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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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 🐺

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. Our newest episode dropped today featuring Amanda sharing her story of losing her sister Shawna in a car accident.

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

"You're old."
~ Tony, every one of my birthdays, without fail.

Today is Tony’s birthday.

He was twenty-two months older than me. The math was the math. Every year, on my birthday, he would deliver his line. You’re old. Every year, I had the only retort that mattered. You’ll always be older.

And on his birthday, I gently reminded him was even older still.

It was an idiotic exchange, and we ran it like a clock. He would say it at the dinner table, at the kitchen counter, over the phone, in a text, in a Facebook message, or in a card. You’re old. I would roll my eyes and hand him back his line. You’ll always be older. That was the deal. He went first into almost everything from the first day of school to the first driver’s license (and the first car accident), first heartbreak, and first apartment. He got to be older. I got to be younger. The order of us was settled.

Then he died, and the math broke.

Subscribe now

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For six years, I have been doing the arithmetic that no one warns you about.

Math should be based on facts and not change. Or at least that is how I like to think about it. Our mom used to tell us about “new math” that was taught to her in school. That seemed odd to me. Now, watching kids do long division and multiplication breaks my brain since it is so different from how I was taught. The problem and the answers are the same. It’s the process that is different.

So, I have begun learning a new math, too. Grief math and specifically sibling death math. (Three years ago, when I first tried to name it on camera, I called it death math. I still call it that. The math has not changed, but what I do with it, my process, has.)

I have lived years he never got to live. I have had birthdays that put me on the other side of a line we never imagined could be a line. The first time I realized I had outlived my older brother, the first time I said it out loud and heard how strange it sounded in my own mouth, something in me went quiet for a long time.

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If you have lost a sibling, you may know this quiet. The kind that arrives when you do a small piece of math at the kitchen sink and the answer turns the room sideways. I am older than my older brother now. Six words. No one knows what to do with them. There is no card for it. There is no condolence note for it. There is barely even language for it. Most of the people in your life will never think the thought, because most of the people in your life have not had to.

This is one of the small, particular griefs of sibling loss. It does not show up at the funeral. It shows up later, on an ordinary Tuesday, when you catch the math out of the corner of your eye and the ground briefly stops feeling so solid under you.

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I have spent seven birthdays of his, and seven of mine, sitting with that math.

For a long time, I let it mean something it did not have to mean. I let it mean I was leaving him behind. I let it mean the order of us was undone. I let it mean that the retort I had used my whole life, you’ll always be older, had been a lie we colluded in.

I think I needed to let it mean those things for a while. Some of grief is sitting with the worst version of a thought until the thought softens into something you can actually carry.

This year, today, on his birthday, the thought has softened.

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Here is what I have come to.

Tony is still older than me.

It’s not because of arithmetic. Math was never the point. Older brother is not a count of years. It is a structural fact about who was in our family first, who made our parents into parents, who handed me the map, and who taught me how to be a younger sibling by being an older one. He held that position from the moment I arrived. He holds it still.

Death did not promote me. It did not move me up a slot. The chair he occupied in our family is not a chair I can occupy by simply outliving him. It was his. It is still his. I have my own chair, and it is still the chair of the younger sister.

He will always be older. That was my retort, and I stand by it.

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For six years and seven birthdays, the work was a fight with the math. This year, the work is letting the math be beside the point.

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If you are a surviving sibling reading this, your math may not look like mine, but it has likely become a “new math,” too. You may be the older sibling, watching a younger one stay frozen at an age you passed years ago, aging past a sibling whose job was to be here for a long time to come. You may be a twin, doing math no one else in the family has to do, reaching an age you were never supposed to reach without them. You may be the middle one, the only one, the surviving half of a pair or multiples. Whatever the configuration, the math has done something to it that the math is not supposed to do.

There is no math fact for sibling death. Death is not a stopwatch, but it does shape how we think of ourselves and how we think of them.

Please know that my way of thinking, that Tony is still older, is not the “right way.” As I am fond of saying, there is no “right way” in grief. So, if you want to think about them as younger now, the same age they always were, or something else entirely, it is ok. Just know you are not alone as you navigate this new math.

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A small writing prompt, if any of this landed:

How old is your sibling to you today? Has that answer changed since they died? What does holding them at that age give you, and what does it cost you? Where in your math are you still fighting?

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.

Happy birthday, Tony.

You’re old.

(You’ll always be older.)

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.

Visit the Updated Website

The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes coming very soon.

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.

