Ten Years of Sibling Suicide Loss

"I am, at this ten-year mark, now beginning to recognise each of these little grief stories as actually together forming a bigger narrative that is ultimately about learning to unite my life with my brother before and my life with my brother after"

Marking the anniversary of a death, I think, is never about a single day of pain - knowing the day is coming, anticipating it, can be as difficult as the day itself. This being the tenth time I’ve experienced the approach of Martin’s death-versary, you’d think I’d know by now what to emotionally expect. I do now *kinda* already anticipate that late-September up to the 15th December will be ‘just hard’, the tone of life identifying very much with words from Huxley’s poem ‘Anniversaries’…

‘And there were sudden gusts that blew
Our dreaming banners into storm;
We wore the uncertain crumbling form
Of a brown swirl of windy leaves,
A phantom shape that stirs and heaves
Shuddering from earth, to fall again
With a dry whisper of withered rain.’

But this year has felt different. Even stronger in terms of emotional investment. And that is because this tenth year has not been/is not solely about remembering Martin, as much as I’d like that to be the case. This ‘milestone’, for want of a better word to express the magnitude, is also about ‘the decade after’ - what the loss has produced for and in me, pushed me into being and doing, reflecting on the loss impact generally for me.

Often, I try to sense-make by writing through the anniversaries - it is my way of marking them whilst also locating logic in the internal messy multitude and mangle of thoughts and emotions that I’ve not been able to organise up to that point - but this year, the one where that would have been most helpful, has been one where the words haven’t flowed as well. And so let me simply resort to listing some of the stronger parts where I can articulate what the loss of my brother to suicide has meant/means to me at this decade-after point:

What 'sibling' means

I should say, firstly, that although suicide is important to my experience, when I truly sit with my grief, it is the fact that my baby brother died that hits me the most. How you experience ‘the after’ in (any form of) bereavement is inextricably linked to the nature of the relationship that’s physically ended. For me, then, I say it’s only when you lose a sibling that you fully come to realise what ‘sibling’ means as well as ‘is’. Sibling relationships are seriously misunderstood, I think. In the academic world (in which I seem to be perpetually embroiled), siblings can get described as “an absent presence” (Davidoff, 2021: 1) in research terms, in part due to their very complex nature - at the most surface level, there are varied, fluid, culturally-specific definitions and understandings of ‘sibling,’ all of which can hinder how (deeply) then sibling relationships are thought about. Siblings are often considered in terms of fighting/rivalry, who’s different or the same as who, who’s good at what in relation to the other etc. etc, rather than in terms of the sense of stability and ‘knowing the world’ they can also bring. Situating myself in relation to some of these views and analyses, I’ve come to realise that so concentrated was my attention on just what Martin was like in the everyday that I didn’t appreciate how important the whole relationship was to me. I took him (and his presence) for granted and Steinbeck’s words hit a little home on this one: “I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen”. It is easy not to see your sibling until you no longer have them, and what follows after that loss is a lot of childhood re-assessment/evaluation, guilt, ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’s, and future secondary losses etc. etc. as life continues. I am still ‘a sister’ but also not. I could write a bucket-load more on this aspect, but not here! Suffice it to say/plea: do not underestimate, overlook, invalidate the experience of a sibling who has lost a sibling - it is felt hard, often in ways that might not be thought of/realised.

Recalibration of identity 

I had a conversation with someone a while after Martin died where they said, ‘don’t let this [suicide] define you.’ I don’t feel that suicide (loss) gives you a choice, really, at least not for me - it is not dramatic but rather a factual statement to say that a part of me also died when Martin did in the way that he did, and therefore, consequently, much of the last decade has been spent trying to figure out who I am anew, in relation to the experience that basically ruptured my original sense of self. I still haven’t an answer on ‘who am I now?’ - it is a fluctuating identity that suicide loss produces - but I do know that many of my decisions and ambitions stem from this one moment in life. I can’t always relate to the term ‘survivor’ in reference to bereavement by suicide, (sometimes I align with it, sometimes I don’t), but there is no getting away from suicide’s impact generally on the core of my identity. This is not to say that this has been or is always a negative thing - this encounter with one of the worst possibilities of human experience has provided deeper empathy and drive to aid and effect change, however small. I can’t say that I live for my brother - his life was already meaningful before his death, despite his inability to see and know that - but thought of him and the manner of his passing are significant in ‘spurring me on’, providing me with ideas of meaningfulness in and for my own life.    

