None of it is magical thinking or a failure to accept the loss. It is one of the oldest ways human beings stay in relationship with the people they have lost.

The nine prompts below follow the shape of an actual back-and-forth: the asking, the way the answer tends to come, learning to recognize your sibling in it, and keeping the conversation open over time. Write them in order if that helps, or go straight to whichever one is already speaking to you.

One thing before you begin. A continuing bond is not something everyone wants, and not every sibling relationship is one you would choose to keep. If yours was harmful or complicated, or if part of your grief work has been stepping away from it, these prompts are still for you. Where a prompt assumes closeness, you will find a second path written in italics underneath it, for those whose bond was not safe or simple. Take whichever line fits. Choosing distance from someone with whom you had a difficult, hurtful, or complicated relationship is its own kind of grief work, and these prompts can hold that too.

Read more

Here are three prompts. Write what comes, as it does.

🐺

1. If you let yourself ask your sibling for a sign, what would you ask for?

Karin McLean, my guest this week, learned that you do not have to wait for a sign to happen but that you can ask your loved ones for them. She has found that asking for something specific works best, because then you both know what to look for. Some readers do this easily. Others have never let themselves try, wonder if this is sacrilegious (listen to the episode to hear Karin’s thoughts on that), or are not sure they believe anything would come.

You do not have to believe it will work to answer this.

Write about what you would ask your sibling to send you, if you let yourself ask. What would the sign be, and why that one? What about it would tell you, without any doubt, that it was them?

If you want to go further, write about what may stop you from asking for a specific sign. Is it a religious or moral belief, a fear that you may not receive the sign, skepticism, something else?

🐺

2. Write about a time something ordinary brought your sibling into the room with you.

A sign does not have to be overly dramatic to count. The one I wrote about earlier in The Feast of the Swedish Fish arrived as a friend’s sibling’s offhand comment about candy. For you it might have been a song on the radio, a smell, a number, an animal at the window, a t-shirt someone was wearing, or a phrase someone said who never knew your sibling at all.

Write about a moment when something small and ordinary made you feel your sibling near. Where were you? What was the thing? And what did you do with the feeling or experience? Did you let it land or talk yourself out of it?

🐺

3. What is the private language only you and your sibling spoke?

Siblings often have a language no one else fully speaks. It’s often includes the nicknames, the inside joke that needs no setup, the look across a room, or a small ritual nobody outside would even notice. It may be how we recognize a sign when it comes if the sign arrives in that same private language.

Write about a piece of the language only the two of you spoke. Not a list of all of it, but one word or gesture or ritual, and a single time it said something out loud that you could never have said plainly.

If you want to go further, write about what receiving a sign in this language might be and what it would mean to you.

🐺

That is where I will leave it for today. Sit with the one that pulls at you. Let the others go.

If you write to any of these and want to share, the comments are open.

If these landed, there is more. The paid set this week, Wild Sibling Grief Prompts: The Ongoing Conversation, takes the work deeper into the ongoing relationship (a.k.a. continuing bond) with your sibling. The nine prompts tomorrow are self-paced and for paid subscribers.

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss, Episode 50 with Karin McLean is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain resources from The Broken Pack, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Wild Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

“Signs, signs, everywhere signs”
from Signs, by Five Man Electrical Band

I loved the band Tesla’s cover of Signs, a song originally by Five Man Electrical Band, when I was in high school. Tony tolerated it but didn’t love it as much as I did. That was the shape of a lot of things between us. We were siblings who had similar taste in some things, but not everything. When we didn’t share the tastes, we did not pretend to. (I will never understand his affinity for eating mussels.)

Recently, I was at dinner for one of my closest friend’s birthday. I was with her, her two siblings, their mom, at a restaurant that primarily serves fish. I spent a good part of that night and recent interactions with this family who often feels like family to me just observing the three of them.

I noticed the way siblings talk with one another, their shared looks, the shorthand, and their inside jokes that I can never fully understand. I saw the small corrections none of them took personally.

I was happy to be there with this chosen family. And, I became fully aware of how much I was also missing Tony, the way I do in rooms full of other people’s siblings.

Somewhere in the evening, the conversation turned to something hard, a health scare in the family, the kind where a heart gives out without much warning. I will not lay out the details here, because they are not mine to tell. But sitting there, I found myself back at one of the heaviest questions I carry about my brother and his death.

I have always wondered whether Tony felt pain as he died alone in his sleep. That night with my friend and her family, for reasons I won’t lay out here, I came to believe that Tony didn’t feel pain or suffer.

I cannot tell you what that did to me at the table. Something I had braced against for the past six and a half years felt less heavy and less torturous. So, I did what I always do. I spoke to Tony quietly in my head while the dinner went on around me. I told him I was grateful for this comforting thought, and asked him for confirmation and to make his presence known to me.

After talking to Karin McLean, I realized just how often I ask him things like that. I am not always sure if he or anyone is listening. I ask anyway.

🐺

Then, just moments later, my friend’s brother said something offhand. He said that every Christmas he makes a feast of the Swedish fish with his son.

In that moment, a strong image and memory overtook me. I was sitting on the floor behind the candy counter of my maternal grandma’s store with Tony, bagging penny candy. Swedish fish came in a box of four hundred eighty-eight, a number I will always remember. We bagged them in lots of twenty-five. Being that twenty-five does not divide evenly, the odd thirteen became a lesson in negotiation, assessment of what was best, business decisions, and sharing. Depending on our moods, the lessons our grandmother wanted to teach us, and our ages, Tony and I would either argue over who got them, leave them for one off purchases for kids with pennies, split them, or come up with some other solution.

