I am a completely different person when thinking about my brothers. Brash and harsh and judgmental and loyal and furious and irrational. But I am learning this is the experience of being a sibling. I don’t know a sibling who doesn’t become a more sour version of themselves when talking about their brother or sister. We insist that it is our view, and our only view, that is the correct and accurate view of their personhood. We have borne witness to their origin story. We have seen the slights and the shortcuts. We have seen the advantages that were afforded them. Because we saw their personalities’ construction, we insist it is artifice. The affectation they took on in high school. The intellectual opinion they assert to feel morally righteous. What a load of bullshit. If you want to know someone's authentic self, ask their sibling.
But we are the most unreliable witness. Our origin story is tied to theirs. We spent years competing for validation from an imperfect source. We still do even now. As adults. Now that the parents are in care. Or dead. Or we have therapy-ed ourselves out of the cycle. The sibling sting stays on. We are, perhaps, destined never to know them. Never to appreciate the warm generosity that colleagues feel. Never feel the intimate giddiness of being in love with them. We are together but unknowable. Our wounds are too similar. We are too different. A fight is never that far away. No, we won’t be talking ever again. You’ve said it this time. Finally, the truth is out. We’re done. You won’t believe what they did.
Then tragedy. Someone inevitably dies. Or gets divorced. Or is flung into some horrible blackness. And sometimes - but not always - a sibling becomes the only one remaining at your side. Or, even worse, the sibling dies or leaves or is vanished. The family has a hole that cannot recover. The dynamic was dysfunctional before, but now it is broken in some horrible way. And Christ, the pain of that missing. The sharpness of that loneliness. The heaviness of their absence that you and only you can carry because only you knew them in this particular way, and you must defend some idea of them - some real essential them - before it is forgotten. Because you do know them, dammit. And you are right about them. Their authentic self. Their laugh and their silly edges and even the shape of their naked body at different stages of their life. And even their own face staring at you in the mirror. Or the shape and curve of your aging body as it grows old. Oh fuck you are them and they are you and you are bound forever. How awful and how lovely and how strange.
Last week, I raved about some of the best books I’d read in 2024. I left out ‘Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland’ by Patrick Radden Keefe, which was stunning. I also left off - because I’ve only just finished it - ‘Intermezzo’ by Sally Rooney, which is equally spectacular and almost entirely about siblings…thus inspiring this post.
Perhaps, if you have that kind of relationship, you could send this post to a sibling.
your observations on humans continue to prick my conscience and warm my heart and make me cry. Damn your insight, Dr Burton!
Losing a sibling is not like losing a child nor a parent: they are different horrors, and different passages of time and loss. But if you are close to your sibling and you have the honour of being with them when they take their last breath, it is a most exquisite pain. After the shock of it, you bustle about and take the drugs back to the pharmacy and arranged for the body to be collected, and start the funeral antics ... and when that is all done, the grief unfurls itself sometimes suffocating memory, sometimes inducing numbness. You can rage against the loss and the shitty-fuckery that is cancer, but to hold the lifeless hand and those beautiful nails and gorgeous skin become cooled, your instinct is to wrap that hand in your coat and warm it up. Meanwhile, the universe takes over: the birds sing to her soul and all the splintered energies that were hers mist into the world to have an adventure without you. I was so angry with her for a long time, then I just sit with her now, imagine her telling me how to drive, how to cook lasagne, and how to "fuck right off". Makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me fear the next time when another sibling is taken. Its quite a journey, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.