Worldwide Bereaved Siblings Month

Today is Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which I’ve written about before because I find it so beautiful and moving, and — dare I say — refreshingly normal and healthy? I love that a culture makes a point to acknowledge death, especially in the celebratory way that those Mexico and elsewhere observe the event, as a significant holiday. November 1 is also — far less spectacular and far less known — the start of Worldwide Bereaved Siblings Month (and, weirdly, it’s National Author Day.) So… I have words on the subject.

Despite there being holidays on the calendar to acknowledge our beloved dead, brothers and sisters are still largely treated as second-class bereaved people. I’ve been trying to place an op-ed or essay related to this issue to discuss the fact that surviving brothers and sisters continue to be overlooked or diminished as grieving people — and trying to tag it to this Worldwide Bereaved Siblings Month because, supposedly, editors like that sort of thing. Even though no one seems to have heard of this month’s observation, it seemed worth a shot.

I’ve now had 14 flat rejections from major and less-major publications in three weeks, which are likely due to my lack of experience pitching news outlets and/or the glut of current horrible news, not because of the subject matter, but still… I tried many different word lengths and focuses, titles and deks — some of them so dramatic, I am almost embarrassed, but I don’t know what it takes to get anyone’s attention in media these days. At any rate, the trying and failing over and over on this subject reminds me of how many times I had to pitch my book because agents kept saying “The writing is great, but I can’t sell a grief memoir about a brother,” and it all feels like it reinforces my main argument: siblings fall far below other nuclear family members on some kind of grief hierarchy that prioritizes children, parents, and spouses.

But those who know me know that this has become my soap box, my mission, my calling. Because losing my brother David 15 years ago changed my whole world, and the many surviving siblings I’ve spoken with know exactly what I’m talking about. Also, there are A LOT of us — this is not some tiny fraction of the population with a special circumstance; it’s absolutely common, and we simply want to be seen. There is nothing helpful or healing about believing you are unentitled to your grief; it in fact draws out suffering and makes people feel their pain is pathological.

So, I’ll keep pitching my stuff again and again. I’m going to keep beating this drum. Sorry/not sorry.

This quote by psychologist and grief expert (as well as a bereaved sibling herself) Dr. Heidi Horsley came across the transom to me today, which inspired this post: “Most siblings will spend 80% to 100% of their lifetimes with their siblings on this earth… it is a really, really big deal to lose a sibling. Very significant, but very unacknowledged.”

Keep it in mind if you know someone whose sibling is gone. When a brother or sister dies, we lose a critical piece of our past as well as a sense of our future — we expect they will grow old with us, outliving our parents at least. It’s not an incidental grief, regardless of how close we were. A little veneration makes us feel we aren’t broken people — we are just so sad, like anyone who loses someone they love is sad — and being unacknowledged only drags out our pain.