The process of grief….. and sibling loss Edited July 4th
Image by Vaso Katraki
“The grief we’re experiencing is actually an antidote to trauma—a healthy outlet for what we’re feeling. While trauma leaves us stuck in our sadness, grief abates and eventually allows us to tap into an innate sense of agency.” Gabor Maté, physician and author
“….The experience of genuine grief protects from trauma. “We shall be saved in an ocean of tears,” as the Canadian psychologist Gordon Neufeld has astutely said.” Gabor Maté, MD
“…only our brothers and sisters know the way back to that original road where, together, we began our odyssey.” Wray, T.J.
“I believe that we’re meant to ask questions; we’re hardwired to seek the truth. The need to ask difficult questions, and the demand for answers, can become the driving force behind our grief journey.” T.J. Wray
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow humans.” Herman Melville
“A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities ….” The Dalai Lama
Today’s post is about the grief process and is related to T.J. Wray’s book: Surviving the Death of a Sibling, written in 2009 – a book I came across as I was searching for material on grief. What I discovered through reading Wray’s book, but also, through further searching for material is that the major significance of adult sibling loss has been ignored, forgotten or trivialized. As suggested in the book: “It’s amazing that after more than fifty years of reflection upon the psychology of bereavement, there has been almost no attention to adult sibling loss. In view of this dearth of material she felt a need to connect with other surviving siblings, create a website, do research with grieving adult siblings, and write this book.
In the introduction Wray writes: “The year my brother died, I forgot how to breathe. Often it would catch me unaware, that terrible feeling that I was suffocating— at work, at home, sometimes at night, as I tried to sleep. As if I had drawn a breath but simply forgotten how to exhale….. The year my brother died, I forgot how to breathe, and no one seemed to notice.” She then continues that within days of her brother’s death she learned that no matter how paralyzed with grief and sorrow she might have felt, society does not recognize the death of an adult brother or sister as a major loss. She also discovered that there was nothing written by the grief experts to help surviving siblings cope with such a difficult loss. The only information concerning sibling loss she was able to unearth was geared almost exclusively toward young children. She poses the question: “Are we suddenly expected to stop caring for our siblings once we enter adulthood?”
As she encountered countless cases of unresolved grief among other surviving siblings, she realised that adult sibling bereavement is what psychologists call a disenfranchised loss, which in simple terms means that society fails to classify our mourning as a legitimate loss. Wary writes that in a society, like the USA, or other Western societies, which don’t always encourage healthy mourning, sibling survivors are the forgotten bereaved. However, she writes “… we need to question the effectiveness of this attitude. I strongly believe that “ignoring it” so that it will go away or “handling it” only leads to repressed grief, which brings with it all sorts of additional problems, including depression and an inability to deal with future losses.” It creates a cumulative effect since with every new loss, we revisit past losses, and if we have just stuffed our emotions down over and over it can complicate things. She writes about how in other cultures there may be more room to mourn and tells us about a Hispanic funeral she attended where family members grieved openly, crying, wailing, and falling to the floor, overcome with shock and disbelief.
Through her own grief journey and those of the many people she talked to she understood that even though surviving adult siblings certainly share many of the grief reactions associated with other kinds of loss, there are some significant differences rooted in the distinctive nature of a relationship, which, unlike any other relationship, begins in childhood, and hopefully, continues into old age. Wray expands on the sibling relationship, which as most of us who have siblings know, is a complex relationship. She writes the relationship can be a mixture of affection and ambivalence, camaraderie and competition, and also, aside from our parents, our brothers and sisters have been beside us from the beginning, but unlike our parents, our siblings are people that we assume will be part of our life for the rest of our life, and that losing a sibling, can also mean losing a part of yourself, part of that special connection to the past. She writes: “The truth about sibling relationships is that no matter how old we become, how much we may change, how far away we may wander, or how infrequently we may communicate, we’re forever connected. This is an unspoken truth that lives in the heart of every sister and brother.”
