by Mary Powell
When my sister died four years ago, people didn’t ask me how I was doing. They asked, “How is your mother?”
There is often an unspoken hierarchy for who is allowed to hurt the most. It is a “ranking” of sorrow that nobody talks about, but many of us — in the world and even in our pews — unconsciously follow. We focus on the parents; we focus on the widow.
But where is the sibling?
In the world of psychology, we call this Disenfranchised Grief. That’s just a fancy way of saying your pain doesn’t have a seat at the table. You’re expected to be the functional one. You keep the machinery running while the person who knew your entire history —the only person who truly “got” what it was like to grow up in your house — is just gone.
When I received a booklet titled “Losing Your Brother or Sister” and read how sibling loss is not recognized as important, I became very angry.
Hardly anyone mailed me a sympathy card. While condolences arrived for my parents, my own mailbox remained largely empty. In our culture, the loss of a brother or sister is just not seen as a big deal.
In my anger, I turned back to the Gospels. We often focus on the parental bond in our faith, yet one of Jesus’ most visceral reactions to death was for a peer.
When Lazarus died, he left behind two siblings, Martha and Mary. When Jesus finally showed up, both of them confronted him with the same raw, accusatory line: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Jesus didn’t tell them to calm down. He didn’t tell them to go check on their mother. He stood there in the middle of their rage, and He wept. He validated that the bond between siblings is sacred and that its severance is an outrage. He stayed with them in their private, peer-to-peer sorrow. He saw them.
I spent a long time being angry at the injustice of this invisibility. I felt like because my mother lost her child, my own grief had been erased. I felt like a supporting character in someone else’s tragedy. But I had to learn that grief is not a zero-sum game.
My mother’s loss was total and devastating, and my own loss was also total and devastating. Her sorrow did not erase mine; they were two distinct, complete heartbreaks existing under the same roof.
The breakthrough happened when I stopped fighting for the living to notice my pain and started standing at the grave alone. I had to stop being the strong daughter or the helping professional.
I had to be willing to be the “Invisible Mourner” in the eyes of the world so I could be a Whole Mourner in the eyes of God.
We often treat grief as if there is a finite amount of room for it.
But one loss does not cancel out the other; they are different rooms in the same house of sorrow.
If you are a sibling standing in the shadow of someone else’s “bigger” grief, please hear me: Your anger isn’t a sin. It’s the guardian of your love.
“The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.” Your overlooked, marginalized sorrow is exactly where Jesus is waiting.
You aren’t a supporting actor in a family drama. You’re a sibling who lost a piece of your soul. And you have every right to scream about it.
Mary Powell, PhD, LCSW, NCPsyA, is a psychotherapist and professor at Fordham University.