My Brother's Keeper: Sibling Loss and the Forgotten Mourners, with Annie Sklaver Orenstein

After her brother was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in 2009, Annie Sklaver Orenstein was heartbroken and unmoored. Standing in the grief section of her local bookstore, she searched for guides on how to work through her grief as a mourning sibling — and found nothing.

Annie shares how alone she felt in her grief, driving her to write Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner's Guide to Grief. We explore why sibling grief often goes unacknowledged and how siblings navigate the complex journey of mourning while their grief is frequently overshadowed by parental loss.

The conversation delves into the unique challenges siblings face, from being expected to care for grieving parents to struggling with finding joy again. Annie shares personal insights about discovering her brother's journals, experiencing signs from beyond, and learning that it's possible to hold both grief and joy simultaneously.

You'll learn:

• The importance of gluten-free meatballs or a cozy throw
• Why grief isn't a pie
• What do about the aftershock of joy
• Whether you should read your sibling's private journals or letters after they're gone
• How you might recognize signs from your sibling and find comfort in unexpected places
• And so much more

Learn more about Annie:
Annie's website
Instagram

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Transcript

Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the “I Don’t Know How You Do It” podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable. I’m so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back to the show, my guest today, Annie Sklaver Orenstein is an author, oral historian, and qualitative researcher, whose brother was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in 2009. Standing in the grief section of her local bookstore, Annie searched for guides on how to work through her grief as a mourning sibling and found nothing.

So Annie wrote the book she wishes she'd had, Always a [00:01:00] Sibling, The Forgotten Mourner's Guide to Grief, which is based on her own story and those of many, many others who have also lost siblings. 

As a surviving sibling myself, Annie and I had a lot to talk about. We delved into why sibling grief often goes unacknowledged. How our identities change when we lose a sibling, what it means to find joy again without betraying our loss, and a lot more. 

Whether you've lost a sibling, know somebody who has, or simply want to better understand this unique kind of grief, this conversation brings you real and raw insights into an experience that is far too often overlooked.

Without further ado, I bring you Annie.

Welcome, Annie. I'm so happy to meet you. Welcome. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Thank you so much for having me. 

Jessica Fein: We are part of a club that it's not only the club that nobody wants to be in, but it is a club that is so rarely [00:02:00] spoken about. So when I got my hands on your book, I thought, It's a real shame that this wasn't written decades ago when I lost my first sister, I have since lost my other sister as well, but I knew I wanted to talk to you because I feel like there is a lot out there for those of us who have lost parents, for those of us who have lost children.

And those are horrible, horrible, horrible losses, as is sibling loss. But sibling loss, as you know, and we'll get into, is so often overlooked. So thank you for writing this book. And let's start off by understanding what led you to write the book. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Yeah. So, first of all, I'm really sorry that you're in this club.

It is terrible. It is a terrible club. And you're absolutely right. It is a club that people do not talk about. I have all sorts of theories on that. But in terms of how the book came about, going way back, my oldest brother was killed in Afghanistan actually last week, marked [00:03:00] 15 years. And I don't know if you experienced this, but in the kind of immediate aftermath, I don't know.

A lot of that is blurry in my memory. A lot of it is kind of gray. But there is one memory that stands out, and that is going to a huge bookstore in New York City, trying to find a book that would help me. And I thought that if I found the right book, I don't know, I wanted help. And I thought that was the way to do it.

People talked about grief books. And I was standing in front of this grief section, and there was nothing there. I looked in the titles and in the indexes and the table of contents for anything about siblings. And I found books for parent loss and child loss, and Losing a partner, losing a pet, all of these losses, but there was nothing for siblings.

And I think in a lot of ways my grief had already been diminished and disenfranchised. And [00:04:00] so I left that bookstore thinking, I guess I shouldn't be grieving. You know, maybe I'm just being dramatic. If there are no books for this, then it's probably not really a real problem. And other people, you know, deal with it easy and there's something wrong with me.

Like, I internalized it. I was the problem. 

Jessica Fein: And how old were you at this time?

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: I was 25. 