My own ink drawing
Wray is aware of Kübler-Ross’s initial work, and the many others that have put forth their own models in an effort to describe the complex process of grieving, and the fact that other psychological theorists reject the use of stages or models in describing this highly individual process. She cites grief and bereavement author, Earl Grollman, who believes that each person’s grief journey is as unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake. She adds however that “even those theorists who jettison the use of models in describing grief usually end up stringing together many of the universal reactions to loss into essentially non-structured models.” She writes that “I wholeheartedly concur with the notion of grief as an individual process and understand it to be a normal, healthy response to the death of a loved one (and, in most cases, not pathological), I have come to believe that models, to a very limited degree, can be helpful. Models, at the very least, provide a framework that enables us to understand grief as a process. In fact, when I initially began to gather information from surviving siblings, I used a twelve page questionnaire framed around Kübler-Ross’s well-delineated model. Why? The answer is more practical than theoretical.”
Her first chapter is about the initial shock. Feeling numb, paralyzed, confused or disoriented are normal grief reactions. This is how she describes her initial response: “The initial shock and numbness I feel quickly gives way to an overwhelming sense of disbelief and the creepy, eerie sensation that I am no longer confined to my body. It’s as if I’m watching everything happen to someone who looks like me but who cannot possibly be me.” She also clarifies that our initial response to loss or tragedy are not universal, at least in terms of the order. For instance, her sister was able to feel her emotions and cry. There are many contributing factors, such as personality differences, where we were when we received the news, the nature of the relationship, whether the death was anticipated or sudden, the cause of death, and also, the meaning we attach to death and mourning because grief behavior is also learned and directly relates to an individual’s worldview. For instance, our religion or lack thereof, our culture, our past losses, our gender conditioning can all influence the manner in which we receive the news and subsequent grief responses.
She also notes that early grief is fundamentally a visceral reaction, and it is common for surviving siblings to develop physical symptoms. One can experience a variety of physical symptoms like shakiness, feeling as if we are going to faint, nausea or more severe stomach disorders. She says that some surviving siblings experience shortness of breath, dizziness, general weakness, and even an inability to speak, and that others may complain of chest pain, or heart attack like symptoms, and some fear that they will die themselves. Wray distinguishes between anticipated and sudden death, and writes that learning that your sibling is suffering from a terminal condition brings a unique type of shock— “in effect, something of a double whammy. In other words, you may end up grieving for your brother or sister twice: first when the reality of the prognosis has been accepted, and then again following your sibling’s death.” Also, if one for whatever reason is denied the chance to be with a dying brother or sister, then they are likely to have a much more difficult time when they learn of the death.
Finally, for the early stage of grief Wray suggests self care which may be making sure that we are dehydrated and fed or seeing we get some sleep even by taking naps during the day. She also advises we give ourself permission to feel whatever it is we need to feel. She writes: “This may seem deceptively easy; the reality, however, is that we live in a culture that denies death and grief.” She further suggests we identify at least one person with whom we feel safe and comfortable in sharing our feelings and ask this person to be our grief partner. This person might also support us in attending to the practical matters associated with losing a sibling. If we feel unsupported sharing our feelings reaching out to a grief therapist can be helpful. Keeping a personal grief journal or a family journal or both, which is a sort of communal diary can also help the process, especially if families have difficulty discussing emotions and can alert us to possible issues like depression. At this point, I should mention that each chapter contains many tools and projects to support the whole grief process from self-care to community support and therapy to finding purpose through a call to action to creative projects like storytelling, keeping grief journals and making scrapbooks or family books, video memorials or quilts, and so on, which I have not elaborated on in this post due to space.
Denial is often another part of the grieving process. In her chapter on denial Wray writes: “What my children do not know is this: At some point during the day, between the numbness and the tears, I closed a door. It’s almost as if my soul peered warily down the long, dark hallway that lay ahead and decided that it would be better for me not to go there. Heeding the silent warnings from within, I retreated into the world of denial. Denial, for me, is not a conscious choice, but more of an automatic response. Not yet ready to face the reality of living in a world without my brother, I seek refuge in the familiarity of my kitchen…. On some level, of course, I know I’m hiding behind the skirts of denial, but I suppress any analysis of my behavior and simply allow myself to be absorbed in the rudimentary tasks of sifting, measuring, and mixing. This temporary escape into my kitchen to bake cookies and muffins is an example of what I call a diversionary activity…”, which is as the name implies a brief distraction from the intensity of grief and a distinctive feature of denial.
