The Feast of the Swedish Fish
What it means when your sibling still hands you what they know you love.
“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.
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.
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