Jessica Fein: Okay, that's interesting. I was 27 when I lost my first sister. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: So it's already a point where you're like, you don't know what's going on, right? Am I an adult? Am I like, what am I? And years later, I wanted to write something about Ben.

I wanted to do something to remember Ben and his memory and his legacy. So I had this idea for a book that was very much about him and written through his journal entries and through interviews, and that is what eventually really, you know, took a turn, but eventually turned into the [00:05:00] book that 25 year old Annie really needed.

I mean, still the book that 40 year old Annie really needed, but that book that could be on a bookshelf when a sibling went to look for it. And that's why the cover says sibling and big letters and it's bright colors. Like I wanted it so clear. 

Jessica Fein: It's like jumping off the shelf. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Exactly, like sibling had to be in the title. It had to be big because I wanted people to feel seen and I wanted their loss to feel validated. 

Jessica Fein: Well, we just have a lot to get into on that in terms of why it is overlooked and why we are the forgotten mourners as siblings. But before we do that, I want to focus on something that you wrote about that really struck me.

You talk about “the day.” And for your book, you've interviewed a lot of other people and gotten their grief stories just so that people understand this is not just your story. This is a book that has many people's [00:06:00] stories. It has so much good information actionable exercises. It's really terrific. Thank you.

But one of the things you talk about is the day. And you say that every person you spoke to had such strong visceral memories of the day their sibling died. The day that, you know, marks them before and after in their lives. And you talk about how it's just even the little things, smells, textures of that day is seared into the memory.

And that struck me because for years after my sister died, my father and I would speak on the anniversary of her death. I mean, we spoke every day, but on the anniversary of her death, we would talk and we would go through exactly what had happened on that day. He got the call, he picked me up, we went to her, so we had been together.

And we would recount and talk about these little details, you know, we stopped for gas. And we always remembered we stopped for gas. Would anything have been different if we didn't stop for gas, you know? And then, of course, when he [00:07:00] died, it was like, who am I going to recount that with? But I wonder what it is.

Why do we do that? I thought I was the only one that I read in your book. I was like, no, everybody does this. What's behind that? And what was your day? 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Everybody does that. And also people have a very hard time recounting it. Without those emotions coming back, you know, without feeling that panic and showing that visible reaction.

I think a lot of it is like sense making, you know, trying to make sense of the day when everything changed and your comment about the gas station. I talk about the dreaded shoulds in the book and the things that we feel guilty about, or we wonder about, or we play through in our head, like, Should I have gone straight there?

And what if I didn't stop for gas? And going through those things, you're trying to make sense of it. You're trying to make sense of a thing that doesn't make sense. Right. And so you kind of constantly go through it and replay it as if [00:08:00] you will find a piece of it that will make all of this make sense or make all of this not true.

That thing doesn't exist. I maintained for a little while that maybe it wasn't Ben, because Ben, my brother, was killed in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber, and we were not allowed to open the coffin. So I kept thinking, well, what if it's not him in there? What if it's someone else? And what if he is actually somewhere else?

Like, what if he was captured, or the Taliban has him, or something? And so I kept working through the day thinking, like, maybe something would reveal itself to me. And I would suddenly know that this wasn't true and this wasn't happening. I think we try to make sense of the thing that is senseless. And you can't, you know, but you also kind of can't stop trying.

Jessica Fein: Can't stop trying. I wonder with you understanding the why behind why we do this, do you still do it? Or are you like, okay, I get it. And I know what I'm doing and stop. Or [00:09:00] are you like, no, we're going to keep doing this, Annie. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: I don't look for signs that it wasn't him, you know, I have certainly accepted that he died and that it was him.

When I replay the day in my mind, it's like I'm torturing myself. Like, I don't know why I'm doing it, except that sometimes I can't help but do it. I think it's a little bit PTSD because of the violent nature of it. That's not going to be the case for everyone. But I think for me, some of what I replay is.

Imagining what happened, imagining what would have happened if we did open the coffin, like those kinds of things that are more PTSD. Sometimes I just kind of walk through the day in my head and I have no idea why. Like, why am I doing this? I know what happened. But I do wonder if part of it is just we're so desperate to remember everything and you don't want to forget what happened and you don't want to forget that day.