She suggests that this temporary respite from mourning is, in most cases, beneficial. She writes that whether it’s baking, premature return to work or running, diversionary activities offer a welcome break from the intensity of grief. In most cases, experiencing denial is not something terrible or pathological, but the way in which our minds move forward to buffer the terrible impact of our brother’s or sister’s death initially. Wray writes that it appears in full force when we need it the most, softening the blow of grief and helping us cope with helplessness, seems to move from an instinctual, unconscious response to a sort of conscious coping tool, and also, feelings of denial associated with the death of a loved one serve other important emotional purposes. She also refers to bargaining, which Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and others understood as part of the greater spectrum of shock, and especially connected to denial. As she brings this chapter on denial to an end Wray writes: “I feel the security of denial slowly melting away, withdrawing its protective hand and pointing me in the direction of the dark hallway I’ve been avoiding. Several days later, I open the door and start down that dreaded dark hallway, alone and without a flashlight.”
Wray also discusses the role of communities as holding containers. She describes how in the past communities relied on established rituals and external symbols of mourning to help gently guide the bereaved through the grief process. And even though people did not talk about grief as a process or refer to stages of grief they understood that grief takes time. She writes: “Family and friends gathered around the bereaved and helped them to learn to live in a world without their loved one. The bereaved felt comforted by familiar rituals and symbols of mourning that silently spoke to them and whispered: you’re not alone.” She actually suggests the reinstitution of external signs or symbols because they provide a gentle reminder and invite people to help and allow space for the grieving process. For instance, in the past when someone died in the neighborhood, the family of the deceased would hang a wreath with colored ribbons on the door or they would drape the doorframe in a black bunting. People in their community understood and respected such external signs and responded with condolences, flowers, food gifts, and words of comfort.
Wray also refers to mourners wearing black, in some cultures for a lifetime, as in the case of widows in the past. Personally, I think that customs and rituals are valuable in facilitating the bereaved through grief as long as they don’t become rigid social mandates. My mother used to tell us that she spent most of her youth wearing black for her parents. Then when one of her brothers passed away she chose to wear black for quite some time because her grief was intense due to the fact that his death was untimely, their bond was strong, she was an ocean away when he died, and was also, probably homesick and overworked. Being the seventh child of eight children she eventually experienced the passing away of all her older siblings, but she abandoned the custom of wearing black and wished her own children to not wear black because she believed that prolonged wearing of mourning clothes reinforces the grief and becomes a constant reminder throughout the days and months and years. Ultimately, people should be free to move through the ache and longing and the whole grieving process in a way that feels right to them, in supportive and non-judgmental environments.
In the third chapter Wray discusses the reactions of others and cautions us to not always expect others to understand the depth of our loss. Some people will lack empathy and understanding. In one vignette a sibling survivor says: “Grief is extremely lonely, and very few people can imagine the pain that desperate grief causes.” Through her own experience and research she found that sometimes the people who reach out to us and help us the most are people we don’t commonly recognize as part of our immediate circle of friends and family. Some of the factors contributing to the lack of understanding and support surviving siblings receive from others are the fact that, as mentioned above, we live in a culture where the death of a sibling in adulthood, unlike the loss of a parent, a child, or spouse, is not generally considered to be a major loss, and also, is somewhat inept when it comes to condolence and other grief-related issues and often what is offered are dismissive or minimizing condolences. Wray mentions behaviours to avoid like: rationalizing, minimizing one’s grief or comparing losses, and certain remarks and clichés that can hurt the bereaved like: “Everything happens for a reason”, “He’s / she’s in a better place”, “God never gives you a burden more than you can bear”.
