This is for all my forgotten mourners, for all my Surviving Siblings. In this podcast, I am going to tell you my story, the story of my brother, what happened and I will tell you how I went on my mourning and healing journey.
As a surviving sibling, there are defining moments in your journey. The first defining moment is the call, that call that changes your life forever, the call when we discovered what has happened, the call to provide information that you'd never want...
The journey of a surviving sibling is full of ups and downs. Usually, people come to us to ask about how parents are, people forget that we have also suffered a loss, we are usually the forgotten mourners. This week I’m sharing the first pieces of...
Everything is so clear but yet blurry at the same. When it's time to say our last goodbyes, we often find ourselves in disbelief. Disbelief that this is actually happening, disbelief that this is the last time that we will ever see our sibling again....
Death can be something that can unite or separate families. It’s not natural for parents to lose their children, but what happens to the other siblings that are still on this Earth? Surviving the death of a sibling is not easy, every step of the...
Abandoned and alone, I had to wait for my family to call me back. When you’re grieving, you really need a support system, someone that’s going to be there for you and help you through the trauma. My family was not that for me. In this week's...
The purpose of a Celebration of Life is to remember a loved one, to tell their story and to come together to celebrate their unique personality. My mother decided to celebrate my brother by scattering his ashes in a creek close to where we grew...
The pain of loss is overwhelming, it’s something that we learn to cope with as we are going through this journey of losing a loved one. Big feelings always come to the surface, which makes coping with the loss even more challenging In this week's...
After going through the ebbs and flows of the different coping mechanisms, I am left thinking “what now?”. What happens now that all the chaos and the spiraling stops? What happens when everything has “calmed down”? In this episode I’m...
We all process grief in different ways, we all do different things to feel “at peace” when losing a loved one. As a surviving sibling, I wanted to do everything in my power to bring justice to my brother’s death. I had been there from the very...
During your grief journey your feelings and emotions ebb and flow. I dont believe there’s such thing as “highs” in the grief journey, more like lows and hope. Going into year 2 of losing my brother, I was losing hope because I felt that I had...
When you’re going through your grief journey, you’re always looking for “closure”, that something that is going to make it ok, that something that’s going to finally let you breathe and “get over” your loss. But as I have learned,...
Going into year five of losing my brother to a homicide, thanks to Detective G I already had most of the answers I was looking for, but in the middle of a global pandemic, I felt like I was regressing in my grief journey. I went through a mixture of...
After losing her brother in 2004, Dr. Dawn DiRaimondo became interested in bereavement work. It wasn’t until later that she found out that there are almost no resources when it comes to sibling loss, so she decided to write a book Surviving Sibling...
As a surviving sibling or anyone that has experienced loss in their life, birthdays, holidays and milestones are always difficult days. Mostly because it is a reminder that our siblings' physical form is no longer with us. What I do is have a glass of...
Support groups can be very overwhelming, so even Jen surprised herself when she decided to join a sibling loss support group just a couple of days after losing her brother LB. It's been six years since that time and now she is co-president of the COPE...
When Audree Kropen unexpectedly lost her sister Robin at the age of 12, her whole life changed. Her family decided to stop talking about Robin completely and not acknowledge the fact that she had passed. Now 50+ years later, Audree feels ready to...
There are so many layers to Audree’s story, she lost her sister Robin when she was 12, and they were only two and a half years apart. Audree shares the second part of her story, the loss of her grandson Hayden and the start of Sibsforever.org
Myesha and Maya are probably the ones that have the most in common because both of their younger brothers were murdered, so they were left looking for answers. The call that changed Myesha’s life forever, the one where they told her her little...
For Margaret, everything started when her mother passed. A few months after that, her brother Julian was killed in a motorcycle accident. This event made Margaret develop an understanding of everything surrounding death and grief from a completely...
Randa’s grief journey has been a long one, filled with emotional rollercoasters. It all started when Perry was diagnosed with breast cancer, after the treatment for that was over they had a couple of good years. Until the cancer came back. Some days...
No one gets a pass on grief, not even a three-year-old. Janice lost her sister Julie at the age of 3, she was too young to understand what was going on around her and her coping mechanism growing up was saying that she had grown up as an only child....
Caleb Harrison and Maya have more in common than being just surviving siblings. Maya was there for Caleb when he lost his brother Josh and Caleb was able to do the same for her when she lost Andreas. This episode is a deep conversation between two...
November 21st 2016 was the day that changed my life forever, it was the day that I lost my brother. As I have shared in previous episodes, my grief journey hasn’t been linear. There are many things that I have done to cope with the loss of my...