Yesterday’s three prompts encouraged you to sit with, validate, and enfranchise your disenfranchised sibling grief. These nine go further: naming what this loss has cost, sitting with the relationship of a lifetime, claiming the rights that have felt hardest, and carrying the bond that has not ended.

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Read more

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1. Be your own witness
Drawn from Right 1.

Today, witness yourself. Take a piece of your loss that has never been told. This is not what was in the obituary or the version made tidy for someone else. This is the version only you have been carrying.

Write it down. Then read it back, slowly.

If you want to go further, read it out loud, alone, in a quiet room.

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2. Setting a limit
Drawn from Right 8.

Write a limit you want to set with someone who has been getting your grief wrong or expecting you to “be over it by now,” or to be your old self.

Three sentences, max. You do not have to use it, but you can.

If you want to go further, write what they might say back or how you can enforce this boundary if you set it.

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3. One moment of joy
Drawn from Right 10.

Write about a moment of joy you have had since your sibling died. What was it and when did you realize you were experiencing joy? Did anything in you flinch, feel guilt, or another negative emotion?

If you want to go further, imagine sharing this moment with your sibling. How would they respond to the experience? How would they respond to your emotional responses

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If these prompts helped, the full Wild Grief Prompt Set goes deeper. Paid subscribers get 9 prompts later today that explore the continuing bond, carrying your sibling into the futures they were supposed to have, and what it means to keep noticing the world on their behalf.

If one or more of these landed, I'd love to know which one(s).

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.

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 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.

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

Subscribe now

"What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered."

~ John Green, Looking for Alaska

There is a list you have been keeping in your head.

It started the moment your sibling died and likely has grown ever since. The friend who stopped asking after three months. The coworker who said, “But they were just your sister” or the cousin who said, “Your parents must be hurting so much.” The waiting room form that asked how many siblings you have, present tense, and you did not know whether to write the number you had or the number you have now. The conversation where someone asked about your mother and never circled back to you. The first holiday. The fifth holiday. The age you reached that they will never reach. The day you laughed and felt guilty. The day you laughed and did not.

The list is the running record of what sibling loss has actually been like. The version no one has been listening for.

Subscribe now

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You are not alone in this. Sibling grief is the grief the world keeps looking past. The cards go to the parents or partners. The questions ask about parents, children, and partners. The casseroles arrive for them, too. You are standing right there, carrying it, and the room is asking about everyone else.

Even with my brother Tony having died in February 2020, people who love me continue, years later, to ask how my parents are doing but rarely about me. They are not being unkind. They have been taught, the way most of us were taught, that sibling grief sits beneath the grief of a parent or a partner or a child. That teaching is wrong, but it is everywhere.

Even though I had the vocabulary for what was happening to me, it did not save me from how lonely it was- and sometimes still is - when I felt I had no right to grieve or that my loss is somehow less than my parents’ loss.

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This week, The Broken Pack published the document I wish someone had handed me that February.

A Surviving Sibling’s Bill of Rights. It has been published in two versions: one for adults and one for kids & teens. Both are free to download on our newly re-designed website.

It names what is true about sibling grief and puts on the page what the world has not been saying out loud. Your loss is its own loss. Your grief will not match anyone else’s grief, even of the same person. You are grieving the relationship of a lifetime, past, present, and future. The childhood. The years before. The years now. The years that will not come. You have the right to live and find joy again. None of it is forgetting. None of it is loving them less.

There are eleven rights. Well, ten and a blank line. The eleventh one belongs to you. We did not want to publish a closed document. Whatever right we did not see is yours to write. Add more if you need to.

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The document is in the tradition Jo Horne started in 1985, when she wrote the Caregiver’s Bill of Rights for the same reasons we wrote this. Caregivers had been disappearing into the grief of others, and someone had to write a document that said the work was theirs and the cost was real. Alan Wolfelt and the Dougy Center extended that line of thinking to mourners broadly and to grieving teens. None of them wrote one specifically for siblings. So we did.

Read More & Download (PDF) Here

A prompt, before you go

Read A Surviving Sibling's Bill of Rights once, slowly. Notice which rights name something you have been carrying without a word for or for which you needed validation. Then write respond to this: what would it have meant, in the early days of your loss, to have someone speak that right to you out loud?

Three more prompts arrive tomorrow, free for every subscriber. A longer set with depth practices for the full Bill of Rights arrives later in the weekend for paid subscribers.

Your grief has always counted, even when the world did not show up to count it.

Thank you for being here.

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.

Visit the Updated Website

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 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.

