Sibling grief has always mattered
A Surviving Sibling's Bill of Rights is here.
"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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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