Jessica Fein: I think [00:10:00] that's right. And I also wonder if putting ourselves back in the moment of the day brings us closer to our person. You know, each year that goes by, I don't know about you, but it's almost harder in a way because we're moving forward, A, without our person, B, it's longer since we were with them. And so maybe putting ourselves back in that day, it's like we were so close to them at that point to literally to when they were here.

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Yeah. I also think when someone asks about our sibling or, you know, it comes up, you kind of default to their death or the fact that they died. Right? And it's really easy to focus on their death and not focus on their life and to focus on, like, the aftermath of it, right? You know, if I say I have two brothers and let's say the conversation gets to, like, where are they now, or, you know, do they live close by?

How old are they? And, like, the conversation gets to the fact that one of them has died. And the follow up questions are not about what he [00:11:00] was like when he was alive. The follow up questions are about how he died, and that's often how the conversation kind of defaults to the stories of their death, not the stories of their life.

And so I think we get kind of trapped in that cycle, as if remembering their death is how we remember them. 

Jessica Fein: That's really interesting. And I wonder if you found that that was true more so in your case, because it was so dramatic, right? The way your brother died. And it's something that we all have seen movies about or heard about.

And I wonder if people are more curious about that than they would be, for example, my older sister died of lung cancer. People don't really want to hear about the circumstances of lung cancer, with the exception of every single person will say, did she smoke? As though that is any of their business.

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Right. And like a judgment. Like, you know. 

Jessica Fein: Yeah. And I'm always like, why does that matter? Like, that's a whole other show. [00:12:00] 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: People want to know if it could happen to me. Could it happen to me? Could it happen to someone I love? So they ask you, was she a smoker? Because they're thinking of the people in their lives, and thinking, do I have to worry about the people in my life dying this way?

And if you say no, she never smoked a cigarette in her life, then they're gonna think, well, I don't smoke either, that could happen to me. Or you say, yes, she's a smoker. And they think, Oh, thank God. Okay. So that, you know, I don't smoke that can't happen to me. So I think for one, there's a curiosity of, could that happen to me?

It's the same way. When I've talked to people who lost a sibling in a violent death, there was one sister I spoke to. I will never forget this. And her brother was killed. And if she says my brother died, she gets a lot of sympathy. If she says my brother was shot, then people will say, what did he do? As if it was, you know, his fault.

That he did something wrong. Same thing when people I spoke to whose [00:13:00] siblings died, a car accident or some kind of random tragic accident. People are very curious about those because that's a real, it could happen to me situation. I think with. the military. And with Ben, there is a morbid curiosity because for most people, especially most people that I know, let's be honest, like I live in the Northeast, I'm Jewish, I'm liberal, like most of the people in my circles are not necessarily connected to the military.

And so it's so foreign that there is like a curiosity about just, I've never met anyone who has family who died in Afghanistan. And so there are those types of questions. And the thing about being the sibling is that people will ask you questions that they would never ask a parent. People are not going to ask my mom the details of how exactly he died.

You know, they're not going to be like, Oh, was it a roadside bomb or a suicide bomber? They're not asking that of a grieving mother. 

Jessica Fein: [00:14:00] Okay, but so let's talk about that because I have also been the grieving mother. I am the grieving mother and I have two children who lost their sibling, my daughter. So I have now seen it on both sides.

And I will tell you, When I lost my first sister, that night, my mother's best friend said to me, you've got to take care of your mother now. Losing a child is too much for anybody to bear. And I remember being like, what are you talking about? Isn't my mother going to be taking care of me and I just lost my best friend and P.

S. I've never lived a day on this planet without my sister. What do you mean my job is now to take care of my mother? So tell me how you experienced that and also what you learned about that because you talk a lot about how the wasp belongs to the parents. And I've now seen that with my own two children feeling like they're the forgotten mourners. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Mm hmm. [00:15:00] There is like this overwhelming societal thing that is, and I don't think it's untrue, you know, that losing a child is like the worst possible thing that could happen. And so there is a lot of pressure put on the surviving siblings to Be perfect. Don't cause any trouble.