"We read to know we are not alone."
~William Nicholson, Shadowlands

One of the hardest things about losing a sibling, sometimes, is not the loss itself. It is the people around you who do not quite know what to do with it. The friend who means well and changes the subject. The coworker who never asks. The relative who tells you, six months in, that they thought you would be doing better by now. They are not usually intentionally unkind. They just do not know, and many conversations with someone who does not know makes the room feel a little lonelier than it was before.

Somewhere along the way, you start to find the people who do know. Another surviving sibling on Instagram who comments on a post and means it. A podcast guest whose story sounds uncomfortably like yours. A line in a book that makes you set the book down for a minute. You start to notice the difference. A room gets quietly larger when someone in it understands.

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The Broken Pack is built out of those people. It is a pack, which means it is a way of moving together, with hopes that it becomes a way of carrying your sibling grief in the company of others instead of alone.

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After months of work, the new website thebrokenpack.com is finally live. I rebuilt it from the foundation up so it could hold what surviving siblings actually need. New pages. New resources. A new home for the podcast archive. Room for what is coming.

The Broken Pack is grounded in two things: lived experience and contemporary grief theory. I am a surviving sibling, a psychologist, and a thanatologist trained in grief work. The frameworks you find here come from grief theorists and the researchers who understand loss, sibling grief, disenfranchised grief, and contemporary grief work, not from personal experiences or opinions. You will not find the five stages here, or grief packaged into a quick fix. All of these pieces matter.

More podcast conversations are on the way very soon, and Wild Grief, which you are reading right now, will be moving at an increasing cadence going forward.

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Today, I'd like to announce our newest offering: Tony's Corner, a sibling loss book club. It is opening with its first book and scheduled live and recorded community event.

Tony's Corner

Tony's Corner is named for my brother, who loved to read. It is a virtual room of people who already get it, with a book on the table between us. The book is the reason we are in the room together. Your sibling is the reason you are.

The first book is Brilliant Disguise by Susan Kellam. Susan was the guest on Episode 43. She is a journalist and a surviving sister. Her brother Robert died by suicide at thirty-nine. She set out to write a rock and roll memoir, and an agent told her to put him at the center. The book is the long arc of coming to know him through writing, set against 1970s New York. Kirkus gave it a starred review. Susan’s writing reads like a novel and is truly moving in so many ways.

We are reading it through May and into June.
The live session with Susan is Saturday, June 13, 2026 at 2:00 PM ET. It will be approximately an hour and recorded for replay.

How to be in the room

The live session is pay-what-feels-right, with a $1 minimum. The recording is available on the same terms for anyone who cannot make it live. Paid Wild Grief subscribers attend free and keep the replay. Some people can give more so others can give less. That is how a pack works.

For where to find Brilliant Disguise and more details (as well as an adorable Olan Mills portrait of Tony reading as a toddler), visit Tony's Corner on our site. You can also pick the book up anywhere books are sold, including your local independent bookstore, your public library, or from a shop near you. Affiliate links on our website further support The Broken Pack.

Register for Tony's Corner

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You may be wondering why now.

For six years now I have been finding the people who get it. A podcast guest who sat with the silence between questions instead of filling it. A reader who emailed at three in the morning and signed off with “thank you for saying the thing.” A friend who, even though she has not lost a sibling, has learned to ask me how I am and then actually wait for the answer. These are the people who make me less alone in the world that I am now moving through without Tony. The continuing bond is real. Yet, it is also easier when other people can see it with you.

Tony loved to read. He read constantly, broadly, and without much regard for whether anyone else had read what he was reading. He left books on the steps, in the backseat, on the floor, and on the couch. Reading has made me feel connected to him.

I wish I had had these books then, and a community of surviving siblings who already knew. The books existed somewhere. The community existed somewhere. I just did not know where to find either one in those first lonely weeks and months. This book club is the room I would have wanted six years ago, and you are welcome in it.

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You do not have to carry this alone. There is a room here, and a date on the calendar, and a book on its way to readers. Susan and I are saving seats for whomever shows up.

Thank you for being here.

Warmly,

Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

Register for Tony's Corner

Visit the Updated Website

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

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

Disclaimer: Wild Grief is written by Dr. Angela Dean, PsyD, FT, GTMR (psychologist, thanatologist, and surviving sibling). Interactions with The Broken Pack, LLC 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.

"We read to know we are not alone."
~William Nicholson, Shadowlands

Tony's Corner is included in your paid subscription. Keep reading to learn more. Your seat at the live with Susan, the replay, and t…

Read more

In the newsletter earlier this week, I wrote about the NFL Draft coming to Pittsburgh, about the city Tony loved becoming the center of something he would have loved, and about what it means to notice the world on behalf of someone who is no longer here to see it. I wrote that the continuing bond is not a metaphor and not a coping mechanism. It is a relationship that keeps going after the person stops being able to be physically present in the room. I wrote that the story of a life does not stop when a sibling dies. It has to be re-authored in a way that keeps moving without abandoning them.

