Shared sadness: Siblings grieve too when a child dies

Kevin Vickers, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

When people ask how many siblings I have, I still tend to say, "Three sisters and a brother" even though my sister Debbie died in 1973.

I guess it's probably because, although she was gone from our home, her presence remained with us in the family, through moves across continents, through family disputes, even in our shared inability to talk about her death.

But, among the few childhood memories that have stuck with me over the years is of the day she died.

In some ways the fact that it is so vivid is strange, because, of course, while there is sadness (thinking about it sometimes moves me to tears), it was not really my loss, but that of my parents.

I was too young to comprehend what death really was, and all I have are snatches of memories about Debbie, who was two years older than me and had been bed-ridden at our home in Durban, South Africa, for months before she died.

In the memory fuzz, I remember waking up on that day, having my father prepare breakfast for me and my two other sisters, which was something he never did, and all of us asking where my sister was.

It then fast forwards to my aunt's car pulling up, my mother coming in, her face streaked with tears, and her telling us that, "Debbie has gone to heaven."

And then me, who had just recovered from measles, running through the house, screaming that I did not want to die, too, lying on my parents' bed and watching my mother sitting next to me, looking utterly forlorn.

There is also the one guilty feeling that also came with it, when my elementary school principal announced at an assembly a few days later that Debbie had died and that I was her brother. It gave me, a pudgy, shy and awkward six year old, a moment of recognition among my peers, who probably did not really know or care who I was. I hate to admit that I remember enjoying that moment when all the teachers and students turned to find the boy whose sister had died.

We have never really talked about her death as a family, but I believe its impact was profound on all of us.

It was a terrible loss for my mother, perhaps more so because she was a nurse before she married. Depressed and rundown, she contracted pneumonia and was "out of commission" emotionally to us for the next few months.

We left South Africa about six months later and returned to my mother's homeland of England. About two years later, there was the new addition of a baby boy, but as loved as he was, he could never replace Debbie.

Wherever we went, however, in the move to England and later to the U.S., Debbie was always there. My mother had her ballet shoes bronzed and keeps them along with her music box, her last Christmas present, on a table in her bedroom with a vase holding a single flower.

And Debbie is with us in other ways. There are the family photos (where she is the prettiest of all of my sisters), the fact that my mother has never been able to return to Durban and that September, the month she died, is a "black" time for us. "All the bad things happen to this family in September," my mother once said.

There were also the ashes. I knew they were around somewhere, but I came across the urn for the first time when I was going through my parents' closet when I was a teenager. It left me with a hollow pit in my stomach, the uneasy feeling that this was something intensely morbid, an inability to let go of the past.

Then again, I was not the one who had experienced the pain of losing a child. In the couple of times I've been able to broach the subject with my mother without her completely breaking down, she told me she brought the ashes with her to signify that Debbie was always with us, wherever we went.

It was also a great blow to my dad, but I never thought about that until years later, and he has only mentioned it once to me, and then very briefly. He said he was supposed to be the strong one, to shoulder the pain for the rest of us, and to keep his feelings to himself.

It was an aching splinter in my parents' marriage for years, because my father had sided with the doctor to allow my sister to stay at home, while my mother wanted her to be hospitalized. I distinctly remember my parents' arguing when I was young, and my mother having the parting shot with, "Well, we should always listen to you, shouldn't we? You always know what's best, like with Debbie." We all knew what it meant.

My mother eventually found help with a group for bereaved parents, Compassionate Friends. She would go to the meetings, talk to other parents who had gone through the same numbing loss and return to us with nothing more said about it.

And I have never discussed Debbie's death with my older sister, who was 11 when our sister died. She must have her own feelings about the loss, but we have never been close enough to discuss them. Or, maybe it is a subject that is "too close to home", too intensely personal for us to broach even so long after the fact.

Yet, for me and my younger siblings, even my younger brother, Debbie is a presence, too, more than just the pretty blond girl in the photo on my mother's bedroom table. When I read about a child dying, like then minister Siswono Yudhohusodo and his daughter's death a few years ago, I think about the parents and also their surviving children.

It's because while I know how parents are deeply injured by a child's death, I also know that the siblings hurt, too.