When You Lose a Sibling, No One Warns You About the Blank Page

Sibling loss doesn't just take them. It interrupts the story you were both still writing.

"Staring at the blank page before you / Today is where your book begins / The rest is still unwritten" — Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (2004)

Before your sibling died, you were in the middle of a story.

Not a tidy one. Maybe it had tension in it, long silences, chapters you’d rather skip. Maybe it was the best relationship of your life. Maybe it was both at once. But it was going somewhere.

There were more pages coming. They were still in it with you, in the background, as the person you hadn't called yet, as the one you thought you still had time with.

And then, without warning, the pen was in your hand. Alone. Staring at a page you don’t know how to start.

Dr. Robert Neimeyer describes loss as a rupture in the story of a life. We each carry a narrative, an ongoing account of who we are, where we came from, and where things are heading. It has characters and history and an implied future.

When someone central to that narrative dies, the story doesn’t just lose them. It loses its shape. The plot you were living inside no longer holds the way it did.

For surviving siblings this lands somewhere specific and mostly unacknowledged. Your sibling wasn’t just someone you loved. They were in your story from the very first pages, so early you don’t even have clear memories of them being absent. They knew the unformed version of you, the one that existed before you understood who you were becoming. They held a part of your history that lives nowhere else now. And the grief of losing that, of losing your first witness, is one the world rarely makes room for.

What Neimeyer offers, and what I find genuinely useful rather than just theoretically interesting, is that the blank page is not a sign you’re doing something wrong. It’s what happens when a story gets interrupted before its time.

The work that comes eventually, slowly, and on no particular schedule is not to return to the story you were living before. That story is gone.

Rather, what grief demands is that we author something new. Something that holds the loss honestly. Something that keeps them in it, because they are still in it. And something that tells the truth about who you are now, with this absence woven through everything.

That is not moving on, and it’s not closure.

It’s the slow, often painful work of figuring out what your life means now — what you carry forward, what you build around what’s missing, how you hold them in the chapters they don’t get to live.

The rest is still unwritten. That’s not a comfort, exactly. But it is true. And sometimes true is enough to begin with.

When we were kids, my brother, Tony, with his tight pencil grip and left-handed posture dragged his hand across each line he wrote. In the 80’s our common school pencils had softer graphite than most do now. Tony’s hands were often covered in the shiny grey graphite and scarred by a permanent callus from his death grip. His pages bore the smudged lines where his hand dragged across what he'd just written, altering it ever so slightly.

I would tease him. My papers and writing were neat, precise, and clean. After laughing together, he would chase me around the house trying to rub his messy left hand on my clothes or my neatly written homework. Some days he would catch me before I ducked into my ironically messy room and he into his organized, clean one.

Some days I find him in what I write. In this newsletter, in the podcast, in the wolves. He is still in the story. Just differently now. And he will appear differently tomorrow, next month, and in the next decade.

If this is landing somewhere in you, sit with this today:
Before your sibling died, what story were you both inside? And what does it feel like to be holding the pen alone now?

Write it down, say it aloud, or just sit with it. There’s no wrong way to begin.

Warmly,

Angela
Tony’s little sister 🐺

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The Broken Pack: Stories of Sibling Loss is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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