But here is the truth of it. While we both loved the Swedish fish, I liked them more than some of the other penny candy for which we had the same task. He would rather have the chalky flying wafer saucers, the ones that taste like sweet paper or communion wafers from the Catholic church we grew up in. So quite often, Tony gave me the Swedish fish and ate the candy saucers I didn’t want.

He did it so easily I did not understand for years that it was a form of kindness. I thought it was a trade, but it was not a trade. It was Tony giving me what he knew I loved and finding a solution that was fair to him and to his beloved little sister. He was always so kind and caring for me.

🐺

There is a feast Tony never got to.

Tony and I are first generation Italian-American from an Italian immigrant family. Christmas Eve in our family is celebrated with what is commonly known in the United States as the Feast of the Seven Fishes. Where my dad is from in Calabria, that meant thirteen dishes with at least seven different fish, and our Nonna counting everything on each of our plates to make sure we ate all thirteen so baby Jesus wouldn’t cry.

Tony loved that night. We both did. We gathered with our grandparents, our aunts and uncles, and our paternal cousins. It was glorious to be together, to eat the food, and stay up late. Those days are by far some of my favorite memories.

The year Tony died, he was finally going to be there again after years of him being unable to attend for reasons I won’t say. In our last conversation, he must have mentioned the joy and anticipation of again being part of the feast at least 3 times. To say he was looking forward to it would be an understatement. But having died in February, he did not make it to Christmas.

So when my friend’s brother said the words feast and Swedish fish in the same breath, I felt Tony was near, that he was okay, and that his death was not painful.

🐺

I have been a skeptic about a lot of things. I have said so on the podcast. I do not fully know how signs work, and I have made a kind of peace with not knowing. And that said, grief researchers have written for decades that the bond with the people we love does not end when they die. We carry them. We keep talking. The relationship continues, even when only one of us is in the room.

I had asked. I had just been handed a peace I did not expect. And then, in a sentence about candy, my brother handed me the red Swedish fish again.

He still gives me what he knows I love.

🐺

Karin McLean, my guest on our most recent episode, asks her brother Brian for signs all the time. She has learned to ask for something specific, and she watches for it, and it comes. My experience is a little different. While sometimes I ask for something specific as Karin and I discussed, more often than not I ask Tony to make himself known without telling him how. I leave it to him. And, every so often he answers in a language only the two of us speak, a box of four hundred eighty-eight, the red ones across a counter, the candy he never liked as much as I did anyway.

You do not have to believe in any of this. You do not have to ask, or watch, or be sure. But if you have ever felt your person answer you in something small and specific and strange, you are not making it up. For some people the sign is a cardinal, and for others it is a song. For me, last week, it arrived as a sentence about Swedish fish, at the exact table where I needed it.

🐺

There is so much in this week’s episode I want you to hear. Please listen wherever you get your podcasts.

A small writing prompt, if any of this landed:

Write about a small, ordinary thing your sibling did for you so easily that you did not understand it as love until later.

Three more prompts arrive later today, free for every subscriber. A longer set arrives tomorrow for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss, Episode 50 with author and surviving sibling Karin McLean is out now wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain Broken Pack resources, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Learn more about The Broken Pack.

Together they talk about the secondary and non-death losses that follow a sudden accident, the long work of self-acceptance, and the practice of asking a sibling for signs.

In this episode you will:

• Hear how a surviving sibling carries a loss across more than three decades.

• Learn what secondary and non-death loss can look like after a single accident.

• Gain insight into how self-acceptance becomes its own grief work.

• Explore the practice of asking a sibling for specific signs.

• Discover one family's ways of keeping a brother present.

Connect with Karin McLean:

• Website

• Book (all stores): Bright Days Do Come

• Substack

• Instagram

• Facebook

Content warning: This episode discusses a fatal car accident, the death of a nine-year-old child, life-threatening injury, alcohol use to cope with grief, and a brief mention of miscarriage.

Resources:

• Find a Helpline (locate a local crisis or warm line) (US & International): https://findahelpline.com

• US Peer support: https://warmline.org

• International: Peer support warmlines

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

If you would like more information or to share your own sibling loss story, please contact Dr. Angela Dean at contact@thebrokenpack.com or go to our website, thebrokenpack.com.

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Thank you!
Angela M. Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR 

🐺Tony's Little Sister

Credits:

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is produced by Not Done Here Media.

IF TOMORROW STARTS WITHOUT ME
    Written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean
    Performed by Fuji Sounds featuring Joe Mylward
    Courtesy of Not Done Here Records
    Licensed for use by The Broken Pack

Full song: https://fujisounds.music

This week’s essay was about the sibling as the family bond with no built-in rank, the equal who stands beside us our whole life. These prompts sit with what happens to that equality when your sibling is gone.

These nine prompts move through four places: the equal you had, the absence they left, the role the family and society expected of you, and the ground you get to stand on now. Take them in order or skip to the ones that you feel drawn to. There is no schedule and no finish line.

A note before you begin. These prompts do not necessarily assume a relationship with your sibling that you want to continue. You may wish to stay connected, but if your relationship with your sibling was harmful, complicated, or one you have actively stepped away from in your grief work, some of these prompts will not serve you. Skip what does not fit. You are not required to maintain a bond with someone who was not safe for you. That is also grief work. You can, if you feel comfortable, use these prompts to set the boundaries you need.

🐺

Read more

Here are three prompts to explore this aspect of your loss. Write what comes, as it does.

🐺

1. What orders or rankings existed in your family between you and your sibling(s), and how did the two of you actually live those out?

Often times expectations exist for us based on birth order, gender, traits, accomplishments, challenges or illnesses, etc. Consider who was older, who went first to things, who achieved certain things (or were expected to), who was supposed to lead and/ or who was supposed to follow. Dr. Ken Doka, my recent podcast guest, talked about how the sibling bond is the one family relationship that does not really run on hierarchy. We wrestle with our siblings, he said, psychologically and physically, in a way we never do with our parents. As he described it, the rankings and hierarchy are mostly for other people.

