The Surviving Siblings Podcast

The Surviving Siblings Podcast

This is a show where I share my journey about losing my brother. I realized after losing him in 2016 to a homicide and struggling for years after that there is little to no support for surviving siblings. We are expected to lose our parents and grandparents so naturally there are resources for those losses. When parents lose a child, that is one of the most tragic things that can happen and there are resources. But what happens to siblings? What happens to those of us who lose our brothers and sisters? We are deeply affected and impacted. Yet, hardly anyone talks about this topic. In the past five years, I have found half a dozen books and only one support group. I still miss my brother everyday. We don't expect to lose our siblings as we expect to go through life with them, not without them. This podcast is for you whether you have lost a brother or sister or if you are wanting to understand and support someone who has. I also dedicate this podcast to my brother, Andreas, as he was never afraid to speak his truth and tell his story. Now, I will be sharing my story of loss as a surviving sibling with you. I will also have incredible guests on the show to share their experiences as well. I hope this helps you and you know that you are not alone. XXX Surviving Siblings

Episodes

November 21, 2021 4 mins
This is for all my forgotten mourners, for all my Surviving Siblings. In this podcast, I am going to tell you my story, the story of my brother, what happened and I will tell you how I went on my mourning and healing journey.
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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...

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The journey of a surviving sibling is full of ups and downs. Usually, people come to us to ask about how parents are, people forget that we have also suffered a loss, we are usually the forgotten mourners.

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...

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March 30, 2022 33 mins

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...

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April 6, 2022 41 mins

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...

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April 13, 2022 50 mins

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...

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April 20, 2022 59 mins

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 ...

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April 27, 2022 61 mins

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...
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May 4, 2022 55 mins

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...

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May 11, 2022 56 mins
We all process grief in different ways, we all do different things to feel “at peace” when losing a loved one. As a surviving sibling, I wanted to do everything in my power to bring justice to my brother’s death. I had been there from the very beginning and it seemed like I was the only one that cared about it. 

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

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May 18, 2022 55 mins
During your grief journey your feelings and emotions ebb and flow. I dont believe there’s such thing as “highs” in the grief journey, more like lows and hope. Going into year 2 of losing my brother, I was losing hope because I felt that I had failed him in so many aspects. However, I have to remind myself that I haven’t, that this is part of the journey and that Andreas is always with me.

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May 25, 2022 48 mins
When you’re going through your grief journey, you’re always looking for “closure”, that something that is going to make it ok, that something that’s going to finally let you breathe and “get over” your loss. But as I have learned, there’s no such thing as closure, really the main goal is to get answers for everything that’s unresolved. 

In this episode I’m talki...

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June 1, 2022 58 mins
Going into year five of losing my brother to a homicide, thanks to Detective G I already had most of the answers I was looking for, but in the middle of a global pandemic, I felt like I was regressing in my grief journey. I went through a mixture of feelings, excited because of my entrepreneurial journey but sad at the same time. 

In this episode, I’m talking ab...

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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. 

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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/

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