These prompts move from the moment of noticing, into what it costs to keep knowing your sibling so well, toward the work of carrying them into a world they can no longer move through themselves, and into the relationship that did not end.

Read more

If any of that landed, these prompts are for you.

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If you want to sit with this a little longer, here are a few prompts to write through this week.

1. You have been noticing the world on your sibling’s behalf, whether you named it that way or not. Think about how that noticing actually lives in your body. Is it something that arrives suddenly, or does it build? Does it feel like sadness, like love, like something that doesn’t have a clean word yet? Write about the noticing itself, not just what triggered it.

2. The continuing bond you carry with your sibling is not made only of the things they would have loved. Some of it is made of the things they would have made harder, louder, more complicated, more infuriating in their own particular way. Write one of those things down without softening it. The full picture of who they were is part of what you are still carrying, and it deserves the same room.

3. Write your sibling a short update. Not a goodbye. Just the news. Tell them about something they missed, something that happened in the world they loved, or something that made you think of them this week. Three lines is enough. The relationship is still a place you can go.

If these prompts helped, the full Wild Grief Prompt Set goes deeper. Paid subscribers get 9 prompts later today that explore the continuing bond, carrying your sibling into the futures they were supposed to have, and what it means to keep noticing the world on their behalf.

If one or more of these landed, I'd love to know which one(s).

Warmly,

Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram or learn more at thebrokenpack.com.

Thanks for reading Wild Grief! If this reached you, share it with a surviving sibling who might need it. That’s the whole reason we’re here.

Share

Leave a comment

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

Subscribe now

"Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened."

~T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

Tony was a Pittsburgh fan. It was not a hobby. It was a fact about himself. He would be found wearing black and gold every Sunday for the Steelers, for nearly every Penguins hockey game, and yes, even for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Our high school colors were black and gold, too. So, his wardrobe from birth to death was filled with black and gold. He talked about games days after they ended like he was still inside them. When we were teens, he would shout at the television like players could hear his sofa coaching.

He loved this city the way only someone who grew up here loves it.

Last week, the NFL Draft came to Pittsburgh. Three days of American football filled our city with sports fans, music (including Bret Michaels from an 80s band Tony loved, Poison), food, and crowds. The bridges were lit up. The streets were full of people in jerseys from all over. The city he loved was at the center of a sport he loved.

This was the kind of weekend Tony would have built his calendar around for a year.

🐺

I keep having a similar conversation with my husband, with my parents, and with people who loved and knew Tony.

The shape of the conversation is always the same. Tony would have been so happy. Can you imagine… He would have lost his mind over this.

We say it and we laugh, and then we don’t say anything for a minute. The saying of it is grief. The laughing is grief. The silence after is grief.

It’s all grief seeing as grief is any response to loss.

It is not the funeral or the anniversary. It is not even the empty chair at holiday gatherings, which I expected and which still hurts but which I have language for.

Last weekend, the city he loved became the center of something he would have loved, and he was not here to see it. That floored me in a way I did not expect. I found comfort in the people who knew him sharing the same sentiment, like we were looking for a container that would hold our grief from getting too big.

What we were grieving was the present which is the future that Tony never got to experience. We knew what that future would look like because we knew him. Now we hold it without him.

🐺

Part of my ongoing relationship with Tony is that now I notice the world on his behalf. I remember the futures he was supposed to have, and in the remembering, I let those futures matter.

That is a continuing bond. It’s not a metaphor nor is it a coping mechanism. Rather, it is a relationship that keeps going after he stopped being able to be physically present in the room.

The story of my life includes Tony. He was supposed to be in it until we were old and gray. Now that he is gone, the story does not stop. It has to be re-authored in a way that lets me keep moving without abandoning him. Saying he would have loved the NFL Draft and all the ways Pittsburgh was shown off is one of the small ways the re-authoring of our sibling story is happening in my life.

It’s not denial. It’s integration between my loss and living after losing him. My work is carrying him into a Pittsburgh, a world, and a life he no longer gets to see with his own beautiful brown eyes.

🐺

If you have lost a sibling, you likely know this. You may not have had the words for it.

There is a particular kind of grief that lives inside the moments your sibling would have been most alive for:

• a song they would have played too loud

• a movie they would have texted you about at midnight

• a team’s improbable comeback

• a draft pick

• a snowfall

• a meal at the place they always wanted to try

• an argument they would have weighed in on

• a holiday they would have made harder

• a fight they would have refused to let go of

• a silence they would have made worse before they made it better.

