I was always supposed to be the first one to go.

We all knew it. We planned for it. As a baby born with spina bifida in the mid-60s, I was given three days to live. Last rites were delivered.

I survived. Obviously.

I thrived, actually. Every prediction for my life would be wrong. When my only sibling, Joshua, was born nearly twelve years after my birth I had long defied the odds and yet my brother still grew up in the shadow of a brother with significant disabilities who could die at any given moment.

It never happened.

Instead, it was my brother who died at the far too young age of 43 due to pancreatic cancer. While born "able," for lack of a better term, Josh never quite found his place in the world and would struggle with parenting his three children and a drug addiction that rendered him the dependent one for the better part of his life. He would die alongside his wife of one year in a home owned by our parents. I was fortunate to spend time with him in the hours before his death, processing how he had become the first one in our family to die while I continued to live a surprisingly rewarding life.

"The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope" invites 26 authors to share their stories of sibling loss. The perspectives are quite diverse, from estranged siblings to complicated grief to deaths by suicide and deaths via traumatic incidents among many more. These are stories of love, loss, and hope with which many of us will identify having joined a sort of club we never asked to join.

It was less than a year after my brother's death that my mother, having herself survived longer than expected following a heart attack and brain injury six years earlier, would pass away. Just this past month, my father, my last surviving immediate family, also passed away leaving this "first to go" the actual last one standing (okay, not quite literally since I don't have feet).

As I read "The Loss of a Lifetime," I felt less alone in a complicated grief I'm only beginning to understand. My brother's death was complicated by happening during the COVID-19 pandemic, no memorial service was held and only a small pendant with his ashes hanging from my car's rear-view mirror existing as a memory left to symbolize the grief of losing a brother who was both very different from me yet also undeniably connected.

"The Loss of a Lifetime" is important because our stories are important. I believe our lives are meant to be communal and I believe our grief is meant to be communal. These are stories without agenda, holding space for common ground and inviting our stories out of the shadows and into a place where they can be listened to, accepted, nurtured, and become part of our healing journeys.

As I've been cleaning out my parents' home over the recent weeks since my father's death, I've become aware of triple waves of grief as I sort through belongings from each family member who'd spent the majority of their lives in this home where I myself never lived. The grief ripples, the memories surface, and what had seemingly become a calm sea rises like torrential waves again.

"The Loss of a Lifetime" is both a tender companion to the sibling grief journey and an invitation to seek safe places to tell our stories and, whenever possible, invite others to share this space with us. It's a reminder that while our grief journeys are unique unto ourselves, there are others who share similar stories and experiences with whom we can connect in our strengths and in our vulnerabilities. A rare and shining light for those of us who've lost a sibling, "The Loss of a Lifetime" is a welcome addition to the literary world of grief studies and the far too often ignored experience of sibling loss.

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic