Sibling Loss in Adulthood
Photo by Artyom Kabajev on Unsplash.
I originally intended to write a post about sibling loss as part of my grief myths and misconceptions series, but truth be told, it simply didn’t fit. Frustratingly, the concept of sibling loss is so consistently overlooked that there really aren’t many myths or misconceptions that individuals actively believe about it. Many people don’t recognize the significance of sibling loss at all.
I wrote previously about invisible mourners, and those who lose their siblings make up a big portion of these mourners. Their grief is often overlooked and/or dismissed, as it is almost always overshadowed by the grief of their parents and/or the grief of their adult sibling’s spouse and children. This will be the first of two posts addressing sibling loss. This post focuses on sibling loss in adulthood whereas Part 2 will speak to sibling loss in childhood.
Arguably, the single greatest myth and misconception about grieving the death of a sibling is simply that it doesn’t really matter or that it’s not as significant as other losses.
There is an odd societal expectation that the sibling bond weakens in adulthood, so the death of a sibling will somehow have minimal disruption on our lives. It isn’t considered to be as significant as the death of a child, the death of a spouse, or even the death of a parent. However, sibling loss is a very particular and unique type of grief. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know that I don’t believe in creating hierarchies of grief, as it causes harm when we label one person’s grief as “worse” than someone else’s. The mantra I’ve come to embrace in this work (and I hope it is clear on this blog), is a sentiment commonly expressed by grief expert David Kessler that the “worst” type of grief is whatever grief someone is grieving right now. That said, however, there is a very unique type of suffering that comes from the loss of one’s sibling.
Sibling loss is different from other losses
Our siblings are the only people we expect to spend our entire lives with. We expect our parents to die before we do, we meet our partners later in life, we prepare for our children to leave home and establish their own lives independent of us, and we rotate through friendships frequently throughout the course of our lives. Unlike these other relationships, our siblings are the very individuals who were with us in childhood—perhaps even from the day we were born if we are the younger sibling—and we expect them to be our companions until near the end of our own life.
Whether we are consciously thinking about it or not, our siblings are the only individuals we expect to walk alongside us throughout our entire lives. No other relationship has the potential to be lifelong in the same way as the sibling relationship. This makes these bonds special. While the death of a sibling is often overlooked, it can be a deeply distressing type of grief. Some studies even report that for some seniors, the death of their sibling is even more painful than the death of a souse.
Our siblings are ties to our childhood, to sacred memories, to a shared set of values and expectations, and to our parents. If our parents have already died, then our siblings are the strongest and only remaining link we have to our ancestors and to our past, which includes past versions of ourselves. Our siblings are also the connection to a future we previously thought we’d have. If one of both of our parents are still alive when a sibling dies, we have lost their assistance in caring for our parents as they age. We may no longer have someone to share decision-making and caregiver responsibilities with. We may even feel pressure to fulfill all the hopes and expectations that our parents had for all their children now that one of them is gone.
Losing a sibling can be a profound loss of identity and sense of certainty in the world. The death of a sibling is the removal of a constant from one’s life, which can then make everything feel unstable and chaotic. When a sibling dies, it can leave us feel untethered and perhaps even alone in the world. Many siblings are often close to us in age, so when a sibling dies in adulthood, it is natural for us to focus inward and worry about our own mortality. This is particularly true if the cause of death was related to genetics, which can raise serious fears about the future of our own health.
Missing supports
If you google “sibling loss” you may discover that there are limited supports and literature available on the topic. What does exist is often focused on children and teens. Adult grievers are often left to fend for themselves, so to speak. Especially if they lose a sibling in later adulthood or their elderly years. There is a silent societal expectation that seniors should “be used to it” when someone in their life dies, but quite the opposite can be true. Each subsequent death and loss of an existing support can be deeply painful and leave individuals increasingly isolated. The pain and loneliness that comes from the loss of a sibling does not lessen the more decades spent together—quite the opposite.
The question of “closeness”
My anecdotal experience is that when an adult loses a sibling, one of the first questions they are often asked is, “were you close?” as if they won’t feel any pain if they weren’t best friends with their sibling or didn’t see them on a regular basis. This is far from the truth, especially when we consider the entirety of the emotions experienced in grief. As with our parents, our relationships with our siblings can be complex and sometimes unhealthy. This may mean that one’s grief over the death of a sibling is punctuated with complicated feels of anger/resentment, guilt/shame, or regret for something that never was or that could have been. The latter is especially true in situations of estrangement where reconciliation never took place. Even if siblings live separate lives far apart with limited contact, the sibling relationship is still unique from other relationships. Our sibling relationships, unlike those with most of our friends, tend to be ones that are deeply rooted, where we can pick up where we left off with minimal effort. While not true for everyone, for many individuals, familial and blood ties matter significantly, and time and distance don’t affect the love we have for our siblings.
Exclusion from decisions
It’s been argued that the grief of losing a sibling in adulthood is comparable to the grief felt by parents who lose adult children…at least in terms of the responses they receive from other people. In addition to the failure of others to recognize the significance of your bereavement or to see you as a “legitimate mourner,” when an adult sibling dies, one may find themself out of the loop when it comes to decisions regarding funeral arrangements etc., as those responsibilities tend to fall to the sibling’s spouse and/or children. This lack of control can be frustrating and exacerbate the grief one experiences, especially if they are not included in ceremonies or events related to their sibling’s death.
Accepting the death
Similar to parents who lose an adult child, it may be difficult for individuals to fully embrace the reality of an adult sibling’s death if they are used to living apart and not seeing them all the time. In these cases, there isn’t the stark absence from daily life as a reminder that their siblings is truly dead, which can make it difficult to accept that they are permanently gone.