Don't make your parents life any more difficult because they are already experiencing the most difficult thing that, you know, any parent can go through. And because they are going through this most difficult thing, and none of us want to upset them, you have to now speak for them on all upsetting things.

And we're going to ask you the questions because we don't want to upset your mother. But also we're really curious. That's kind of like the overwhelming pressure that's put on siblings and one Distinction I've seen is that in some cases the parent Feeds into that in some cases the parent agrees and it's like yes You child now do need to take care of me because I am grieving your sibling [00:16:00] And this is my loss and you have to take care of me and other parents Like you, you know, like what you were saying, are like, but wait, my surviving children lost a sibling.

They are also grieving. They don't need to take care of me. They need to grieve. They are allowed to grieve. I was very fortunate in that my parents approached it the way you do. You know, my parents never acted like my grief was any less than theirs or than anyone else's. And same with my surviving brother.

They always made it clear that they knew we were grieving and that they did not expect us to take care of them. And I didn't know how rare that was until I started interviewing other siblings and I started hearing these stories of their parents calling them, crying in the middle of the day when they're just trying to make it through the day at work and the mom needs to talk, you know, all of this pressure and.

For those people, their loss was really diminished and it was really forgotten. And they really struggled to [00:17:00] own that loss in any way. And I think it stems from this like feeling or this belief that I struggle with so much because it does not make sense to me that there is a finite amount of grief to go around that because the parent is grieving this most tremendous loss, no one else is allowed to grieve because it would somehow detract.

From their grief as if grief is a pie and the parents own a hundred percent of it, and if you try to grieve, it takes away from what they are allowed to grieve. If you grieve even 5%, then they can only grieve 95%, and that's not right, and it doesn't compute. To me, it doesn't make sense in my mind in a very logical way, because grief is love.

Grief is a reflection of our love for this person. You wouldn't say that about love. You wouldn't be like, you're not allowed to love your sister because we're already loving her. So you're not allowed to. 

Jessica Fein: like happiness. Like, wait a second. I'm [00:18:00] 90 percent happy. So that means you can only be 10 percent happy.

It's not exactly. It's not a pie. The other thing is, I really do think that in community in general, and I too am Jewish and am so fortunate that in my community, there is a lot of support for grievers. And I will say, that that support when you lose a child really wraps itself around the parents. So much so that I was totally struck when somebody sent a care package to each of my children.

And I shouldn't have been struck because I was getting care packages every day. You know what I mean? I mean, food or blankets or whatever it was. And somebody thought to send something to each of them. And that really stood out for me because we don't think as much about the siblings. We just don't. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: You know what that makes me remember, and it just came back in my mind.

I don't know the last time I thought of this memory. When we were sitting Shiva, I have a gluten intolerance. It's like, I'm not celiac, [00:19:00] but it makes me sick. And I remember we got a lot of edible arrangements. And it was like, I have a whole thing about edible arrangements. I won't get into it.

Jessica Fein: For me, I'm like, bring on the edible arrangements.

I'm like, I need edible arrangements or rugelach or it's not a shiva.

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: I just, I see edible arrangements and I think my brother is dead. And you gave me this like cantaloupe in the shape of a flower. I ate so many edible arrangements because they knew it was safe. Right. And like, I couldn't eat the cookies.

I couldn't eat all this stuff. And no one asked. I certainly didn't say anything or make a big deal. And I remember a group of my friends. You know, 25 year olds came to Shiva from New York. So like the two hour train ride and they came to Shiva and one of my friends had made a big container of meatballs and made sure that they were gluten free and wrote on them that they were gluten free so I could have them.

Put it right in the freezer thing of meatballs and I just felt like seen I felt like someone was taking care of me And it was a very [00:20:00] minor thing. They didn't make a big deal about it They were just like I wanted to be sure the food I brought was something you could eat Which no one had said and it really struck me I remember those meatballs and I remember feeling like safe and cared for because someone thought of me. 

Jessica Fein: I just think this is so important for people to hear so that they can remember when they happen to know somebody.