Given certain cultural Italian gendered beliefs my father and his family held this was furthered by Tony being a boy and me being a girl. As I wrote in this week’s post, neither Tony nor I really gave much thought to it. We believed one another to be on equal ground, unless we were playing our Atari 2600 (his scores were always the top).

Write about the order you and your sibling were given or expected to live. Who was supposed to be what, and a time the two of you lived it completely differently than it looked on paper. Where did the assigned ranking have nothing to do with how you actually stood with each other?🐺

2. Where did you and your sibling meet on level ground?

When you stand on level ground with someone, you follow them into places you would never go alone. Different interests, different worlds, a whole activity you took up just to be in the same room.

I joined my high school’s AFJROTC, fully bohemian and entirely out of place, just to be where Tony was. He, in turn, joined the competitive drum and baton corps I was in. Others questioned our presence or referred to me as “Tony’s little sister” or “Angie’s big brother.” We both loved that, smiled, and embraced it. Those monikers were badges we wore proudly.

Write about something the two of you did as equals that the rest of the family or your friends did not quite get. Maybe it was a hobby you shared, a trip you took, the program one of you joined for the other. What did you do that otherwise would not have been something you would have done but did (willingly or not)? And what came out of it for either or both of you to be there together?

If you want to go further, write about a world of theirs you wish you had crossed into and never did.

🐺

3. Where has the loss pushed you in the family, and where do you wish you could stay?

When an equal is gone, the family rearranges, and you can get pushed upward into a rank you never asked for, such as the strong one, being the oldest or youngest, or the one who did X, Y, Z.

As you likely know or have experienced, surviving siblings are often told to be strong for their parents at the exact moment they lost the one relationship that was never about rank at all. At Tony’s funeral, I wanted so badly to share with him the burden of being told to take care of our parents. I needed him to help me do that. Standing in the funeral home, looking at him in the casket, was a moment when I realized my lifelong partner and the assumed hierarchy of grief assumed I would take on all the roles he had played in caring for our parents.

Write about a moment since the loss when you felt your place in the family shift. Who were you suddenly expected to be? And what part of who you were beside your sibling do you not want to give up, even now?

🐺

That is all for today. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

If you write to any of these and want to share, the comments are open.

If these landed, there is more. The paid set for paid subscribers will follow in the morning, Wild Sibling Grief Prompts: Level Ground. It takes the work deeper with nine prompts to move through at your own pace.

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss, Episode 49 with Dr. Ken Doka is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain resources from The Broken Pack, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Wild Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

“It’s a family relationship, but it doesn’t tend to have the hierarchy of most family relationships.”
~ Dr. Ken Doka, Episode 49

Dr. Ken Doka and I spoke about what makes the sibling bond different from every other relationship in a family, in addition to the expected lifelong nature of it.

The sibling relationship has an equality in the family hierarchy that few other family relationships have, save for maybe cousins. We are their peers. Consider a drawing of a traditional family tree or a genogram. Siblings are placed on the same horizontal plane, below the parents and above their own children. Sure, this is in part to show heritage, but does it not represent how we interact in a hierarchical manner with others?

As siblings, we play, wrestle, compete, share, negotiate, and support one another, as equals.

Our ranking in the family is supposed to be equal, even when parents have favorites.

🐺

My brother was a proud member of our high school’s Air Force Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (AFJROTC). Recently I was going through his room at our parents’ house. The room now houses a variety of things, including some of his clothes from the few weeks he stayed there the year before he died, some books, his drawings, model rockets and airplanes he built, and a bag of his ribbons, ranking pins, and name tag from AFJROTC.

Despite us having completely different interests, we each joined several programs the other was in to spend time together, especially when travel was involved. He joined the competitive drum and baton corps I was in. I joined the marching band as the videographer so I could travel on the trips with him. And, despite having fully embraced my bohemian style and attitude in high school, I joined AFJROTC to spend time with him. He, of course, out ranked me.

Yet that only mattered to others. He just called me Angie or his little sister. To Tony, we were equals at home, at school, and anywhere in the world.

AFJROTC gave us both ranks. Pins, ribbons, and ranks in a bag preserved in his childhood bedroom. Our nameplates said the same thing. Our family name and our sibling relationship bonded us and put us on equal ground.

While we looked up to and respected one another, between us there was no ranking. Even when other family members viewed that differently, to us we were equals. Rank never once came between us.

That is the strange grace of a sibling. It is the one bond in a family where the ranks never really stick.

🐺

That equality is the part grief researchers and family theorists keep circling back to, and it is the one I keep thinking about since recording the episode with Dr. Doka.

When a sibling dies, you do not only lose a person. You lose an equal in the family.

You lose one who was in the trenches of childhood beside you, not supervising it. You lose the one you could be petty with, competitive with, unguarded with.

After they are gone, you may still have parents above you and children below you, even other siblings who are on the same horizontal plane of the family tree.

But now you are missing someone who stood where you stood and ranked where you ranked.

🐺

I think this is part of why sibling loss disorients people so deeply, even when they cannot name why. It is a shift in your whole position in the family.

One of your equals is gone. In my case, the only one.

The family rearranges around the empty spot. People tell you to be strong for your parents, to hold it together for the family, and they ask you to step into a hierarchy of grief at the exact moment you lost the one relationship that was never about hierarchy at all.

🐺

If you have lost a sibling, I want to name the thing that may be hard to explain to anyone who has not.

You did not just lose someone you loved. You lost someone who was more equal than most relationships in your family can be.

