Empty Room

Nature versus nurture. Of course the two work together. How and to what extent is not yet fully understood. But there’s no doubt that we are heavily influenced by our parents to become who we are, as they are the source for both the genetic and the environmental.

We are also influenced by our siblings. Modern psychological theory does not yet fully grasp how much. Freud spoke of sibling rivalry and Adler of birth order. But not until the 1980s did anyone seriously consider the effects on a person of a sibling’s death.

How terrible to lose a child. Everyone’s worst nightmare. When it happens, the parents are devastated. They retreat from the world. They go into seclusion. Bereft siblings are left to handle arrangements, speak to family, transmit condolences. How often are they consoled themselves? Who thinks of their grief, not the grief of a parent or a spouse, but the grief of a person who has lost a major part of what defines them? For that’s what siblings are: defining fellow travelers, contemporaries, partners, rivals, companions, part-time enemies and full-time friends.

Too often, people lose a sibling and their world is forever turned inside out. They honor the grief of their parents, their dead sibling’s spouse and children – but not their own. Their loss is ambiguous, their grief disenfranchised. Often they never even give themselves permission to grieve, knowing that there are others who grieve more deeply. This neglect can leave the wound open for years and years. The effects can be devastating, and, misunderstood and suppressed, may last the rest of their lives.

So much for my inadequate synopsis of The Empty Room by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. What does it mean to me?

I was surprised, reading this book, to learn how few psychologists, even now, appreciate the effects on a person of the death of a sibling. But I’ve known all my life how huge it is. I was only fifteen months when Jimmy died, yet that one event thoroughly colored the rest of my life. Not so much directly, of course, for I never really knew him. But he remained in the family, a palpable presence created by his absence, a mysterious other person that everyone knew except me, a brother I wondered about but about whom I had no questions, only vague ideas.

I’ve no intention right now of describing a life led with someone who isn’t there. Somewhere in this blog-world I wrote of my earliest memory, of a family gathering, with a sad boy off to the side that no one else could see. Elsewhere I hinted at my poor interpretation of what the loss may have meant to my other brother. I only mean now to mention one small aspect of the experience that came to light while reading the above book. A tiny glint of self-knowledge that may someday be useful.

In the early 1960s, common wisdom was that young children don’t understand, they won’t remember, they’ll get over it. It was considered best for them to let their dead sibling fade in memory: take down the pictures, don’t talk about him. Our parents did the best they knew how to do. What they couldn’t know was that it wasn’t the best.

I remember my father’s second wife remarking one day that when she first met me, when I was nine or ten, it was clear Jimmy’s death still bothered me. I doodled a lot. A frequent theme of my doodling was to write out that I wished Jimmy hadn’t died; that everything would be all right if he hadn’t died. Still an open wound.

It was as natural to me as breathing to wish that a random illness had not taken my never-known older brother away. I tied to his death all the other disappointments of childhood, because they all seemed to spring from what I thought was the obvious result of it: my parents’ divorce. I spent my entire childhood, literally on a daily basis, completely convinced that whatever was wrong would not be wrong, that everything would be okay, if Jimmy hadn’t died.

I reasoned this away later. When I was significantly older than it was ever given him to be – he died shortly after turning five – I understood that the great questions in life, the great problems and challenges, would not much be changed by the addition of another older brother. I might or might not have a guide, I might or might not have a friend. That was about it. No big difference. Time to move on.

But the fact of something missing was encoded into my DNA. The unresolved loss morphed into other forms of loss. Not rational, not necessarily real, but fully burned into my psyche. When I look back, whether to when I was nine or to yesterday, I see my day – yes, every single day – dominated by the sense that the world just isn’t right, that something is missing; and that it is something I can do nothing about. A sort of fatalistic never-ending sense of irresolvable disappointment is as normal to me as are the clouds in the sky.

Shallow, uninformed pop psychology is always suspect, especially when directed at oneself. But it make sense to me. And now that I see that, and can hypothesize a reason for it, there’s a chance I can find a way beyond it. A sense of something wrong was encoded into my being by the pervasive boy-shaped hole in the heart of my childhood. Now that I see this – I lived it, but for forty-seven years never saw it – I might be empowered to change it; which is to say, to live towards a day when nothing that truly matters is missing, when everything really is just fine.

p.s. - Read the excerpt. If you or anyone you love has lost a sibling, take a close look at this book.