The Lonely Grief of Adult Sibling Loss

Wray conducted dozens of interviews with brothers and sisters who’d lost a sibling, all of them heartbreaking in the details, whether suicide, cancer or murder. What they have in common is how a sibling is the keeper of our secrets, the rival for our parents’ affection and “a secure and familiar constant in an often precarious and uncertain world,” as she wrote. When you lose someone who has been there all along and suddenly is not, it leaves you unmoored in a unique way.

This is where language could help but doesn’t. I wanted a shortcut, one simple word, to explain my loss, to identify myself as a brother whose sister had died. Something like orphan or widower, the title my dad assumed when my mother died. On all the forms I helped him fill out — insurance, real estate, health, Social Security — he checked widowed with a jittery hand. The word was not just a legal status, it was his new identity, flagging his loss for the world to see and understand him in a new light.

Without the right words, how can we tell our stories?

Frankly, I wondered how there could not be a specific word for a bereaved sibling. Roughly 85 percent of Americans, approximately 210 million adults, have at least one sibling, so eventually all of them will experience this loss (or be the loss). 

I turned to Google and the dictionaries and came up empty-handed.   

I wondered if perhaps the void in English was the exception, so I checked out some other tongues — and found the same vacancy. In French, there’s veuf (widower), veuve (widow) and orphelin (orphan), but no word for a surviving sibling. Danes refer to enkemand and enke (widower, widow), forældreløs (orphan) and even søskendemord (siblicide). But unless you kill one of your siblings, you won’t find a Danish word for surviving their death. 

I had to go all the way to the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, home to the indigenous Great Andamanese, to find what I was seeking. “There is a word in Great Andamanese, raupuch, that means ‘one who loses his sibling,’” wrote Anvita Abbi, a linguistics professor. “I don’t think any other language — English, Hindi — has a word for this relationship.” When she told her Great Andamanese contacts this fact, they were perplexed. They asked, “Don’t you love your sister or brother?”

Exactly my thought. 

The best English has to offer is what psychologist Kenneth Doka, an expert in grief and loss, calls “disenfranchised grievers.” He defines that as “grief that isn’t recognized, not able to be mourned publicly or supported socially. Disenfranchised grievers are those who do not have the perceived right to grieve.” That lonely club would include not just siblings but also former spouses, who have no formal status to grieve an ex. For too long it included gay and lesbian partners who were shut out of the rites of loss because they could not marry.

A close friend wrote to me after the recent murder of her brother: “One cannot know the hole it leaves in the soul without having experienced it. Losing a sibling, one who knows you at your worst and best, one who likely plotted your death as a child and protected you with their life as a teen and adult, is its own continuing pain.” She also confirmed what I’d heard from others about feeling shunted aside: “Sibling grief is a lonely one, too. I feel like my grief is so much less important than that of others, like my parents and my niece and nephew.”

Julie was part of my life for six decades; only my brother has been by my side longer. With her passing, I felt the loss of my personal history. We’d carried a lifetime of secrets for each other, and then — poof! — my coconspirator was gone. The future as I’d imagined it became forever altered, without all the shared birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and other celebrations. My No. 1 emergency contact: deleted. My executor: expunged. My go-to lawyer and financial whiz: no more. The one who would remind me when I made a raucous joke, “Steven, you are so bad!” That was a job for one person: my sister, my fellow troublemaker. Now I am without her. How can there not be a word for that?

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.​