The continuing bond is not always sweet. The world keeps producing things they would have loved, things they would have ruined, and things they would have made unbearable in their own particular way. They died. The world did not. We are the ones left to notice it for them and to hold the futures they were supposed to have.

If your sibling hurt you, the continuing bond does not ask you to keep holding what hurt. You can grieve a person honestly, including the parts of them you needed protection from, without rebuilding a relationship with the harm. That is also integration. That is also carrying them.

All of this is the relationship, and the relationship does not have to end.

🐺

If any of this landed, try writing on this:

• What did the world do this week that your sibling would have had something to say about? Who could you say it out loud to? What was the saying like? What was the silence after?

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

Stay tuned for a few more free prompts later this week, plus a new podcast episode dropping in the next few days. The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme (9 prompts with reflection questions) will be available for paid subscribers on Tuesday.

If any of this resonated, send it to someone who might need it, or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.

Warmly,

Angela

Tony’s little sister 🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

In the newsletter I wrote about the split second when I didn’t recognize my brother in a photograph, about Valerie Lentine’s freight train, and about the fear of making our siblings up. I wrote that attachment does not end in death and that the work of grief is the slow reconciliation between the attachment that keeps telling us our person is here and the memory that knows they are gone. I shared that when those two truths collide, it hurts. Yet, the hurt is not evidence we are forgetting. It is evidence we are still doing the work.

These prompts move from the glitch itself, to what we fear we are losing, to the practice of remembering on purpose, and to the relationship that did not end when their lives did.

Read more

If any of that landed, these prompts are for you.

🐺

If you want to sit with this a little longer, here are a few prompts to write through this week.

1. Think back to the last time your brain played a trick on you about your sibling. Not a grief wave, a glitch. Maybe you looked at a picture and did not recognize them for a second. Maybe you tried to summon their laugh and could not. Maybe you stopped yourself mid-sentence because you were not sure if the memory you were telling was real or one you had smoothed over time. Where were you? What did you feel when your brain caught up?

2. Write about a time you tried to summon something small about your sibling and couldn't. The exact pitch of their laugh. The weight of their hand on your shoulder. The way they said your name when they were annoyed with you. (Tony used to say "Angie" with a singsong pitch. He was one of the few people I still let call me Angie. That singsong still lives somewhere in me, and I hope I don't ever lose it.) Where were you when you reached for it? What came up instead? What did you do with the space where the thing should have been?

3. When did the freight train last hit? The sudden awareness that too much time had passed since you had thought about them. Where were you? What pulled you out of it, if anything did? What did you do after?

If these prompts helped, the full Wild Grief Prompt Set goes deeper. Paid subscribers get 9 prompts this weekend that explore the silence around names, carrying names forward, and what it means to keep speaking when the world goes quiet.

If one or more of these landed, I'd love to know which one(s).

Warmly,

Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 Listen: Half of Myself: A Surviving Sibling’s Story of Losing Andy with Valerie is out now wherever you listen to podcasts.

🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram or learn more at thebrokenpack.com.

Thanks for reading Wild Grief! If this reached you, share it with a surviving sibling who might need it. That’s the whole reason we’re here.

Share

Leave a comment

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

Subscribe now

“Sometimes I feel as if I made him up. Did I really remember what his laugh, what his voice sounded like, the presence that we had when we were together, what it was like to have a conversation with him?”

~ Dr. Valerie Lentine, Episode 45

I was recording with Dr. Valerie Lentine when she said that sometimes she feels as if she made Andy up.

She said it had been three years since she had physically been with him, and her brain had started playing tricks on her. Had his laugh really sounded like that? Had his voice really filled a room the way she remembered?

Earlier in our conversation she described the same experience a different way. She said that when she goes too long without thinking about Andy, it hits her like a freight train and sends her into a spiral. She said she doesn’t remember her brother as well as she used to. She said it out loud in a way bereaved siblings rarely do.

I wondered aloud whether a lot of us have felt that.

I didn’t tell her, in the moment, that I had been sitting with my own version of it a few weeks before.

🐺

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through pictures of my brother as I prepare to revise our website. I stopped on one of Tony in young adulthood.

For a split second, I didn’t recognize him.

It only lasted an instant. Then my brain caught up, and realized, of course that was my brother. Yet the gap was enough to send me spiraling.

I started obsessively looking at other pictures to remind myself. I sat with specific memories. I grounded myself in his familiarity, in the small things that were unmistakably him.

Underneath all of it was anger and frustration that my own brain would do that to me.

I don't know who my brain thinks it is protecting. Certainly not me.

🐺

What was happening in that split second, I think, is something grief researchers have written about for decades.

Attachment does not end in death.

When we love someone, we build an attachment to them that lives in us at a deep level. That attachment does not have an off switch. Even after they die, we keep holding them as present, because that is what attachment does. It was built to do that.

The problem is that we also carry the memory of the death. The phone call. The hospital. The funeral. Those memories are real, and they are true, and they coexist with an attachment that keeps telling us the person still exists.

Grief is the slow reconciliation between those two truths. Every major grief theorist writes about some version of this. It is why the work takes years. It is why it is work.

When I looked at that picture of Tony and didn't recognize him for a split second, I think those two truths briefly collided. Tony was one of, if not the only, secure attachments I had. My attachment to him, which is still alive and running, didn't match the frozen image I was looking at. My memory of his death did.

The spiral that followed was me reconciling. Looking at more pictures. Walking myself back to specific memories. Grounding.

The anger was because the glitch felt like betrayal.

🐺

I think what Valerie is describing with the freight train and the fear of making Andy up is the same thing. The longer you go without actively remembering your sibling, the more the death takes up the space where they used to live in your brain and in your heart. When something forces the two back together, it hurts.

That is not evidence that you are forgetting. It is evidence that you are still doing the work.

The texture of someone you loved does not disappear. It gets stored more deeply. It moves from the part of your brain that keeps things on the surface for quick recall, into the part that holds things for the long haul. That move is what makes it feel, for a moment, like they are slipping. They are not slipping. They are being carried.

You are not making them up. You are loving them from farther away than you used to, and your brain is figuring out how to hold both of those truths at the same time.

🐺

After the photo glitch, I kept that picture of Tony open on my phone for a long time. I looked at him. I remembered the sound of his voice. I said his name out loud.

When the freight train comes, when your brain plays the trick, when you wonder for half a second who that person is in the picture, don’t push it away. Sit with it. Look at them on purpose. Say their name on purpose. Remember something specific on purpose.

🐺

There is so much in this week’s episode I want you to hear. Valerie’s story has stayed with me. Please listen wherever you get your podcasts.

If any of this landed, try writing on this:

• When was the last time your brain played a trick on you about your sibling? When was the last time you didn’t recognize them for a second, or couldn’t hear their voice, or felt like you might have made them up? What was that like? What did you do next?

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

Stay tuned for a few more free prompts tomorrow. The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme (9 prompts with reflection questions) will be available for paid subscribers this weekend.

If any of this resonated, send it to someone who might need it. Or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.

🎧 Half of Myself: A Surviving Sibling’s Story of Losing Andy

Warmly,

Angela

Tony’s little sister 🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

David Eagleman wrote that there are three deaths. The first is when the body stops. The second is the burial. The third is the last time the person’s name is spoken.

We can’t prevent the first two. The third one is in our hands. These prompts move from the experience of silence around your sibling’s name, to what that silence costs, to what it means to keep speaking, to carrying the name forward regardless of whether the world made room for it.

Read more

So I’m asking you. Right here. Right now.

What’s their name?

Drop it in the comments. Just the name. Nothing else required. No story, no explanation, no “how” or “when.” Just the name of the sibling you carry with you.

I’ll go first: Tony.

🐺

If you want to sit with this a little longer, here are a few prompts to write through this week.

1. Write your sibling’s name at the top of a blank page. Now write every version of it you’ve ever used, the full name, the nickname, the one only your family said, the one only you said, and yes even the ones you joked about or never said out loud. (My kiddo put a nickname for my brother in my phone once that says “Uncle Tony the buttface.” It’s still there.) Which version feels most like them?

2. Where do you say your sibling’s name most freely? Where do you hold it back? What makes those spaces different?

3. Has anyone ever asked you about your sibling in a way that felt like a gift instead of an obligation? What did they ask, and why did it land differently?

If these prompts helped, the full Wild Grief Prompt Set goes deeper. Paid subscribers get 9 prompts this weekend that explore the silence around names, carrying names forward, and what it means to keep speaking when the world goes quiet.

If one or more of these landed, I'd love to know which one(s).

Warmly,

Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

🎧 Listen: A Surviving Sibling’s Story of Caregiving, Loss, and Finding Joy Again with Earla Legault is out now wherever you listen to podcasts.

🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram or learn more at thebrokenpack.com.

Thanks for reading Wild Grief! If this reached you, share it with a surviving sibling who might need it. That’s the whole reason we’re here.