The meaning of time 

Suicide loss/grief has, I think, significantly altered my sense of and relationship with time. There’s not (ever) enough time. You can be transported back to a past moment in a flash, either by choice or (most often) unexpectedly. The past persists in the present in images, music, relationships, places, your own behaviours etc. etc. You can fear the future and/or you long for a future that can’t be realised. You can wish so strongly to just be a child again and/or you relish the time that has passed since your loss as a provider of lived experience to be put to use as an aid to those just beginning on a similar journey. Time is not linear. The present, past and future are all in it together in each moment, which can at times be exhausting to navigate. Sometimes you want to spend time grieving and you make time for it, other times you fill your calendar to avoid it. Generally though, regardless of how long it’s been since the loss day, you don’t ‘heal’ or ‘get over it’ with time, and nor with time do you ‘grow around your grief’ - grief trumps time and will decide how, tell you exactly when it wants to be felt, and you just go with it.

Understanding 'mental health' 

Since Martin’s death, the mental health and suicide prevention conversations have increased, and the general ‘public appearance’ of grief, as something that people can be open about, has grown. In some ways, this is great. ‘Stigma challenging’ and all that, and the total honesty of podcasts like ‘The Griefcast’ are fabulous. But when it comes to the hashtags, slogans and ‘quick fix’ activities…these do not for real, long-term change make. I don’t warm to ‘It’s ok to not be ok’, and all the emphasis on ‘reach out’, ‘just talk’ etc. etc. If these have helped certain individuals, that is wonderful and I’m glad, but for me these essentially-catchy-jingles just don’t educate and are meaningless if there are no resources and, importantly, true listeners to be had on a large scale. These momentary campaigns also don’t tackle the depths of the experiences they say they relate to. Mental health is supremely complex, importantly without a concrete definition. Mental illness and mental health are not synonymous and yet many conflate the two. I remain undecided as to whether my brother had ‘severe illness’ that determined his ending or whether the situations he lived through, what happened to him, what he experienced were more significant in leading him to suicide. I often err towards the latter but perhaps it was a combination of the two... I’ve spent the best part of ten years trying to get my head around the complexities of my brother’s death and I have *a feeling* I won’t ever reach a conclusion. I get it, in relation to the ‘awareness campaign’ approach, something is better than nothing, right? But I am concerned that the nature of those ‘conversations’ reduce the issue at hand to the point where ‘mental health,’ as an umbrella term, just feels like a bandwagon that won’t be jumped on, that will stall without change ever being realised, as people come to identify the lack of depth to/in them.   

There won’t ever be enough text-space to contain all I would say about my (beloved) brother, our relationship, his death and the general thoughts rippling out from the experience of having been touched by suicide loss. I miss him so very much it is frequently easy to identify, ‘today I feel emotional pain physically.’ It is, however, easy to tell and get lost in the anecdotes of the sibling suicide loss experience – the memories I hold on to; the emotions and triggers I’ve gone through/still have/anticipate; the interaction with and management of others’ feelings/perceptions/judgements that have to be contended with; the memorialising strategies I turn to etc.etc. What is important though is that I am, at this ten-year mark, now beginning to recognise each of these little grief stories as actually together forming a bigger narrative that is ultimately about learning to unite my life with Martin before and my life with Martin after the 15^th December 2011.

Martin Andrew Sutherland, 11^th August 1984 – 15^th December 2011

I also find a thoughtful quote (or two) helpful so…:

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it” (Haruki Murakami)

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” (Aldous Huxley)

“Although for a while it feels like this is all there will ever be, you look down and see you are different. Your beloved is a part of you and always will be…The hope that each day will bring new strength, however tiny, and that a day or a week may come where you can carry your loss and your new life in your heart at the same time, is what keeps you going.” (Poorna Bell)