11.17.2015

Siblings

On this day 39 years ago, my brother Brian was born full term, held briefly by our parents and then died a few hours later due to complications likely caused by human error at the hospital. I was two and do not remember, yet I must have been attuned to the grief in our home. My older brother Patrick, age six at the time, remembers our father taking him to McKennan Park to attempt to explain how the little baby we were all so excited to meet had gone to heaven.

Now that I have two healthy children of my own after losing one baby in an early miscarriage, it leaves me breathless to imagine the pain my parents went through - still go through - grieving the sudden loss of this child. I think about Brian and try to imagine what he would have looked like now as an adult, what passions and interests he might have had, what interesting things he might have done with his life.

I recently saw this family portrait honoring children lost to miscarriage, as part of a campaign to promote October as SIDS, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Month. I didn't know this organization existed until a few weeks ago. Many of my friends and family have had miscarriages, but it is something most people don't talk about or have a space where they can talk about it. I wish I'd know about this organization when I had my miscarriage.

A few weeks ago, the three siblings I grew up with all came to visit along with our mother. We four kids try to see each other individually a few times a year but rarely are we all together at the same time, being dispersed around the country. I wish I could just run over to dinner at my sister's, have a beer with my older brother, go to the theater with my younger brother, laugh with their spouses, play with their kids all a lot more often. Not every family gets along and we're lucky to actually like and admire each other.

Photographer Nicholos Nixon took Forty Portraits in Forty Years of his wife and her three sisters. I love to imagine my siblings and I in a project like this, with Brian in the photographs with us.


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