That is a particular kind of absence. Grieve it as its own loss, not a smaller version of someone else’s.

🐺

There is so much in this week’s episode I want you to hear, including how Dr. Doka thinks about identity, how sibling relationships are experienced across two dimensions, his experience of his sibling relationships, and loss of his own brother.

Please listen wherever you get your podcasts.

A small writing prompt, if any of this landed:

Write about a moment you and your sibling were unmistakably equals. Maybe it was the fight, the joke, the competition no adult could settle. What did it give you to have someone on your level?

Three more prompts arrive tomorrow, free for every subscriber. A longer set arrives later in the week for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss, Episode 49 with Dr. Ken Doka is out now wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain Broken Pack resources, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Learn more about The Broken Pack.

Together Dr. Doka and Dr. Dean talk about why the sibling bond is so often overlooked, how grievers process loss in different and equally valid ways, and what it means to enfranchise your own grief when no one around you names it.

In this episode you will:

• Hear how Dr. Doka came to study grief, and his own experience of losing his brother Frank.

• Learn why the sibling bond is the longest relationship most people have, and why it is so often disenfranchised.

• Learn the difference between instrumental, intuitive, and dissonant grieving, and why no single style is the right one.

• Be inspired to enfranchise your own grief, create your own ritual, and find a grief professional who actually fits.

Connect with Dr. Ken Doka:

• Kenneth Doka at TAPS: https://www.taps.org/kennethdoka

• Hospice Foundation of America: https://www.hospicefoundation.org

Content warning: This episode discusses the death of an adult sibling from illness, childhood cancer and pediatric illness, perinatal loss including miscarriage and stillbirth, twin loss, and a brief reference to a murder in the host's extended family.

Mentioned in the show:

• Hospice Foundation of America

• Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC)

• The Compassionate Friends

• The Surviving Sibling's Bill of Rights

• If you are struggling, in the United States you can call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

If you would like more information or to share your own sibling loss story, please contact Dr. Angela Dean at contact@thebrokenpack.com or go to our website, thebrokenpack.com.

Please like, subscribe, and share!

Please follow us:
Facebook:  @BrokenPack
Instagram:  @thebrokenpack
TikTok: @the_broken_pack
YouTube: @thebrokenpack

Sign-up for Wild Grief, our newsletter: https://thebrokenpack.substack.com/ 

Thank you!
Angela M. Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR 

🐺Tony's Little Sister

Credits:

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is produced by Not Done Here Media.

IF TOMORROW STARTS WITHOUT ME
    Written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean
    Performed by Fuji Sounds featuring Joe Mylward
    Courtesy of Not Done Here Records
    Licensed for use by The Broken Pack

Full song: https://fujisounds.music

This week’s essay was about “were you close,” the question most every surviving sibling gets asked, and why it misses nearly everything. It collapses two things that are not the same: closeness and contact. You can love someone deeply and not be talking much. You can drift for a season and never stop being close. Like Tony and me, sometimes you are finding your way back to each other when the time runs out, and the closeness you just rebuilt becomes one more thing you lose. That is a secondary loss, and it has its own weight.

These nine prompts move through four places: the question itself, the seasons which may have been more difficult, any difficult emotions that can arise from pondering your sibling relationship in this way, and the qualities or aspects of the relationship you are carrying with you now. Take them in order or skip to the one that is pulling at you. There is no schedule and no finish line.

A note before you begin. These prompts do not necessarily assume a relationship with your sibling that you want to continue. You may wish to stay connected, but if your relationship with your sibling was harmful, complicated, or one you have actively stepped away from in your grief work, some of these prompts will not serve you. Skip what does not fit. You are not required to maintain a bond with someone who was not safe for you. That is also grief work. You can, if you feel comfortable, use these prompts to set the boundaries you need.

🐺

Read more

🐺

1. What happens in your body before you answer the question about your sibling?

Many surviving siblings, like my recent podcast guest and author Anne Pinkerton, have been asked “were you close?” more times than we can count. Anne called it “a really strange question,” and “way too blunt a tool,” one that makes an already awkward conversation more awkward.

When someone asks me about Tony, I feel it before I find any words. I feel myself pause and my eyes take a quick scan of who is asking and why. I use those reactions to assess how much of him and our relationship I am willing to hand over in that particular moment.

Write about that physical moment, the one that comes before the answer to the question. Do you pause, take a deep breath, scan the room, feel your heart drop, or something else? Where do you feel it? What is your body deciding and your brain assessing before you speak?

🐺

2. What does ‘close’ even mean?

When Anne and I kept circling the word, I realized something. ‘Close’ is a vague word. Look it up on Merriam-Webster, and you will find it is a verb, an adjective, an adverb, and two different nouns, with dozens of meanings between them. Even the one we mean, ‘intimate, familiar,’ sits on a list next to ‘near in distance,’ ‘stingy,’ ‘stuffy,’ and ‘secluded, secretive.’ We are handed a blurry word and asked to give a precise answer.

Tony and I were close, but not in a way that the dictionary, or the people asking, could measure. Not too ‘near in space’ as we lived over 20 miles apart, or as Pittsburghers like to confuse time with distance, an hour away. We were sometimes but not always ‘in frequent contact.’ Over time and circumstances, the contact waxed and waned. Yet, unmistakably, we were always ‘intimate’ and ‘familiar’ as the people who knew each other first. Sometimes that meant we could argue or bicker and seem to be ‘secluded, secretive’ while also having an underlying love and warmth.

So write your own definition. When you say you were close to your sibling, or that you weren’t, or that it is complicated, what do you actually mean? What kind of close were you? And which of the dictionary’s meanings has nothing to do with the bond you are trying to describe?