That it can be something as small as meatballs, and here we are 50 years later and that stuck out to you. And the cozy throw that the person sent to my kids, that has always stayed with me. Doesn't have to be a grand gesture, it can be meatballs. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Yes, absolutely. 

Jessica Fein: Now, there's something else that you wrote about, and you actually referenced at the beginning that I have to talk to you about, which is you said when you were first thinking about writing the book, you were thinking about writing it based on your brother's journals.

And in fact, you talk in your book about discovering these journals and reading the journals. I need to ask you about this because [00:21:00] We had something somewhat similar with my sister in that she had written many, many letters to one of her best friends over the years. They lived far away from each other.

When my sister died, the friend gave the letters to my father and my father devoured them. Of course, he wanted to make new memories with his child. He wanted to understand everything he could about her. For him, this was a huge, huge, huge gift. And I was very upset by it because I felt like This is her private letters to her best friend.

I don't think she would necessarily want her father reading these. Now, where do we get to decide, I have these journals or letters or whatever of my person, and I want every piece of them, so I'm going to read them. Versus, these were not meant for me when the person was alive, so how can I decide they're meant for me now?

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: We didn't open the journals for a decade. No one did. And I had a conversation with someone who had lost a sibling, a [00:22:00] sister, and her sister also kept journals. And she was like, we read them within the first week. Like, immediately. And she was like, astounded that we hadn't looked at these journals. And a point that she made that I thought was a very good one was like, He left those journals, and he left zero evidence that he didn't want us to read them.

He left the journals lined up on a shelf. I feel like as siblings, like if I had something that I really didn't want someone to see, I would be like, yo, I'm being deployed to a war zone. If I don't come back, destroy these journals. Right? Like, he had every opportunity, you know, he could have put them in a box somewhere.

Jessica Fein: That's a very good point. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: He had every opportunity to hide them, to tell us never to read them, and he didn't do any of those things. He left them out on a shelf. And I think that resonated with me when it was put that way. And the other thing that a sibling said in the context to kind of letting go of guilt, but I think it works here too, she was like, they're not [00:23:00] thinking about it anymore, so why should I?

Right? That also really hit home for me, that, you know, he's not mad that we're reading the journals. The interesting thing with the letters is I almost feel like if the best friend felt that it was okay to share with your dad, I wonder if she shared all of them, or if there was like some editing that happened first, or something, you know?

Jessica Fein: That's a very good 

point, right. Clearly she would have had my sister's best interest at heart. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Exactly. And so that's one thing I would consider, too, is like, maybe it wasn't actually every single letter, or maybe she knew exactly what she was handing him. 

Jessica Fein: And I've never thought of it that way. So that's good.

Thank you. I like that. Another thing that was kind of tied up in that for you, It was the idea of signs and I'm really, really intrigued by how we are, first of all, open to signs and what signs might be like, and I'd love to hear your take on it and how you became open [00:24:00] to and what kind of signs you saw from your brother.

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: So I was very not open to signs. For many, many years. And I had a friend who had also lost her brother and she was very into signs and she was like overall a little more woo woo than I was at the time. And she convinced me to look for signs and she kind of kept saying like, why not? What's the worst that's going to happen?

I think for me, the worst that was going to happen would be. That I didn't get any signs, you know, and would that feel like he's really gone, you know, maybe if I didn't see signs, but I didn't try to see signs, I could still hold on to some sense of him still kind of being around that it didn't work that way.

But I think that was my kind of broken logic at the time she kept saying, you know, just ask him to show you something. And I was like, I do not understand what you have, like, very literally. And she said, well, you know, like, just ask him to show you blue flowers. And so I did, you know, I [00:25:00] had a whole conversation in my head and I asked him to show me blue flowers and maybe a week later I'm walking to work and there were all these blue flowers kind of growing on the ground, you know, like ground covering.

And my first thought was, well, this is the power of suggestion. These have probably been here all along and I just didn't notice them. And now I'm noticing them because I have blue flowers on the brain. This is not real. This is not a sign. And then, I don't remember if it was the next day or a few days later, I'd go to therapy and I walk in and my therapist fell in her 70s and I had never noticed her outfits in the past.

