The Strange Calculus of Grief

The Atlantic

5 days ago

The day my brother died, the dogwoods were in bloom. I sat by my bedroom windowsill, painting my nails. Junior prom was just hours away. I was 16. My brother, Alex, was 18—just 22 months older than me.
The car accident happened on a highway in upstate New York in the early morning. My brother was driving a group of his college classmates to an ultimate-frisbee tournament. Over time, my family has settled on the theory that he fell asleep at the wheel, though for a while my parents thought it was mechanical failure. They couldn't bear the alternative. The car flipped, and the roll bar above the driver's seat broke his neck. Everyone else walked away.
This May marked 33 years after his death. Since it happened, I've been thinking in numbers: days, months, eventually years. It's a compulsion, really, this ongoing tally. My own private math. I have just turned 50, an age unimaginable to that 16-year-old girl, and I will have been without him for more than twice as long as I knew him. Here's a story problem: If I live to 80, what percentage of my life will I have spent as someone's sister? What percentage as no one's sister? I don't know why I do this. Perhaps it's an attempt to impose order on something that defies ordering.
Ten years ago, when my mother needed open-heart surgery, I sat alone in the waiting room with a book I couldn't focus on and a cup of coffee that turned cold. Every time the doors swung open, I half-expected my brother to walk through them. It's ridiculous, I know. But grief doesn't age normally.
I clutched my phone, my bag, my jacket all at once when I was summoned to the recovery room. 'She's okay,' the doctor said. And I thought: This is exactly the kind of moment when you need a sibling—someone to hold your jacket while you hold the phone. Someone who remembers to ask about medication interactions when your mind goes blank. A witness to your life who carries the same memories, not just from the hospital but from the beginning.
As lonely as it may feel, sibling loss is not uncommon. According to one 2013 analysis, nearly 8 percent of Americans under 25 have experienced it. Racial disparity clocks in here: Black children are 20 percent more likely than white ones to have lost a sibling by age 10. The impact of such loss can be wide-ranging. In a 2017 study using data from Sweden and Denmark, researchers found that bereaved siblings face a 71 percent higher mortality risk for decades after the death. The loss is also associated with a cascade of mental-health issues, the 2013 study found, including higher levels of 'depression, aggressive behavior, social withdrawal, eating disorders, and behavior problems,' not to mention higher high-school-dropout rates, lower college attendance, and lower test scores. That study notes that sisters who lose siblings tend to face worse outcomes than brothers, which researchers theorize is because sisters form 'stronger bonds with siblings' and generally bear 'an unequal family burden,' including 'caring for the emotional needs of surviving parents.'
Sibling relationships represent our longest shared bonds—extending from earliest childhood, beyond parents' deaths, and preceding any adult partnerships. Siblings are the ones who help us carry on our family memories after our parents pass. They remember why all of our dogs were so badly behaved or how we ended up at that vacation rental overrun with mice. They are 'interstitial: lodged between your cells. They are the invisible glue that holds your interior architecture together,' Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn writes in her 2004 book, The Empty Room. 'You're born into this world with a sibling, and you expect this to outlast every other relationship,' Angela Dean, a psychotherapist, a thanatologist (a person who studies death and dying), and the host of the podcast The Broken Pack, told me. Losing that is 'a loss of the past, the present, and the future.'
Despite this profound absence, sibling grief remains under-recognized and often overlooked. In the late 1980s, Kenneth Doka, now a professor emeritus at the College of New Rochelle and a senior vice president for grief programs at the Hospice Foundation of America, described the experience as 'disenfranchised grief,' a term for losses that aren't properly acknowledged or supported. One manifestation of that is self-disenfranchisement, where a person (intentionally or unintentionally) minimizes their own grief—something I relate to keenly.
My brother and I did not live harmoniously together. He was mean to me in the way that only siblings can be: with a precision that comes from intimate knowledge. He was jealous of me; I was jealous of him. We fought over everything and nothing. At times—and I hate to admit this—I wished him dead.
