by Ken Saydak
The death of our parents is traumatic regardless of our age when we lose them. They are the guiding force in our lives, from the very first moment we arrive. Whether we come from a loving home or one plagued by indifference and abuse, the passing of the flesh that generated us carries immeasurable weight. It is a moment that is both unsettling and tragic.
We depend on our parents and that dependence defines our relationships with them. If we lose them when we are children, there is fear to accompany the grief. Who will take care of us? What will happen to us? What will we do without them? The gulf between our ages always separates us. Even when we catch up to the age at which they welcomed us, they are still the same distance from us in experience, and at an equally distant stage in their own journey. We are their creation, and only in hindsight can we begin to understand who they were, and how we resemble them in more than just appearance and genetics.
As disturbing as the passing of the preceding generation proves to be, the loss of a brother or sister is yet a deeper cut. These are our peers. We share not only family genes, but the viewpoint unique to contemporaries. We grow up in the same moment, we listen to the same music, see the same visual images around us. We reel at the same startling news events, and delight in the same revelations of a perpetually fascinating world. Our parents may be right beside us, but time has insulated their perceptions. Our siblings stand beside us as well, but they are taking it all in with equally developed eyes and ears, and living it for the first time, together with us as our excursions unfold.
We may love Mom and Dad, but we constantly try to outwit them in conspiracy with our brothers and sisters. We corroborate each other’s stories, concocted to pull the wool over the old folks’ eyes. We understand each other when Mom and Dad couldn’t possibly get it. We fret about schoolwork and teachers and bullies, and we speak the same language when we do. And as we age and drift into our separate lives, we are maybe a short drive, or at least just a phone call away from someone who understands us as nobody else could.
When we approach the age at which our elders passed, our wisdom emerges simultaneously, and we share our discoveries of the bigger picture. We marvel at the swiftness of time, we begin to see our family history with a clarity that previously eluded us, and we confirm our epiphanies by revealing them to each other. Then when the first of us dies, we truly grasp the brevity of our presence among each other and the inevitability of our own departure.
The loss of any family member is heartbreaking. The loss of a brother or sister also shakes the ground beneath our feet.
