Brilliant Disguise
What a sibling's death can teach you.
“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.
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“…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.” Whoa. Yup.