And she was wearing these kind of Doc Martin style combat boots with blue flowers embroidered all over them. Blue flowers all over her shirt. I think she had blue flowers on her pants. It was like she was head to toe in blue flowers. And I just had this moment, like, I could hear Ben being like, Do you see it now?

It felt so good. And his presence felt so [00:26:00] real and so tangible in a way that it had not felt in the preceding, you know, nine years. I felt him so strongly as my big brother. It reminded me of like, When he would be home from grad school, and he would come pick me up at high school, he would come pick me up from school, and he would, like, do the thing where he pulled up and opened all the windows, and honked the horn, and would be yelling my name, and making a whole scene about it to embarrass me, as, like, older brothers do.

It felt like that. It felt like he was screaming and honking the horn at me. And I just remember like, as soon as I left calling back and being like, you are never going to believe what just happened. And then I started seeing them more and more. And I think I start also started to look back at things and be like, Oh, maybe those were signs.

And I just wasn't open to seeing them yet. 

Jessica Fein: Once you opened yourself to signs, did that change your beliefs in what happens after we die? [00:27:00]

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: That is such a good question. I've always had this kind of fantastical idea of what happens after we die, where I just kind of imagine all of the people I love who have died are like, off hanging out together somewhere.

They're kind of, watching us. Because the idea that you just like go into a hole and it's black just never resonated with me. And so I think that is still what I imagine. Like, I still imagine that, you know, Ben is up there with all of our grandparents giving our mean grandma a hard time and It's like that those things are happening, but I also didn't really think there would be like interaction between the two.

Like I assume they could kind of see us and like check in maybe, but not that it would be like a two way thing. Not that I could see them or feel their presence or anything. And I do think it made me feel like the veil between us is perhaps thinner than I had originally believed or that there can be more interaction or engagement than I [00:28:00] thought.

And that we can kind of still talk to each other, that there are bits of him still out there in the ether somewhere. It wasn't like a huge shift in how I thought about what happens after we die. It was more of like a, Oh, maybe this is even better than I thought. 

Jessica Fein: One of the things that you talk about in your book is the aftershock of joy.

And I thought this was very interesting, and joy is something we talk about a lot on this show, and how joy and grief can exist together. But joy becomes complicated when your person is no longer here. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Joy becomes very difficult because it can feel selfish. How can I experience joy if this other person can no longer experience joy?

Or it feels like you're not taking it seriously. There's a lot of like, how can you feel joy at a time like this? Right? When everything is so terrible, feeling joy can feel like a selfish quest, or naive, or [00:29:00] delusional. Okay, maybe this sounds ridiculous, but there's an episode of Daniel Tiger that we used to watch with my son when I was pregnant with my daughter that was about how you can feel two emotions at the same time.

And how with sibling coming, you might feel a lot of like joy and happiness that you have this new sister, but you might also feel jealousy or you might also feel sadness because you don't have as much, you know, one on one time with your parents and that that's okay. And we had the book about how you could feel two feelings at the same time.

There was a song. I remember being like, Oh my God. Why has no one told me this before? I'm just thinking, like, my son is going to be so much better off for having learned this at three years old. And I am learning this at like, you know, 35. 

Jessica Fein: I totally get that. We should all just be watching little kids shows and reading kids books.

That's where the real lessons happen.

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: [00:30:00] Daniel Tiger and Bluey. If everyone just watched Daniel Tiger and Bluey, I think we would live in a better society. Right. I really do. And it just unlocked something for me where it was like, yes, yeah. I can feel joy and miss my brother at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive, but at least for me, I wasn't raised with this lesson of carrying seemingly conflicting emotions at the same time.

Everything was all or nothing. So if I'm grieving, I'm grieving and I can't be happy and I can't feel joy because if I feel happy or I feel joy, I'm doing a disservice. I am acting like their death didn't matter or that I'm happy about their death in some way, because I am happy and they have died and that nuance of no, you can actually be grieving and have moments of joy.

