The Invisible Blanket
Sibling loss, invisibility, and a conversation twenty years in the making
"There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me."
~ C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
When C.S. Lewis wrote about grieving his wife, he described an invisible blanket between himself and the world. You may know exactly what he meant.
Maybe you’ve never had a name for it, but you know the feeling. The world keeps going. People talk. Life continues in every ordinary way. And you are somewhere just outside all of it.
That’s sibling grief. That’s been sibling grief for as long as there have been surviving siblings – since the beginning of time. And even in recent decades, most of the world looked right past it. Even the fields that are supposed to study it.
Dr. Christina Zampitella has been trying to change that for over twenty years.
She’s a Fellow in Thanatology: the study of death, dying, and loss. She has spent her career researching sibling loss, writing about it, presenting it, pushing for it to be taken seriously in a field that still reaches for other losses first.
She lost her own brother Damien on Christmas Day in 1999. She has been doing this work from both sides of that door, the researcher and the surviving sibling, for longer than most people have even known sibling grief had a name.
Decades later, there is still so little out there.
When my brother Tony died, I did what psychologists do. I went looking for the research. I needed something that named what I was carrying. There was almost nothing, especially on adult sibling loss. One paper on adult surviving siblings, published in 2011, written by Dr. Zampitella, was profoundly helpful to me and in a lot of ways inspired me to create The Broken Pack™.
That’s the world sibling loss survivors are living in. You reach for something to hold onto and the shelf is nearly empty.
I’ve been thinking about why that shelf stays empty, about all the ways the world fails to witness this grief. This happens in person, in the awkward silence when you tell someone your sibling died and they ask how your parents are doing. It also happens in the digital spaces where so many of us now go looking for each other. I’ve been working on something: a new scholarly paper I’m presenting next week at the 50th annual conference of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC).
I’m not ready to lay it all out here yet, and I want to do it properly before I do. But I’ll tell you this much. It’s about that blanket and about why grief keeps getting missed even in the spaces that were supposed to finally see it. It’s for every person who has ever reached out and gotten silence back.
More on that soon.
What I know is that Dr. Z has been living that silence for a long time. And she has spent twenty years making sure other surviving siblings didn’t have to live it alone. That’s partly what Episode 41 is about. We talked about her story, her brother Damien, nearly twenty-six years of carrying him, and twenty years of advocating and educating for the rest of us.
It’s a conversation that stayed with me long after we stopped recording.
Link in bio. 🐺
As a child, I got lost walking along Virginia Beach looking for seashells. I stopped at a lifeguard chair sobbing because I couldn’t find my family. I was certain I had been forgotten, that I would never find my way back to them. When they found me, it was Tony’s hug and his quiet reassurance that made everything okay. He did that countless times in the years that followed.
So when he died, and the world around me turned toward my parents and toward his children, I wanted so desperately for someone to see my pain. I knew that Tony, who had loved me unconditionally and always found ways to acknowledge me quietly, without anyone else noticing, would have seen it. He would have named it.
His absence at his own funeral was an overwhelming force. And the people around me, while meaning well, were mostly unable to support me, or they said unhelpful, hurtful things.
Until I found other surviving siblings, I felt like I was hiding under that invisible blanket. And then, slowly, together, it felt a little less suffocating. Meeting Dr. Z reinforced that. Still does.
If this is sitting with you, I wonder:
When did you first realize the world wasn’t going to witness your grief the way it deserved?
And what did you do with that?
Write it down, say it out loud, sit with it. There’s no wrong way.
Share this with a surviving sibling who needs to know the blanket has a name.
Warmly,
Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺
The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss, Episode 41 with Dr. Christina Zampitella is out now wherever you listen to podcasts.
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