🐺

3. What do you wish people would ask you instead?

When people ask Anne what to say if not “were you close,” she tells them to ask the person’s name, and to ask what they were like. I would add one more: tell me about your relationship.

None of these ask you to rank anything or fit your relationship into some vague, unmeasurable concept. They are open-ended questions that just make room for you to answer in the way that you can and need to in the moment. The answer may be one thing today and another tomorrow. And yes, even when asked my brother’s name, I usually say Tony, but with some people I trust them with other names or nicknames he had.

If someone really wanted to understand my relationship with Tony, I would want them to ask me something that let me tell a story, not score a closeness on a scale of one to ten.

So write the question you wish people would ask. What question would actually let you say something true about your sibling and your relationship in the way that you need?

If you want to go further, answer your own question, the way you wish you could answer it out loud.

🐺

That is all for today. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

If you write to any of these and want to share, the comments are open.

If these landed, there is more. The paid set this week, Wild Sibling Grief Prompts: Everything the Question Misses, takes the work deeper, nine prompts to move through at your own pace. For paid subscribers.

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

Register for Tony's Corner

Register for our inaugural book club, Tony’s Corner, in which we are reading Brilliant Disguise by Susan Kellam. Please join us even if you have not yet read the book.

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain resources from The Broken Pack, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Wild Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

"It's a really strange question."
~ Anne Pinkerton

When I sat down with Anne Pinkerton for our most recent episode of the podcast, she told me about the question she has been asked more times than she can count. The one she named her whole memoir after.

Were you close?

Anne lost her 47-year-old brother David in 2008. He fell while hiking a mountain in Colorado. David, an elite athlete and a radiologist, was the big brother Anne had looked up to her whole life.

In the days and years since losing him, the question people ask Anne, again and again, is whether the two of them were close.

In our chat, Anne said plainly what many of us who have been asked this question have likely thought, “It’s a really strange question.”

When I am asked this question, I have never once known how to answer it cleanly.

🐺

Tony and I were always close. That part was never in question for me or him, even if others may have perceived it differently. I know some people did.

You see, for a stretch of years, we drifted a bit as life got complicated for both of us and in the years before computers or cellphones dominated the world. Life presented challenges in the way it does, and we did not talk the way we used to or as often as either of us would have liked, for reasons I am not likely to share here.

The closeness was still there underneath, but the contact thinned, and we both let it for some very good reasons. When we were together in person, we didn’t miss a beat. The knowing looks, the inside jokes, the laughs, the love, and the affection were proof of that closeness.

Yet in some ways it didn’t look idyllic to those looking in including some people who supposedly knew us best. I carry that knowledge and those experiences of limited contact with guilt and regret. While I cherish all the times we did connect, even if we were arguing or not seeing eye to eye, it feels really heavy to think about it all.

If I am honest, I feel quite badly about those times we didn’t see one another, about the calls I did not make, about the calls he didn’t make, and about assuming there would be time to get back to each other.

But then circumstances changed, and we did get back to each other.

🐺

In the last two weeks of his life, Tony came back to himself. We communicated every day via texts, calls, messages on various apps. Every single day for two weeks we were intentionally coming back to one another and making big plans for the rest of the year.

It was the old closeness returning. I still remember sitting on my bed, giving my big brother advice and hearing his gratitude followed by his quick wit and sarcasm to lighten the heavy moment. I cherish those days, conversations, and moments. I remember looking forward to the rest of the year with glee and comfort that we would be okay.

Then he died.

🐺

So here is what I know now, and what Anne named so well in our talk and in her book. “Were you close?” is the wrong question.

When someone asks me, the true answer does not neatly fit in a box. What I want to say is “Yes. Always.”

But because we also drifted from time to time and in 2020 were finding our way back, it feels untrue to simply say “yes” and too painful to tell the full story.

I lost that closeness in the exact moment it returned to me. In addition to grieving the amazing brother I lost, I grieve the potential for the growth in the relationship, the future, and the simplicity of the closeness we had before we were adults.

Grief theorists, researchers, and thanatologists have a name for this grief. We call this secondary loss which means the losses we experience as a result of the primary loss, in this case my brother.

The closeness we had just rebuilt was ripped away from me right when I had it again.

The question “Were you close?” cannot hold the complexity of answers like mine. It begs for a yes or a no without acknowledging that “closeness” is both subjective and variable.

🐺

This is what I wish people understood. Closeness and contact are not the same thing.

You can love someone deeply and not be talking much. You can drift for years and never stop being close. You can be in the middle of finding your way back when the chance is taken. The frequency of the phone calls, visits, messages, or cards is not a measurement of the bond. You can be in constant contact with someone and not feel any real connection or meaningful relationship.

“Were you close?” treats closeness and frequency of contact as the same. It hands you a ruler and asks you to report a number. What you are actually holding is a whole relationship, with all its seasons and nuances, that may not be easy to explain.

🐺

If you have been asked this question and felt the quiet judgment underneath the question, I want you to know you were not alone.

The question really does miss nearly everything.

So, if you are carrying guilt about a season you were not as close as you wanted to be, that guilt is not proof that you failed them. Maybe for you, you had unfinished business, estrangement, or other reasons you were not in frequent contact, but are struggling to understand how and why you are still grieving them.

Maybe your relationship was exactly what you wanted and you feel awkward answering because you aren’t sure why the listener is asking.

All of these scenarios (and whatever ones I have missed that may be yours) are valid. They do not diminish your loss or your right to grieve in whatever way you grieve.

🐺

Here is the thing. Prior to losing Tony, I know I asked this question. And as I said to Anne, until recently, I even asked this or a similar question with my clients.

So, what is a better question or approach for the people who want to do right by us?

When people ask Anne what to say instead, she tells them, “Ask their name. Ask what they were like.”

After those statements, I would add, “Tell me about your relationship.”

