Still Older

On grief math and sibling birthdays.

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

Tony and me. He was already older. He still is.

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.

🐺

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.

🐺

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.

🐺

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.

🐺

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.

🐺

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.

🐺

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.

🐺

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 🐺

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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.