How I feel after the death of my Brother

Nobody tells you what to do when a sibling dies.

I used to think that as an adult I should be able to get over this pretty easy. You hear of people losing loved ones too early all the time and you see them moving on.

But that doesn’t happen to us.

The only grief I have experienced has been that of my elderly grandparents who all got to old age and had lived good lives. Losing my brother when I was 37 and he was 40 shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t be something I had to deal with.

My brother was a good man, a proper gentleman, who lost his way. Mental ill health swooped in and took hold of his vulnerability and moment of weakness and it never let him go, no matter how hard he tried to fight it.

I will remember the phone call from my parents who were with him, clear as day, for the rest of my life. They told us that my brother had deteriorated and that there was nothing else that could be done. We were told once the machines were switched off that he might have hours or days, as it was, he died after 25 minutes. His fight was finally over. I sobbed. I curled up on the sofa and went through a range of emotions in quick succession. Anger, to sadness, to guilt, to confusion, I couldn’t regulate my thoughts or emotions which lead me to shutting it out. Ignoring it. Pretending it wasn’t happening. It’s not real.

The biggest emotion I had and I couldn’t shake, was the feeling of being scared. It’s a strange one to explain but I had an overwhelming feeling of being scared of how this could happen. Scared of how precious life is and how short it is. I was also scared of what this meant. How were my parents going to cope and what happens if I get the support wrong and I can’t help them through this. I was scared for my other siblings, how are they coping? Are they coping? Are there signs that I’m missing that I should be picking up on that they are not ok? Scared of what this means for us as a family and how we find a way to keep living and move forward.

I remember my sister saying to me that this doesn’t mean that me being the second oldest that I have to prioritise stepping in to the ‘oldest’ sibling space to be there for her and my younger brother while my parents were still in Australia, and that I needed to allow myself time to grieve too. But I just wanted to wrap the family up and hold them and tell them that it’s going to be ok, even though I didn’t know that was the case. It was my way of coping, being there for them meant I could pretend it was happening to them and not me, it was incredibly selfish.

I searched for hours on the internet on ways to process and deal with grief. I was hoping I would come across the step by step process on how it should go. I wasn’t accepting the narrative that grief is individual and everyone goes through it at different stages. Not me, I was going to find that step by step and I was going to follow it to the letter and move through it as fast as possible. I failed! I’m sure that comes as no surprise. I actually don’t know where I am on my journey. There is so much out there for grieving the loss of a parent, partner or child but nothing for losing a sibling. Like it’s not going to hurt as much. Fact is, it hurt more than you can explain, anyone who has lost a sibling will second that. Even though my brother lived in Australia and we were here in the UK, we are a close knit family. We talked daily. We’re a unit. We come as a package. So to have a link missing, so unexpectedly, we’re broken.

But I know we will be ok. We won’t ever find a fix as there isn’t one, but we’ll find another way, a new way of rebuilding and who knows, maybe we’ll come back stronger.

The weird thing about grief is the emotions that it takes you through. I feel guilty saying that I know we will move forward from this. I know that we will be ok. I know that it’s going to be painful. I know that when one of us is struggling the others will step in to pick us up. Because that’s what families do. As I say to my nieces all the time, they’ve got me, always!

I’m determined to channel what I’m feeling now to live life to the fullest and grow old gracefully with zero regrets, because Ross will never have that chance, and I now see this as a privilege. The plans we made together to see certain places and experience certain things, I’m still going to aim for. I like to think that he’ll be looking down on me with proud big brother eyes and as I sign this off with tears in my eyes, I know in my heart that the time will come where I think of him and smile with happy thoughts instead of those of an indescribable loss.

I just need a little bit more time.