Sunday, August 1, 2004 SF Chronicle
A sister left to deal with a lot more than grief
Reviewed by Rachel Elson

In 1980, Ted DeVita -- known as a "boy in the bubble," a sufferer of
aplastic anemia who has spent most of his adolescence confined to a
sterile room at the National Institutes of Health -- dies after eight
years of illness. Ted's death is, perhaps naturally, presumed to be most
devastating for his parents, particularly his father, a prominent
oncologist who supervised the NIH unit in which Ted had been kept alive.
Traumatized by their loss, the DeVitas silently put away their memories of
their son, box up his medical files and, for the most part, stop talking
about him.

   Ted's little sister, Elizabeth, is 14 at the time. Practiced for years at
being the healthy child, the easy child, the one who spares her parents
all possible worry, she essentially pulls herself together and gets on
with things. It isn't until she reaches her mid-20s that she begins to
question her family's response to the death. And when she does, it's the
start of a decadelong exploration of her brother's story, her own and
those of other survivor siblings. Struggling to make sense of a life still
defined by her brother's absence, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn interviews
hundreds of other adult survivors of a sibling's death, piecing together a
common experience and a healing process. The resulting book, "The Empty
Room: Surviving the Loss of a Brother or Sister at Any Age," is less a
memoir than an emotional travelogue, charting an often unexplored
landscape of loss.

   DeVita-Raeburn starts with a different kind of absence: the cultural
invisibility of sibling grief. Brothers and sisters are never considered
to be the primary mourners. She notes that younger children are assumed
not to understand at all, older children see their own grief eclipsed by
their parents' loss, and adult siblings find themselves shunted to the
side to support spouses and surviving children. At Ted's funeral,
DeVita-Raeburn recalls, an older attendee takes her by the arm and
interrupts her moment of grief: " 'You'll have to be very good now,' [the
woman] whispers intently, sadly. 'Your parents are going through a lot.'
Her hand is a pincer around my elbow. Her words are a jab from a sharp
knife. They make me feel selfish, ashamed."
   DeVita-Raeburn interlaces other stories with her own, creating a wide
palette not only of loss but, more generally, of sibling relationships.
Occasionally, the crosscutting creates a dizzying patchwork as she picks
up and drops the strands of various characters' lives; I sometimes found
myself flipping back from one poignant moment to a grittier death scene
just to remind myself of the family context. At other times, however, the
stories form an effective counterpoint to DeVita-Raeburn's own tale.
There's Amber, the older sister who at 19 was called upon to identify her
brother James' body after his death in a fiery car crash; unlike
DeVita-Raeburn's family, Amber and her parents talk openly about James,
setting out flowers for his birthday and setting a place at the table for
him at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And we meet John, who was 5 when his
sister died at 2; more than four decades later, he still knows almost
nothing about his sister's life and early death.
   Chapter by chapter, DeVita-Raeburn explores the process of grieving and
healing, beginning with a basic validation of the loss. "The first and
biggest hurdle for me was coming to understand that my brother's illness
and death had happened to me, too," she writes. A clear loss, she
explains, allows grief; and grief in turn allows recovery.

   DeVita-Raeburn establishes herself as an actor in the story of her
brother's loss and redefines her own identity in relationship to him.
(Prominent survivor siblings such as Akira Kurosawa and Val Kilmer have
thrust themselves into the arts to fulfill the dreams of a dead brother,
she notes; the Kennedy clan's presidential ambitions showed textbook
symptoms of transferred identity.) Along the way, DeVita-Raeburn touches
on such issues as specialization, the evolutionary notion that, to avoid
direct competition, siblings divvy up talents and interests (a theory that
explains why there is so often a family jock and a family scholar).
   DeVita-Raeburn's explorations are most rewarding where they are most
specific to sibling relationships: Once a survivor is able to acknowledge
her own loss, she enters the realm of a more traditional literature of
grief. And as the volume progresses, DeVita-Raeburn brings her story back
to the personal.
   "One fundamental theme in all sibling-loss stories is disruption," she
explains early on. "When [our] story line is cut off abruptly, the world
and all our assumptions about it get thrown in the air. ... Storytelling
is a remedy for ambiguity."

   Rachel Elson is a New York writer. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 SF Chronicle

Note: This book contains a chapter on twinloss and TTSGI. A cherished link is revealed between
all siblings losses, including twinloss.