I don’t feel the warm rush of panic flood my chest when I’m asked this question anymore, though I’ve never quite gotten used to it. As a middle-aged mom, I don’t actually hear it as much anymore. When I’m getting to know someone new, our inquiries tend to center around kids or jobs or news.
So when someone asked me recently, I was caught off guard.
We were at my mom’s doctor appointment. My mind flitted around from the fire alarm that had delayed her appointment by a half hour to my mom’s health to the stubborn disbelief that I was sitting there instead of my dad, who died a year and a half ago.
“Do you have any grandchildren?” the doctor asked my mother. My mom told him about my children. Then, before I could even see the question hurtling toward me, the doctor turned and asked me: “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
The question sat between us, ripe and waiting.
“No,” I said. I shook my head, glanced at my feet.
For a moment, I wondered: If the doctor had asked my mom if she had other children, would she have answered the same? Or would she have told the truth?
In the early years after my brother’s death, the question haunted me. As a twentysomething at the time, I heard it often.
Do you have any brothers or sisters?
If I said, no, I don’t have a brother, I felt like I wasn’t honoring my younger brother, Will, who died at 21 from substance abuse. Saying no also felt inherently dishonest. It painted an untrue picture — I had not been raised as an only child. I’d been Will’s sister since I was three; I could barely remember being un-brothered.
But if I said, yes, I had a brother, I’d have to also say that he died. Otherwise, they might ask where my brother lived, and if I answered, “In a box in my parent’s liquor cabinet,” things would get weird.
Dropping death into polite small talk almost always turns awkward. We don’t learn how to speak about topics like death and grief and overdoses in school — we learn it either by being thrust into the bog of it or by having an unusually open and curious heart.
At some point, I decided on a loose rule for dealing with the inevitable question. If someone I was unlikely to have any type of consequential future relationship with — for instance, a hair stylist in a town I didn’t live in — asked me if I had siblings, I’d say no and try to pivot the conversation to safer ground.
If it was someone I might be edging closer to, like a neighbor or a new friend, I’d tell the truth: I had a younger brother, and he died.
The harder, more painful question now is the internal one that pulses just beneath the surface. No one has asked me it; I doubt anyone will. It’s deeper and more crushing.
Am I still a sister?
It’s been nearly 22 years now since my brother died. He’s been gone for longer than he was here. And while the brutal loss doesn’t haunt me every moment like it did in those early months, it remains etched on my heart. It continues to evolve, just like our relationship would’ve.
Should’ve.
A year and a half ago, when my dad was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and my mom and I sat at his bedside, I sometimes imagined a third chair with us, my brother filling it. In the loneliness of my dad’s illness and death, I felt the stark pain of my missing brother rush over me again, the wide reminder of all the awful and beautiful thresholds he should’ve been here for.
Sometimes I wonder if acquaintances ever see my posts on social media and wonder why I’m still writing about my brother’s death all these years later. Why I keep dredging it up, running my fingers through the silt. Maybe I’d tell them it’s because I can still summon up those metallic early months after Will died, the vast loneliness of searching for books to accompany me in my grief and finding more literature on pet loss than on sibling loss.
David Kessler, an expert in grief who worked with death and dying guru Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, has posited that there’s an often overlooked sixth stage of grief — meaning making. My interpretation of this sixth stage is that by taking some of the love I have for Will and alchemizing it into words that might help other grieving siblings, my love for him has somewhere meaningful and tangible to go.
I often receive messages from people who are wading through the raw and murky days after a sibling has died. I’m always touched by these, always grateful. I usually say a little prayer for them, for the missing galaxy of their lost sister or brother, for all the future they feel robbed of.
And I also say a thank you — to my brother, to the universe, to some unseen power — for allowing me the opportunity to extend my hand, to peer back at all the milestones I’ve crossed and continue to cross without my brother. Because in these moments of quiet connection, in these slivers of mentorship? I still feel like a sister.
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