The Surviving Siblings®

As a surviving sibling, there are defining moments in your journey. The first defining moment is the call, that call that changes your life forever, the call when we discovered what has happened, the call to provide information that you'd never want to receive.

This week I’m sharing the first part of my journey, how that call changed my life and the first series...

This week I’m sharing the first pieces of information that the detectives were able to gather and share with us, as well as how it was seeing my sisters, my m...

Everything is so clear but yet blurry at the same time. When it's time to say our last goodbyes, we often find ourselves in disbelief. Disbelief that this is actually happening, disbelief that this is the last time that we will ever see our sibling again.

This week I’m sharing how things were after my father arrived from Africa, more pieces of information we got...

Death can be something that can unite or separate families. It’s not natural for parents to lose their children, but what happens to the other siblings that are still on this Earth?

Surviving the death of a sibling is not easy, every step of the journey is painful. On top of that pain, the siblings have to deal with so many other situations. Reality begins to hi...

Abandoned and alone, I had to wait for my family to call me back. When you’re grieving, you really need a support system, someone that’s going to be there for you and help you through the trauma. My family was not that for me.

In this week's episode, I am sharing about how I was coping with not only grief but also abandonment, what happened before my brother’s c...

The purpose of a Celebration of Life is to remember a loved one, to tell their story and to come together to celebrate their unique personality. My mother decided to celebrate my brother by scattering his ashes in a creek close to where we grew up. 

In this week's episode, I am sharing about the moments I shared with my mother before the Celebration of life, my ...

The pain of loss is overwhelming, it’s something that we learn to cope with as we are going through this journey of losing a loved one. Big feelings always come to the surface, which makes coping with the loss even more challenging.

In this episode I’m covering:

• What happen...

After coping through different mechanisms after the homicide of my brother, I am left thinking “what now?”. What happens now that all the chaos and the spiraling stops? What happens when everything has “calmed down?”

In this episode, I’m talking about what happened with my boyfriend at the time during the holidays, how I was dealing with my anxiety and taking me...

In this episode I’m talking about how miscommunica...

In this episode I’m talki...

In this episode, I’m talking ab...

After losing her brother in 2004, Dr. Dawn DiRaimondo became interested in bereavement work. It wasn’t until later that she found out that there are almost no resources when it comes to sibling loss, so she decided to write a book Surviving Sibling Loss: The Invisible Thread That Connects Us Through Life and Death. Dr. Dawn DiRaimondo Psy. D. was the inspiration behind this podcast. 

As a surviving sibling or anyone that has experienced loss in their life, birthdays, holidays and milestones are always difficult days.

Mostly because it is a reminder that our siblings' physical form is no longer with us.

What I do is have a glass of champagne by myself every year, that is for my brother and is one of the ...

Support groups can be very overwhelming, so even Jen surprised herself when she decided to join a sibling loss support group just a couple of days after losing her brother LB.

It's been six years since that time and now she is co-president of the COPE Foundation. 

Connecting Our Paths Eternally (COPE) is a nonprofit grief a...

When Audree Kropen unexpectedly lost her sister Robin at the age of 12, her whole life changed. Her family decided to stop talking about Robin completely and not acknowledge the fact that she had passed. Now 50+ years later, Audree feels ready to share her healing journey and how that single event has immensely impacted her life and who she is today. 

In this we...

NOTE: THIS IS A TWO-PART EPISODE, TO LISTEN TO PART ONE CLICK HERE

There are so many layers to Audree’s story, as mentioned in part one, she lost her sister Robin when she was 12, and they were only two and a half years apart. To this day, it has been the event that has impacted her...

Myesha and Maya are probably the ones that have the most in common because both of their younger brothers were murdered, so they were left looking for answers. The call that changed Myesha’s life forever, the one where they told her her little brother, Tony, had passed, was the beginning of a nightmare. It wasn’t until years later that she began her grief journey, and one of the ways she has decided ...

For Margaret, everything started when her mother passed. A few months after that, her brother Julian was killed in a motorcycle accident. This event made Margaret develop an understanding of everything surrounding death and grief from a completely different perspective. She now runs the Good Grief AUSTRALIA website - https://good-grief.com.au/