Sooner or later denial will crack and the finality of death will sink in. Wray writes that “As the shock and denial that initially guides most surviving siblings through those first difficult days and weeks begins to fade, the terrible finality of death dawns…. I now understand the meaning of the expression grief stricken; it accurately captures the punch-in-the stomach reality I’m experiencing. The grief is bigger than me now; it lingers around every corner, like a bully, waiting to pounce.” During this time many people often seek physical and emotional solitude and quality time alone, a self-imposed seclusion. Wray suggests ideas about how to carve out solitude time, create a specific grieving space and personalize that space for as long as it is necessary, and how to negotiate this with family and young children. She describes her daily visits to the shore where she runs and feels connected to her brother maybe because he loved the sea and always lived by the sea or maybe as she notes because there might be a primal force, deep within us that draws us to the sea, or maybe nature in general. She describes emotional solitude as the desire to simply go within and begin to come to terms with our loss. This usually involves the long process of reorientation, the period in which one begins to learn how to adjust to life without our brother or sister, who has been part of our identity, part of who we are since early on. Fatigue and feelings of disconnectedness are also experienced by many surviving siblings, which probably also stem from the fact that they’ve just been through a trauma.
Wray also describes a searching behaviour that most bereaved siblings experience and maybe all those bereaved do. During this phase she experiences a deep longing to see her brother. She also starts to “see” him everywhere. She writes: “As unusual as it may seem, searching behavior and even false sightings are fairly common grief reactions. Psychologist John Bowlby understood both yearning and searching as forms of attachment behavior. Although Bowlby’s work focuses primarily on parent-child relationships, his attachment theory makes a great deal of sense with regard to brothers and sisters, considering the longevity and complexity of the sibling bond.” So although intellectually she knows none of the look-alikes is really her brother, nonetheless, she ponders on the reasons of these pseudo-sightings.
Wray also discusses other emotions like the anger experienced by surviving siblings, which can take many forms, and which is part of the grieving process. Some feel anger at the disease or accident that claimed the life of their sibling, some may feel anger at the deceased sibling for dying, especially, if the death is considered preventable or the result of bad choices and inadequate self-care, others are angry with doctors or the health care system, God for allowing such a terrible thing to happen or at an unresponsive community who fail to acknowledge the depth of their grief, and of course, anger is often directed at oneself. Often siblings feel responsible for not being able to prevent or protect a sibling, especially if the sibling that died was younger. She writes; “In the same way that our parents feel the need to protect us, we siblings often feel it’s our responsibility to protect our brother or sister, particularly if we’re older. I remembered that when my younger sister first began school I was so concerned for her well-being that I made an effort to be the first to leave the classroom as soon as the lunch break bell rang so that I could catch her as she came out from her classroom to discreetly check on her, and if I happened to have pocket money on me I would ask her if she needed it to buy something before going off to get something for myself. Surviving siblings often react similarly to their bereaved parents in the amount of guilt and anger they may feel over what they perceive as their failure to protect their sibling.” And most people feel that our brothers and sisters are not supposed to die until we’ve had the chance to grow old with them; it’s the natural order of life, and as Wray adds reminds us losing a sibling destroys the illusion of permanence in a more profound way than most other deaths.
Although anger is a natural and healthy response with regard to the loss of a loved one, and sometimes it can actually serve to energize one in a positive direction, if repressed or misdirected it can become self-destructive or lead to depression. As is often the case, anger is coupled with other difficult emotions and states like guilt, regret, fear and depression. Wray writes: she found herself reverting to a five-year-old mentality, fearful and worried about the well-being of her loved ones. Regret and guilt also commonly plague bereaved siblings as one reflects back to what we should have, could have, or would have done, if we had only known. Then, there’s the guilt baggage from our childhood, the teenage years, the young adult years, and finally, survivor guilt, which are feelings of guilt or regret at simply being alive. In terms of depression she suggests that one question to research is whether there a difference between clinical depression and the depression associated with the death of a loved one. Another factor to consider is the number of previous losses you’ve endured and how that residual and unmetabolized grief might be creating a greater burden. Wray also reminds us that although these reactions related to depression may be classified as normal responses to loss, they need to be monitored with great care because it’s fairly common to start out with normal grief depression only to have it escalate into a more serious form. It is also important to do research and reach out for help because many people deal with grief and the depression that comes with it in destructive ways, which can range from self-neglect to the use of alcohol, drugs, and food as coping tools.