Share

Leave a comment

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

Subscribe now

“There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

~ David Eagleman, Sum

Many years before Tony died, before I knew much about sibling loss at all, a friend’s sister died. I showed up for her. I sat with her. I helped book a flight for her, and I helped her create a project to stay connected to her sister. I didn’t have a framework for it yet. I just knew she needed to keep her sister close, and I helped her find a way to do that.

Later, when I was going through significant challenges in my own life, she sat in my kitchen and told me I wasn’t allowed to be sad. She was not joking. She adamantly berated me for being upset about circumstances that had warranted my therapist at the time telling me, “You have been through more difficult things than most people have in their entire life.” But this now former friend insisted that because of what I do, because I’m a psychologist, I should know how to handle hard things. That because I had the tools, being upset didn’t make sense. (Don’t worry, through my tears I kicked her out of my house.)

I carried that for a long time not because I believed her, but because I wondered how many other people thought the same thing and just never said it.

🐺

When I unintentionally stepped back from the podcast and from Instagram for a while over the past year or two, some people reached out because they genuinely saw me. They didn’t need anything from me. They were concerned, and they just wanted me to know they were there.

Earla Legault was one of those people. She’d send messages, sometimes just a photo of a rainbow or a pink sky that reminded her of Leigh-Ann. She didn’t ask how I was doing in that way that requires you to pretend or offer socially normed “fine” responses. She just showed up in my inbox or my DMs with something beautiful and let me know she was thinking of me.

She told me later that she had a sense I was overwhelmed. She was right. She could see it because she’d lived it, the weight of carrying your own grief while also holding space for everyone else’s.

Not everyone who reached out during that time came with the same energy. Some people showed up with demands or expectations, not support. It was as if my stepping back was an inconvenience rather than a necessity. I don’t say that with bitterness. I say it because I think bereaved siblings will recognize the feeling. There are people who see your grief, and there are people who see past it to what they need from you.

Earla saw me in the way she sees every bereaved sibling she meets.

🐺

In this week’s podcast episode, Earla told me something that stopped me mid-conversation. She said the first thing she does when she meets a bereaved sibling is ask them their sibling’s name. Not how they died. Not how long ago. Just the name.

One woman told her, “You are the first person that has asked me that since he died in 1992.”

Decades. Decades without someone asking her brother’s name.

I think about that third death from the Eagleman quote. We can’t prevent the first. We can’t prevent the second. But the third one? That one is in our hands. Every time we speak our sibling’s name, every time someone asks us about them, every time we answer, we are holding that third death at bay.

And every time someone doesn’t ask, every time the room goes quiet when we mention them, every time someone changes the subject because they think enough time has passed, that silence inches us closer to it.

We talk about disenfranchised grief. We talk about the grief hierarchy that puts siblings somewhere near the bottom. But sometimes the simplest way to describe what bereaved siblings experience is this: people stop asking or saying the name. Eventually, they stop saying it altogether.

🐺

Earla lost her younger sister Leigh-Ann to pancreatic cancer twelve years ago. She was Leigh-Ann’s caregiver for three months. Their house of two became a house of five and a long goodbye.

There is so much in this episode I want you to hear, so please listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Right now, I want to come back to the name and to the one simple question. What was your sibling’s name?

It costs nothing. It means everything. And it keeps that third death from arriving.

🐺

Tony.

That’s my brother’s name. And I will never stop saying it.

If you’re reading this and you have a sibling who died, I want you to hold their name right now whether that is out loud or in your head. Which feels right? They are still your sibling. They matter. You matter, and someone should be asking.

🐺

If this is landing somewhere in you, try writing on this:

• When was the last time someone asked you your sibling’s name, not how they died, not how you’re doing, just their name? What did that feel like? And if it hasn’t happened, what do you imagine it would feel like to hear someone ask?

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

Stay tuned for a few more free prompts tomorrow. The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme (9 prompts with reflection questions) will be available for paid subscribers this weekend.

If any of this resonated, send it to someone who might need it. Or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.

🎧 A Surviving Sibling’s Story of Caregiving, Loss, and Finding Joy Again

Warmly,

Angela

Tony’s little sister 🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

“Just when I thought I had figured out the way the world worked, Robert went and flattened it.”

~ Susan Kellam, Brilliant Disguise: A Memoir

I thought I knew my brother. I spent decades beside him, and I built a pretty solid picture of who he was. I think most of us do that with our siblings. We grow up alongside them, share a childhood, eat at the same table, and we assume that means we know each other. We assume the version of them we carry is the whole version.

As we grow up, the picture becomes more whole. We assume that we have decades to learn about one another.