These approaches do not audit the relationship or put the person on the spot for a binary answer. Rather it makes room for conversation, and hands the grieving person a reason to say their person’s name out loud, to share what they need to share in the moment albeit positive, negative, or neutral.

So the next time someone asks you the question, give yourself permission to share what you are comfortable sharing that you need to share.

🐺

There is so much in this week’s episode I want you to hear. Anne talks about continuing bonds, about writing her way through grief, about the strange experience of becoming older than her older brother ever got to be. Please listen wherever you get your podcasts.

🐺

Here’s a writing prompt for today:

What did you say the last time someone asked you “Were you close”? And what do you wish you had said instead?

Write for five minutes. No editing. No judgment. Just let it come.

Three more prompts arrive tomorrow, free for every subscriber. A longer set arrives later in the week for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

Register for Tony's Corner

Register for our inaugural book club, Tony’s Corner, in which we are reading Brilliant Disguise by Susan Kellam. It is happening at the end of the week on June 13th. If you can’t attend, register and you will have access to the recording. It’s pay what you can, starting at a $1 minimum.
Paid Wild Grief subscribers attend for free.

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen or watch podcasts.

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain Broken Pack resources, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Learn more about The Broken Pack.

Anne and Dr. Dean unpack the question that gives the book its title, "Were you close?"  as well as why it's far too blunt a tool for the complexity of any relationship. They talk about the hierarchy of grief that pushes surviving siblings to the margins, the disorienting limbo of those first days, the strangeness of out-aging an older brother, the small signs Anne takes as a hello from David, and how a bereavement writing group became an MFA and, eventually, a published memoir.

In this episode you will:

• Hear Anne's story of losing David and what it means to be a surviving sibling nearly two decades on. 

• Learn why "Were you close?" and questions like it can leave grieving siblings feeling unseen  

• Be reminded that there's no timeline for grief and how writing through grief aids memories

• Explore how  joy and gratitude can grow alongside the loss.

Connect with Anne Pinkerton:

• Website: https://annepinkertonwriter.com 

• Read  the book

• Instagram: @annepinkertonwriter 

• Faceboo: 

• TikTok: @annepinkertonwriter 

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

If you would like more information or to share your own sibling loss story, please contact Dr. Angela Dean at contact@thebrokenpack.com or go to our website, thebrokenpack.com.

Please like, subscribe, and share!

Please follow us:
Facebook:  @BrokenPack
Instagram:  @thebrokenpack
TikTok: @the_broken_pack
YouTube: @thebrokenpack

Sign-up for Wild Grief, our newsletter: https://thebrokenpack.substack.com/ 

Thank you!
Angela M. Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR 

🐺Tony's Little Sister

Credits:

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is produced by Not Done Here Media.

IF TOMORROW STARTS WITHOUT ME
    Written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean
    Performed by Fuji Sounds featuring Joe Mylward
    Courtesy of Not Done Here Records
    Licensed for use by The Broken Pack

Full song: https://fujisounds.music

These prompts go where the newsletter left off. They are for your journal, your voice memo, a trusted friend, a quiet hour you didn’t know what to do with. If you have not read the lead-in yet, Not About the Climb is the newsletter these prompts come from, and the three free prompts that followed are a softer entry. Each prompt here stands on its own, but they will land deeper if you have sat with the newsletter first.

The mountain you have been climbing since your sibling died is part of grief work, even if no one ever sees it or names it as work. The day I climbed Mt. Si, my pack was too heavy. I was carrying camera equipment and other people’s lunches. But the heaviest thing I carried was what others did not see. It was my love and grief for my brother and for a lot of unfinished business in our relationship.

Read more

Yesterday I wrote about my hike up Mt. Si, the Outward Bound trip Dr. Heidi Horsley took in her brother Scott’s place, and the climbs sibling loss survivors take that other people misread. If you haven’t read it yet, Not About the Climb is here.

Below you will find the companion prompts to that post.

Each one stands alone. You do not have to write to all three, and you do not have to write to them in order. Pick the ones that catch you. Set a timer for five minutes. No editing. No judgment. Just write.

🐺

1. What did the world look like the day your sibling died?

Heidi told me the sunny April weather felt wrong. She wanted it to be raining, storming, and horrendous to match how she felt inside.

What did your day look like? Was it sunny when it should have been gray, cold when it should have been warm, normal when nothing was normal, gloomy and dark, or something else altogether?

Write about the weather, the hour, the lighting, and what you noticed. Consider also the other aspects of atmosphere such as where you were, who you were with, the mood in the room, the activities in general. How did these align with how you felt? If they were misaligned, how and why?

🐺

2. What is a hard thing you have done that nobody knew was for your sibling or that you felt your sibling was guiding you through?

I climbed Mt. Si in part for Tony, and in part for myself. Heidi finished Outward Bound in part for Scott, and in part for herself.

But before climbing Mt. Si, in the early days of my own grief, sometimes the hard things I would do would seem much smaller to others. These were things such as going to the grocery store, going to bed even though I feared dying in my sleep like Tony, or taking time to rest.

Your difficult thing might be big like climbing a mountain, training for a marathon, or starting a big project. Or the difficult thing for you may be seemingly smaller to other people, yet still very hard for you. Maybe it’s getting out of bed on a day you couldn’t, going to work and entertaining clients, or making lunch for your kids.

Name it. Tell the story. What was hard or difficult about it, and what about it was for your sibling or was guided by them?

For example, going to a grocery store, especially in the early days of losing Tony, was always so hard for me, and still often is, because we grew up in our grandma’s tiny grocery store. And, at the time of his death, Tony was working a second job in a grocery store. At first, I sobbed, and strangers averted their eyes. And now, when I feel the difficult moments, I am able to feel Tony’s presence, remember the fun times we had at our grandma’s store, and feel he is walking with me in the aisles like I felt him on the trail.