When I was about 12, I read a YA novel called Nobody's Fault about a girl whose churlish older brother—whom she calls 'Monse,' short for Monster—dies in an accident. I read this book again and again, drawn to it in a way I couldn't articulate. A few years later, when I was living that story for real, I felt as if my obsession had somehow conjured the tragedy, as if the universe had misunderstood my thoughts as an actual request. The guilt was crushing. But with exams to take, lacrosse games to play in, and so many other teenage distractions, I kept moving forward and suppressed the grief at the door.
I've often wondered what my relationship with my brother would look like now if he had lived. I know so many siblings who clashed in their younger years but settled into meaningful adult friendships. I study them in the wild, like rare butterflies. I notice how they speak to one another in a private shorthand, how they navigate shared territory with their parents, how they never have to explain the context of a story. They complain bitterly about one another but would throw themselves in front of a train to save the other. Would we have had that? I'll never know, because my brother and I never made it to the part of the story where the childhood animosity fades and something more complicated takes its place.
In those last months, though, something was changing between us. I remember noticing it—these small moments in which we began to see each other as actual people rather than as obligatory relations. He was in his first year of college and let me visit campus for a weekend. I stayed in his dorm and he showed me around with what felt like pride, not his usual derision. It was a glimmer of what might have been.
The hardest question in the world is the simplest: Do you have siblings? I've developed a range of responses over the years, each calibrated to the situation and my own emotional reserves. No, I'm an only child feels like a betrayal. I had a brother who died when I was 16 instantly changes the temperature of the room. My compromise is usually I grew up with a brother, which is both true and incomplete, a sentence that trails off into an ellipsis.
I spent my formative years with a sibling, but I'll end my life having lived far longer without him than with him. I wasn't born an only child, wasn't raised as one, don't have the temperament of one. Yet there's no proper other term for what I am. Surviving sibling sounds clinical. Former sister seems harsh. After-only might be the closest approximation—though it's awkward.
Psychologists know that siblings can be crucial to identity formation. We define ourselves both in relation to and opposition from them—what researchers call 'sibling de-identification,' or differentiation. In the journalist Susan Dominus's book, The Family Dynamic, she concludes that differentiation from our siblings is one of the key factors in our personal development and in many cases sets the course for some of the most important choices in our lives. When that reference point vanishes, surviving siblings can feel unmoored. In 2013, the writer David Sedaris, reflecting on the loss of his sister Tiffany, wrote: 'A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I'd lost the identity I'd enjoyed since 1968' (the year his youngest sibling was born).
I don't have many of my brother's things; 18-year-old boys don't leave much behind. A selfie from a few months before he died. A hunk of turquoise from a pendant he wore. A small red backpack from a summer trip across Alaska. Three items to represent 18 years of a life—that's six years per object, though the math of meaning doesn't work that way. These objects have taken on a significance beyond their actual value. They are proof that he existed, that there was a time when I wasn't the only.
On my parents' bedroom wall is a picture of my brother, next to a framed poem by David Ray, who lost his teenage son. It begins:
There will come a day
When you would have lived your life
All the way through,
Mine long gone.
The poem then speaks of a peace that will eventually descend:
like a breath
Moving those pines, moving
Even the stone
And then, then I can let go.
I wonder about that letting go. Not forgetting—I don't want that—but understanding. Finding a language for what I am and exactly what I've lost. Yet some equations resist solutions. I am both a sister and not a sister. I am the product of a childhood with a sibling and an adulthood without one. Maybe the peace that Ray describes isn't about resolving these contradictions, but accepting them. My life was shaped as much by my brother's absence as by his presence—and that, too, is a kind of relationship.
No matter what, I'll keep doing the math. I'll calculate that he would have been married for 15 or 20 years by now and estimate that his kids would have been teenagers. I'll estimate the ages of nephews and nieces I'll never meet. I'll imagine the conversations my brother and I might have had, the ways we might have grown together.
By the time I'm 80, he'll have been 18 years old for 64 years, frozen at an age that seems impossibly young. But in these imaginings, he stays with me—not a phone call or text message away, but present in the strange calculus of memory and absence, in the mathematics of what makes a person whole.