Then they die.

Slowly, sometimes years later, we start to learn things about them and about ourselves that we couldn’t quite see from the inside.

🐺

In the most recent episode of The Broken Pack™: Stories of Sibling Loss, I spoke with Susan Kellam about her memoir, Brilliant Disguise. Susan set out to write a memoir about her career at Rolling Stone, and the many related rock and roll adventures she had. Her brother Robert was in it, but in the background. When an agent pushed her to develop Robert's story, Susan realized she couldn't do it alone. She began seeing a therapist, and over years of writing and looking back, she began to understand things about Robert and about their shared childhood that she hadn't been able to see while he was alive.

Susan spent years seeing Robert as her rock, the person she called when she was struggling. He always showed up. Yet, he never made that call to her. She had not seen him as vulnerable. When Robert was hospitalized after a crisis and her family told her to stay away, she went to the Fashion Avenue, Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. There she bought fabric and made him a patchwork quilt. At the time, it was the only way she felt like she was helping him put his life back together.

When someone we love dies, it disrupts the story we were living inside. The assumptions we held about our family - our role in it, our sibling’s inner world - all get shaken. Susan thought she was writing a rock and roll memoir. However, many readers, agents, and others who picked up the book told her the same thing: this is a sibling book. The story she thought she was living inside was not the story that was actually being told on the page. The work that follows is slow and uneven. It’s a lifelong process of building a story large enough to hold who our sibling actually was.

And after all of that, the pain, the hidden vulnerability, the quilt, Susan said that Robert was still the person she turned to. Until the very end.

People sometimes show up for us when our sibling first dies. But this kind of grief — the grief of re-knowing them, of sitting with what we learn years later — doesn’t get the same support. Most people don’t even recognize it as grief. It happens quietly, over years, and we carry it largely alone.

🐺

What I have learned about Tony since his death warms my heart like the sweater of his I love to wear and the bear hugs he used to give. The Tony I know now is even more loving, caring, supportive, and understanding than I realized he was. Don’t get me wrong, he always was.

Since his death, I have heard from so many people that he was always talking about me, always telling them how proud he was of me. I always sensed that, and never understood how much he shared me and his love for me with others. Since his death I have reflected upon our life while he was living, and realized he truly loved me unconditionally — unlike anyone else in my life (then or now).

This was ever present the week he died, in what I will always hold as one of my most precious conversations.

A sibling's death can teach us things their life can't. For Susan, it was the depth of Robert's pain. For me, it was the depth of Tony's love.

It’s not because our siblings were keeping something from us. Rather, it’s because we were together inside the story, living it, and sometimes the love that’s closest to us is the hardest to see clearly.

🐺

If this is landing somewhere in you, try writing on this:

• What is one thing you understand about your sibling now that you couldn’t have understood while they were alive? Sit with it. You don’t have to resolve it.

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

Stay tuned for a few more free prompts tomorrow. The full Wild Grief Prompt Set for this theme (9 prompts with reflection questions) will be available for paid subscribers this weekend.

If any of this resonated, send it to someone who might need it. Or hold onto it for yourself. Both matter.

🎧 Listen to Episode 43: Brilliant Disguise: A Surviving Sibling’s Memoir

Warmly,

Angela

Tony’s little sister 🐺

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

Follow us on Instagram

Leave a comment

These prompts go deeper. Take your time with them. Come back to the ones that scare you a little.

Read more

These prompts are for you. You don’t need to have listened to the episode. You just need to have lost a sibling.

Pick one or do them all. Five minutes each. No editing.

🐺

1. When someone asks how many siblings you have, what do you say? Has your answer changed since they died?

2. Has anyone ever said something that made you feel like your role as a sibling had been erased? What happened and how did you respond?

3. What is one thing about your sibling that you refuse to let the world forget?

4. Has losing your sibling changed how you see yourself as a sister or brother? Have labels changed about being older, younger, only, twins? What shifted?

5. If your sibling could hear how you talk about them today, what would they think?

🐺

These prompts were inspired by my conversation with Nina Rodriguez on Episode 42 of The Broken Pack. Nina lost her only sibling, Yosef, and her answer to the identity question is one of my favorite moments in this episode.

If these prompts helped, the paid version goes deeper. Paid subscribers get 9 new prompts tomorrow that explore the roles we carried, the versions of ourselves that only existed in our sibling's presence, and what it costs us to stay quiet about our loss.

Warmly,

Angela

Tony’s little sister 🐺

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

🎧 Listen to Episode 42: Shining a Light on Sibling Loss, Addiction, and Life’s Little Pleasures

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