In the book there’s a chapter on dreams. Wray claims that very little clinical research has been done in the area of grief related dreams, and yet so many surviving siblings have both had nightmares and found comfort in these dreams. She starts off with how sleep deprivation, often experienced during the process of mourning, can among other things interrupt the process of dreaming. She writes: “What bothers me most about not sleeping, however, is not the persistent fatigue or the loneliness of the night. What bothers me most is my inability to dream.” She includes vignettes of other surviving siblings’ grief dreams and concludes that death does not sever the life bond we’ve shared with our siblings and that our dreams can ease the intensity of grief, gently helping us to accept and integrate our loss into our lives. She suggests recording our dreams and exploring their content as part of the grieving and integration process and a way of understanding the aspects of grief that may be preventing us from moving forward.
Wray is a theologian and professor of religious studies so the chapter on faith, religion and spirituality are to some degree informed by this. She discusses how like other experiences of deep loss the death of a sibling can begin an awakening process. It can plunge one into a sort of “dark night”, a period of introspective circles of questioning of beliefs and ideas kind of journey and a coming to terms with shifts in one’s identity. Our questioning and search for truths is also part of grieving and our meaning making process. She writes: “My brother’s death caused me to question everything I’ve ever believed….. Like Jonah, I descended into the belly of the beast and languished there for a while— lost, afraid, and uncertain of the person I’d be once I reemerged.” She also notes that there is the notion of suffering as “a divine method of instruction— to teach us or others some valuable lesson— or the idea that our suffering is our just desserts, a punishment for some undefined human failing.” She concludes that suffering is simply part of being human in a less-than-perfect world and none of these supposed reasons can be reconciled with the concept of an all-loving God. She says: “You can learn a lot about people by asking about their beliefs— especially their beliefs about God. Generally speaking, the person who describes God as unforgiving, punitive, and punishing— or as loving, forgiving, and accepting— is actually describing him or herself.”
One shift that Wray experienced is a heightened sense of common humanity. She writes: “I no longer see church as simply a time between God and me…. Today, when I go to church, I look around…. friends and neighbors who have problems with their teenagers, or who hate their jobs; people who have successful, happy lives, and those whose lives are plagued with sorrow and turmoil— and I think, “These are my sisters and brothers; we’re one.” On the same note the Dalai Lama says: “We must learn that humanity is one big family. We’re all brothers and sisters: physically, mentally and emotionally the same. But we still focus far too much on differences instead of what we have in common. After all, every one of us is born the same way and dies the same way (1)…. Many problems that confront us today are created by man, whether they are violent conflicts, destruction of the environment, poverty or hunger. These problems can be resolved thanks to human efforts by understanding that we are brother and sister and by developing this sense of closeness. We must cultivate a universal responsibility toward each other and extend it to the planet that we have to share (2)….
Finally, the book ends with a discussion of the process of acceptance and search for meaning. Most people who have been through deep loss are likely to feel irrevocably changed by it, and if they have engaged in the process of grieving instead of burying their emotions they are likely to move towards finding meaning in the loss and then integrating it into their life. Wray understands acceptance as learning to live again through finding meaning in your loss and then incorporating it into your life, and also, that the grief never really goes away, but the periods of acute grief and longing diminish greatly. However, through her research she also found that some surviving siblings reject the whole idea of acceptance because in some sense their grief is their connection to the deceased sibling. Acceptance basically happens once we’ve attached meaning to our loss and transitioned from “loving in presence to loving in absence” (Thomas Attig). Finding meaning does not mean the grief disappears, instead it becomes incorporated into the person one becomes as a result of the loss. Wray writes: “It has evolved into a shadowy companion that always walks a step behind.” Meaning differs for people. For the author and many others the loss shifted their focus more on embracing the now and life in a more dynamic and passionate way, re-evaluating their priorities and caring less about what others think, and finding new purpose.