Drawing (through) the grief of an adult sibling

Earla (right) with her sister, Leigh-Ann

Today’s society makes little effort to acknowledge the grief that follows the death of an adult sibling. Without books about sibling grief, without workplaces understanding what losing ‘your person’ is like, adult siblings must learn on their own how to move along while grieving.

In Winter 2013, I learned firsthand this challenging path.

When my only sister, Leigh-Ann, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, my husband and I opened our arms and house to her and her family. Leigh-Ann returned to Canada from Spain with her fiancé and her adult daughter. Our home in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia became her new home. As our mother soon described, our house developed a revolving door, with our two brothers' families and mutual friends visiting frequently.

Caregiving took over as we simply lived our days together. Leigh-Ann’s death on December 30th, 2013, left me weak and in shock. Her fiancé returned to Spain and her daughter went back to work. While a good listener, my husband is a man of few words when talking about grief.  His empathy is deep, coming from having his eldest brother die as a young man in a car accident, followed years later by his youngest brother’s sudden death to a medical condition. But I needed to speak. I needed to express my deep missing of my sister to have this experience empathized. I felt like there was no one to speak to in my circle.

I therefore sought help through our local hospice's First Step Grief Group. In the initial sessions, I witnessed two unrelated parents grieving their adult children and finding mutual understanding through sharing a similar loss. I craved what they had found. I said to myself, “I need what they have”; that is, I needed a ‘peer griever.’ I enrolled in a second set of grief group sessions. But, throughout both groups, while I wanted to talk, words continued to fail me. I felt unable to express how my sister’s death affected me. I also looked for books to give me that language, but I was unable to find my sibling grief experience in any books.

The only outlet that brought me solace was my own private art journals where I found I could pour words and images about ‘us sisters’ onto paper. With time, I learned to ‘speak’ my grief through my art and writing. I developed my own style of doodling cartoon-like stories, a form called ‘zines.’ Through creating zines, I learned to feel both vulnerable and safe in the grief groups. My grief counsellor told me my zines were ‘intentional grieving’; though this reflection, I realized that by creating ‘zines,’ I’d found a grief literacy tool to help me move along while grieving my sister.

A family in my grief group was inspired by my zines and made one to memorialize their matriarch, handing it out to mourners at her funeral. I was also asked to teach zine making in the hospice’s after-school children's program. Sharing my zines about my life after Leigh-Ann died, and helping others use this medium to grieve, helped me feel lighter. However, despite these activities, and despite having a loving family, and good friends – including the folks from the grief group – I continued to feel alone in my grief.

Three years later, I met Monica in an online private support group. Monica seemed to be speaking my language when she was discussing her grief as an adult sibling. After initially texting, emailing, and then finally meeting in person, we both realized we’d found true ‘peer support.’ Monica and I are kindred spirits: we both dearly miss our relationships with our sisters and need to share our experiences of our sisters’ illnesses. "You get it!" is a phrase we repeat many times in our conversations. We soon found ourselves discussing co-writing the book we wished we had in our early days of grief.

I greatly benefited from Monica’s ‘peer support.’ I therefore sought out grief support training to help other adult siblings find what I had found. Through this training, I connected with other adult siblings and started hosting peer support groups based on creative expressions I’d learned and then shared, focusing on how making art can be a somatic grounding grief tool.

All the while, Monica and I – separated by 200km and a global pandemic – continued to develop our book’s content. With a growing group of bereaved siblings cheering us on, and a great editor, our book Living With Sibling Grief: Imagining a Way Forward was published in July 2024. Later that month, I received the Outstanding Sibling award at The Compassionate Friends USA National Convention for advocacy work in programming with adult siblings.

While I am not that keen to participate in large groups, I reluctantly participated in the annual commemorative walk at that convention, with hundreds of grievers. Through that experience, I realized that any type of group movement can contribute to collective grieving. This experience planted the idea of creating such a gathering for adult siblings. Inspired by Wild Grief’s Virtual Hike model, I created Walk With a Sibling for adult grievers. I piloted this event during Grief Matters’ 2024 Grief Gatherings. For this event, participants checked in over Zoom, introduced themselves, their siblings and how they were feeling. We then each left our Zoom screens and went on a walk, focusing on our grief and the nature around us. After thirty minutes, we reconnected on Zoom to talk about the intentional grief experience. The consensus was simple: people felt joy.

This experience confirmed for me that adult siblings need venues of support. Sibling grief is disenfranchised and underserved. Newly grieving siblings do not generally know what they need.  The process of working through their deep grief is often put on hold while caring for grieving parents. A sibling’s silence can be amplified by debilitating loneliness when specific support programs are not available. As a seasoned grieving sibling, I know now that grief doesn’t have to be such a lonely road. I encourage Canadian grief support communities to imagine creative ways for their organizations to commit to supporting adults whose siblings have died.

*Check out Earla’s guest cartoon this month!