After my brother died, I felt guilty when experiencing joy. I'm learning to let go of that.
Annie Sklaver Orenstein is a research lead at YouTube and an author.
Her work has appeared in Time, NPR, Fast Company, and more.
This is an excerpt from her new book, "Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner's Guide to Grief."
The first time I felt true joy in the months after my brother Ben's death it was followed by a wave of depression that I had never anticipated. I hadn't felt joy, true happiness, in so long that I didn't think those kinds of highs were even possible. Then, when it happened, it was as if I had finally made it to the top of the tower of terror, only to plunge back down again.
There is an aftershock to joy when you can't share it with your person. There is a unique feeling of guilt, that you shouldn't be allowed to feel happy without them, accompanied by that oh-so-friendly reminder that you will never hear the voice of the person whose voice mirrors your own.
How dare I feel joy when my brother is (still) dead? Selfish little sister, brat, heartless — take your pick. I didn't believe I was worthy or deserving of joy, and God help anyone who dared tell me that my brother "would have wanted you to be happy." Oh no. No, no, no. He would have wanted to share my happiness with me in person, not from his seat in the afterlife.
Losing a sibling makes you grieve the moments of joy they can no longer experience
After experiencing the loss of a sibling, it's not just your own joy that can topple into sadness, but the recognition of all the things your sibling will never experience.
Getting married wasn't just hard because Ben wouldn't be there to stand under the chuppah and give a toast berating my husband, but because he never got to have a wedding himself. When my oldest son was born, I wept not only because my son would never meet his uncle but because Ben never got to have kids of his own.
Looking back, I think that even more than the guilt and self-loathing, I resisted joy because it terrified me. It was a reminder of how fleeting everything is. The thing that brought such joy one day could be ripped away the next. If I didn't feel joy, I couldn't feel pain.
What a sad way to exist in this world, constantly muting the most beautiful moments out of fear. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, then, when I learned that joy is the most vulnerable emotion — more than shame or fear. Joy is felt so deeply and physically that it brings some people to tears.
To feel anything that deeply is risky, but especially joy. If you don't experience pure joy, then you can't have it ripped from you; if the joy is temporary, then avoiding it means avoiding the fallout. You can't miss something you never had. But here's the truth: a life without the vulnerability of joy may seem easier, but it's empty. It's a vulnerability that helps us build resilience and strength — and those are the things we need most.
Joy is that deep happiness you feel at your core, deep enough to bring someone to tears or change a life. While happiness can be felt as a mood or state of being, joy is acute. It is often triggered suddenly, and it involves connection — to ourselves and to others. It's watching your best friend marry their person, holding your child for the first time, or (in my case) making my kids laugh so hard they snarf.
It's no wonder such a strong emotion rooted in connection could be so triggering. If your sibling is the person you'd turn to, the person on the other end of the connection, then, of course, joy itself becomes a trigger when that connection is severed! In this new world, joy reminds us of what is no longer possible. We can't pick up the phone and call or text them; our arms feel empty with nothing to hold; we may feel empty. Then there's the guilt — AGAIN.
Guilt that you're experiencing joy and they aren't — can't —experiencing it with you. Guilt that you're feeling any positive emotion at all rather than living in the sadness of loss.
It's important to allow still yourself to experience joy amid your grief
"How can I feel joy at a time like this?" may be running through your head. And to that, I say, "A time like what?!" This is it; this is the only time we have. There is no other timeline, no options.
You know what I think? I think "a time like this" is an excuse I used for a long time to avoid being vulnerable; pretending to be all noble, refusing to feel joy when my brother was gone and more were dying every day wasn't noble. I was just trying to avoid the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum because I didn't want to feel that level of pain ever again, and if giving up joy could help avoid that — then that's what I'd do. I wish I could go back in time, flag down younger Annie, and scream in her face, "Don't shut yourself off to joy! Being happy doesn't mean you're happy about Ben's death, it just means you're allowing yourself to live!" Then I'd cover her in glitter.
I know now, after speaking with so many other surviving siblings, that I'm not the only one who tried to resist joy. In my research, this resistance was most common in the first five years after a sibling's death or as a manifestation of longer-lasting, complicated grief. One sibling, who was only one year out from her sister's death, explained, "I still have this limiting belief that if I let the grief pass through me, I have to let Laurie go too. So I'm fiercely holding on to my grief."
When your arms are so full of grief, when each finger is clinging to it, nails dug in, you can't hold any joy. You can't hold anything else at all. It reminds me of the children's book Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins, in which (spoiler alert) the king of the goblins gets his hand stuck in a pickle jar when he refuses to let go of the pickles in his fist. The goblin's hand would continue to be trapped in that jar until he made the decision to let go of the pickles. You see where I'm going with this. Don't cling to your grief so tightly that you can't experience the joy of eating pickles.
Excerpted from "Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner's Guide to Grief " by Annie Sklaver Orenstein. Copyright 2024 Annie Sklaver Orenstein. Published by Hachette Go.
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