🐺

3. Who is walking with you on your climb?

At the top of Mt. Si, I realized Tony had been there for the entire climb on every switchback and every steep section (which was the entire mountain, I think). Every time I wanted to stop, or when other friends went ahead or left the hike completely, I thought I was alone. In those moments I sobbed because no one could see me, and I felt abandoned. When I got to the summit, I realized Tony was there the entire time.

Who is walking with you on your climb right now? Is it your sibling, someone else who has shown you how to keep moving, a younger version of yourself, an older version, a version of your sibling you wish you knew, a friend, the sibling loss community, or even all of them at once?

Where and when do you feel them? Maybe it’s at the start of the day, in the hard parts, at the end of the day, when you sit down, when you are alone, or trying to fall asleep.

Write to them or about them. Name where they are on the trail with you.

And, please note that all responses are okay and valid, not just the positive ones. You may have negative thoughts or feel angry, upset, irritated, confused, or abandoned. This is normal at different times in grief, life, and relationships with both the living and the dead, especially if your sibling relationship was not ideal. Write anyway.

🐺

That is all for today. Take what is useful. Leave what is not.

If you write to any of these and want to share, the comments are open.

A longer set of nine prompts arrives tomorrow for paid subscribers. It goes deeper into the inside-outside mismatch, the visible vs. invisible climb, and what it means to channel a sibling across time, even if you and your sibling did not get along well or if the loss was complicated.

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

Register for Tony's Corner

Register for our inaugural book club, Tony’s Corner, in which we are reading Brilliant Disguise by Susan Kellam. Paid subscribers attend for free.

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain resources from The Broken Pack, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Wild Grief is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

“I wanted it to be raining and storming and horrendous.”
~ Dr. Heidi Horsley, Episode 47

Heidi was in her early twenties when her brother Scott died. He had done Outward Bound, a 23-day wilderness program in the Colorado mountains, the year before. He loved it. He had signed up to go back. He didn’t make it to the second trip. She took his place.

She wasn’t an outdoors person. Scott was. She’d had two thoughts about wilderness in her life and they were both “no thanks.” She went anyway, because he had wanted to go, and that felt like enough.

For 23 days she carried everything she had on her back. There was a three-day solo built in, and she spent it asking herself the same thing on repeat, “Why am I here?” She was contemplating not only why she was on the trail, but also why she was living.

She found herself sobbing. The other people on the trip would say things like “That climb was rough,” “That was so hard,” or “You did great.” She’d nod. They thought she was crying because the mountain was steep.

It was steep, but that’s not what she was crying about.

She said it like this on Episode 47, and I had to stop:

I had to stop because I’d done the same thing, almost exactly.

🐺

A few years after Tony died, I was on a business coaching retreat. One of those programs with a packing list, group dinners, workshops, community, and outdoor activities. We were supposed to go on a short hike, which in reality was an all day adventure. It was Mt. Si near North Bend, Washington.

Unlike Heidi I do love a good hike and being outdoors. My husband has a good story about me and hiking, but that’s not relevant today. However, at that time in my life that I was on Mt. Si, I was definitely not in good shape.

And, despite the grief, I was not crying easily that year. Yet, I cried at the top and up and down the mountain, too.

The people I was with thought it was the climb. They were kind about it. They said it was hard or were encouraging. Some even were giving me permission to stop and turn around. But I was determined to finish and to climb to the top, not just for me, but also for Tony.

It was a hard hike. My tears were not about that.

What I was actually doing on that mountain was deciding to carry my grief and learn to live with it. I was deciding to build this, The Broken Pack including what it was becoming, what it is now, and what it will be next.

I made the decision on a mountain because a mountain felt right. I needed something outside that matched what was already happening inside. I needed to prove something to myself that Tony always knew about me: I could do hard things. I could survive.

🐺

When Heidi described Outward Bound to me, she said something I keep thinking about. She said she wanted her external life to reflect how she was feeling. She described that the pleasant April weather when Scott died felt wrong. She needed it to be raining, storming, horrendous. She needed the world to match how she felt inside.

I think a lot of surviving siblings and other grievers have done a version of this. It isn’t always a mountain. Sometimes it's the project everyone says you can't handle. Sometimes it's a move. Sometimes it's training for something physical. Sometimes it's picking up something heavy on purpose.

You are looking for an outside that matches your inside. You are climbing something other people can’t see.

When people watch you do it, they put a name on the visible part. You must be tired. That’s a big undertaking. You’re really pushing yourself. They are not wrong. They are also not seeing the actual mountain.

If you’re mid-climb right now and you don’t fully know what the climb is for, there are two things I want to share:

1. The climb is real. The visible part takes effort. Your body knows. Your tiredness is not made up. Grief can be physically exhausting.

2. The actual mountain might not be the one under your feet or the difficult thing you are taking on physically, at work, or in your home. It might be the internal mountain Heidi named, the one you’re climbing to learn how to live your life without someone you love.

Neither mountain is small. You don’t have to pick which one to honor. You can climb both.

Heidi also said this in the episode: when she wanted to quit on Outward Bound, she’d channel Scott: his strength, what he would have said, and how he would have done it. This helped her to keep going. I did the same on Mt. Si. I still do.

I talked to Tony at the summit of Mt. Si, and I realized he had been there for the entire climb.

🐺

A small writing prompt, if any of this landed:

What is the mountain only you can see right now?

Write for five minutes. No editing. No judgment. Just let it come.

