We Created a Book

It feels like something very alive, trembling with heat and energy

Photo by Alicia Christin Gerald on Unsplash

As a 24-year-old back in 1999, I was baffled to find almost no existing literature on sibling loss. In one of the brief pauses between violent waves of raw grief, I decided, I’ll write one.

My mom encouraged me, gifting me a mini cassette recorder I could use to interview people for the project.

Fast forward: blur through the turn of the millennium and September 11^th, past Hurricane Katrina and iPods and mailable Netflix DVDs, through Beyonce’s emergence and Facebook when it was still really fun and the subprime mortgage crisis and Obama being elected and the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s 2025 now, and we all carry little computer/stereo/camera/phones with us that both enhance our lives and pull us away from one another.

It’s been a very, very long gestation period, but that book I imagined all those years ago is just about ready to emerge. Here’s a sneak peek at our cover:

Cover art by Elise McCall

Starting on June 17th, you can order The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope. This collection of essays (and a poem) brims with beautiful, hard stories from 26 people who’ve walked through the death of a brother or sister. Many of these people—people whose sisters and brothers died when they were ten or 20 or 57--have become dear friends. We’ve forged a community. While I’m proud of the book, it feels like so much more than just a book to me. It feels like a dense tapestry of stories, a mosaic of the siblings we lost, a sampling of all the love and ache of those relationships. It feels like something that’s alive, trembling with heat and energy.

For the past year, I’ve been engaged in Internal Family Systems therapy. IFS is based on the concept that we carry our younger, wounded selves within us, and those hurt parts of us sometimes wreak havoc on our current life. In IFS, we learn that we can heal these parts of ourselves, integrate them, and in doing so, we might become less reactive, more integrated, healthier.

So it’s through this lens that I travel back to that lonely, heartbroken 24-year-old girl on my parents’ porch, smoking cigarettes and sobbing, pleading into the night. I hand her this book that is more than a book— it contains friendships with sensitive, creative, gifted, soulful writers you can’t even dream of at this moment. It’s full of love and time and buckets of sweat and tears and the softening that comes when we chisel meaning out of our most painful stories. Here you go, Sweet Girl. I know you feel broken and alone. You won’t get over this loss, but you will move forward with it. You’ll find meaning in it, and it will become a part of your bones and skin and heart.

I’m not sure I’ll ever stop being amazed by the writers who’ve become friends through the process of creating this book. These are the friendships I craved all those years ago, the friendships I didn’t realize I still very much needed…until they arrived.

In particular, I can’t sing enough praises for my co-editor, Alyson Shelton. Her drive and determination fueled the process of transforming this book from something that lived in my head into an actual book with actual pages, not to mention the sibling loss community we’ve created. Alyson brought in many of the authors included in the anthology, and she interrupted my destructive cycle of perfectionism/procrastination. She’s become a dear friend as well as a writing partner. Last summer, when I was diagnosed with lymphoma and she was living with excruciating physical pain, our work on the book paused while we dealt with our emerging health issues. Alyson called me often to check in, and those calls meant so much to me. She’s unafraid of sitting with hard things. Her heart and fire and presence is woven throughout this book.

Thank you for being part of this community. Sibling loss is a club no one wants to join, but if you find yourself here, I hope you find that it’s full of amazing people— people who’ll help you feel so much less alone.

With Love,
Lynn, Alyson & Molly