And in fact, those moments of joy are essential. And that is what will continue. Like when we say like, [00:31:00] I don't know how you do it, right? Like joy is part of how you do it. Otherwise you get stuck, you get very stuck and joy is what helps us continue to move forward and it's that momentum. And that was really hard for me.

I really felt like. If I was happy or joyful or anything, then it would be like, I was happy he was gone or that his death didn't matter because I can still be happy anyway. Maybe it's because as a sibling, your grief is forgotten. And so you kind of feel like you have to shout it a little bit louder.

Like, look how unhappy I can be, you know, because if you're happy or if you are joyful, then was everyone right? That like, you don't really get to grieve because look, you're fine.

Jessica Fein: And it's so important because as we know, you're going to be grieving forever. There will never be a day that I'm not grieving my losses.

Nor would I want there to be. They're part of who I am. So if we can't have joy while we're grieving, that's a pretty bad [00:32:00] prognosis if we're saying we're going to be grieving forever, right? So we've got to figure out how these two things can hold hands. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Mm hmm. And I think it's easy to feel like the grief is all we have left of this person and so you have to cling on to it so tightly because this is what you have.

I grieve every day, but yet I can even find moments like when there's a sign that makes me laugh, and I'm still sad, I'm so sad that I'm communicating with my brother through a sign that may or may not be real, and not just by texting him or calling him, but that sign still makes me happy. You know, and I can hold on to that happiness.

I can lean into that moment of joy and not the, oh, I wish I could have called him. 

Jessica Fein: What was the most unexpected thing you learned having been through your own loss, but then talking to so many other people about theirs? What surprised you the most? 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: I was surprised with how many people [00:33:00] really felt no ownership over it.

You know, I think I knew that my parents validated our grief and I felt that my parents did the best that any grieving parent could possibly do. I didn't realize that that was a rare thing. The number of people who said to me, the loss feels like something that happened to my mother was really surprising.

And the way the book is structured, there are these three sections, with, without, within. And with is all about the sibling relationship and validating the importance of the sibling relationship. And the reason that it's structured that way was because I realized after talking to people that before we could get into the grief, I needed People to feel ownership over their relationships, and I needed them to understand the importance of this relationship, you know, whether or not they got along, whether or not they even liked the sibling, the importance of the sibling relationship, the impact that a sibling has on a human's development, because people were so [00:34:00] quick to diminish their own loss.

And to really feed into the narrative of the disenfranchised grief. And so, I needed to validate people before they could really face their grief that a lot of people had been suppressing for a long time. And that was surprising to me. 

Jessica Fein: I think when we talk about the uniqueness of the relationship, it's also that with siblings, so often we define ourselves in relation to the siblings.

I am the younger sister. I am the younger of three. I'm the this one, the that one. Whatever. We define who we are in relation to them. So when they're gone, who am I? Who am I? Yeah. Mm hmm. There are these kinds of questions and you do these deep dives into so much. It's such a rich book. And again, I just wish it had been around quite some time ago, but it is here now.

And I hope that people will check it out. Thank you for sharing so openly. 

Annie Sklaver Orenstein: Thank you. Thank you so much for [00:35:00] having me. 

Jessica Fein: Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Annie. 

Number one, when we lose a sibling, we are not just grieving a family member. We're grieving a piece of our identity. Number two, sibling loss is far too often overlooked. Paying special attention to the siblings, even with something as seemingly simple as giving them a cozy throw, or making special meatballs, can have a lasting impact. Number three, grief is not a pie that gets divided up. There is an infinite amount to go around.

Number four, sibling grief doesn't have an expiration date. Continuing to acknowledge the loss can be incredibly meaningful. Number five, when somebody tells you they've lost a sibling, resist the urge to ask about how their sibling died. Instead, ask what their name was and what they were like. Number six, sibling relationships continue to shape who we are, even after loss. Number seven, honor that by making space both for people's grief and for their memories. 

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. As we approach the holiday season, consider adding my [00:36:00] memoir, Breath Taking, to your gift list, which you can get wherever you love to get your books in whatever format you prefer.

Print, audio, ebook. Have a great day. Talk to you next time.