Three more prompts arrive tomorrow, free for every subscriber. A longer set arrives later in the week for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

Note: A first-timer’s primer for hiking Mount Si without tears (Seattle Times)

Register for Tony's Corner

Register for our inaugural book club, Tony’s Corner, in which we are reading Brilliant Disguise by Susan Kellam. It is happening in two weeks on June 13th. If you can’t attend, register and you will have access to the recording. Paid Wild Grief subscribers attend for free.

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen or watch podcasts.

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Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain Broken Pack resources, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

Learn more about The Broken Pack.

In this episode you will:

• Hear Dr. Heidi Horsley's story of losing her younger brother Scott and her cousin Matthew, and the night the call came.

• Listen to hear how the devastating loss changed her fundamentally and how how others reacted.

• Learn why sibling loss is treated differently than parent loss and child loss, how family identity gets rewritten, and how purpose can emerge slowly after sudden death.

• Be inspired by the community Dr. Horsley has built for other bereaved siblings, and the work she has carried out in Scott's memory for four decades.

• Find hope in the kind of relationship Dr. Dean and Dr. Horsley describe in the episode, between siblings further along in grief and those still in early loss.

Connect with Dr. Heidi Horsley: Open to Hope

Content warning: This episode discusses sudden death and a fatal car accident.

Mentioned in the show:

• TAPS, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors

• The Compassionate Friends

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If you would like more information or to share your own sibling loss story, please contact Dr. Angela Dean at contact@thebrokenpack.com or go to our website, thebrokenpack.com.

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Thank you!
Angela M. Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR 

🐺Tony's Little Sister

Credits:

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is produced by Not Done Here Media.

IF TOMORROW STARTS WITHOUT ME
    Written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean
    Performed by Fuji Sounds featuring Joe Mylward
    Courtesy of Not Done Here Records
    Licensed for use by The Broken Pack

Full song: https://fujisounds.music

These prompts go where the newsletter left off. They are for your journal, your voice memo, a trusted friend, a quiet hour you didn’t know what to do with. If you have not read the lead-in yet, Still Older is the newsletter these prompts come from, and the three free prompts that followed are a softer entry. Each prompt here stands on its own, but they will land deeper if you have sat with the newsletter first.

Grief is something you do, not something that happens to you. The math you have been running since your sibling died is part of that work, even if no one ever named it as work. Underneath the math, there is the story you and your sibling were inside together, which has been ruptured. Alongside it, there is a bond that changes form but does not end. These prompts hold all three.

Read more

I promised three more prompts. Here they are.

Each one stands alone. You do not have to write to all three, and you do not have to write to them in order. Pick the one that catches you. Set a timer for five minutes. No editing. No judgment. Just write.

🐺

1. How old is your sibling to you today?

How old they are to you, right now, in the version of them you carry?

The number might be the age frozen on a calendar the day they died. It might be the age they would have grown into. It might be no number at all, if they died before you could form memories of them, or if the math has stopped behaving like math. Write the number, or the absence of one. Then write the math you ran to land there.

Observe what comes up for you as you think about all of this. What emotions or bodily sensations occur? Write about this for 5 minutes.

If you want to go further, write what your sibling would say if you told them the number out loud. (I know Tony would laugh.)

🐺

2. What does holding them at that age give you, and what does it cost?
Every version of the math gives something and takes something else.

If you hold your sibling at the age they died, write about what is preserved in that math, and what is lost. If you hold them at the age they would be, write what becomes possible, and what becomes harder to carry. If you hold them at no age at all, write what that lets in, and what it asks of you.

For example: For years I held Tony at the age (46 years, 10 months) he was when he died. That kept the order of us in place. He was still my older brother on a calendar. The cost was that every birthday of mine arrived as evidence I was leaving him behind. When I realized I was going to surpass the birthdays he saw, I began to feel anxious. This year, I began to continue to think of him as older, even if he was unable to be physically here to see the birthdays and the years increase in number. This gave me back the retort I had used my whole life. He is still older, because “older brother” was never a number. The cost of holding him at 46 was anxiety. The gift of allowing myself to change this was letting the math move with me, allowing him to be older still. There is some level of comfort in knowing he is still my older brother. That has taken me six years to learn how to do.

🐺

3.The age you have not yet reached.
Today, look ahead. There is likely an age, a birthday, or a milestone on the horizon that you have already started thinking about.

Write what it is, and what you imagine it will be like to reach it. Write what you want to bring with you when you do. Will you find ways to keep your sibling present or not? There is no right or wrong approach.

If you want to go further, write what you hope someone will say to you that day.

🐺

These three prompts are yours. Write them all, write one, write none. The writing matters more than the order or the polish or the page count.

A longer set of nine prompts arrives later this week for paid subscribers. It goes further into the math, including the math specific to your relationships and dynamics (e.g. the math twins do, the math an only surviving sibling carries, the math that begins before memory, the math of the role the family slid you into). It offers a slower, more structured way to come back to this work across more than one sitting.

If any of this is landing, share it with a surviving sibling who might need it, or hold it for yourself. Both matter.

Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

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Register for our inaugural book club, Tony’s Corner, in which we are reading Brilliant Disguise by Susan Kellam. Paid subscribers attend for free.

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Our newest episode dropped today featuring Amanda sharing her story of losing her sister Shawna in a car accident.

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Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and Tony’s surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC, Dr. Angela Dean, and its content do not constitute a therapeutic or professional psychological relationship with Dr. Dean. All content is educational and informational, not clinical advice. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to your local crisis line or warm line, or visit findahelpline.com.

Wild Grief is original work by Dr. Angela Dean and is protected by copyright. You are welcome to share posts via link. Please do not copy, reproduce, or republish content elsewhere without written permission. Certain resources from The Broken Pack, including A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights, are separately released under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and may be shared in full, with attribution, for non-commercial use. Those resources will say so explicitly.

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