You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everyone.
Andrew Limbaugh here in for Marielle Saguera.
Author Annie Sclaver Orenstein grew up with two older brothers, and she says she took her first steps walking towards her oldest brother, Ben.
According to my parents, he just asked me to walk over to him, and I did.
And that was basically how it went from there.
We had a really beautiful reciprocal relationship.
When I got older, he would come to me for advice sometimes, and he made me feel like I mattered.
But when she was 25, her brother Ben died while serving in Afghanistan.
The shock and pain of his death destroyed her mental health.
For a long time, it felt like.
Nothing mattered at all.
I started having panic attacks and nightmares.
Nightmares were really bad, and I would be afraid to go to sleep at night.
Despite how painful losing a sibling is, this kind of loss is something people don't talk about often.
After her brother died, Annie tried to look for resources to help her understand what she was feeling and to find tools to cope with it all.
I went to a bookstore in Manhattan, a huge bookstore, five story bookstore, and I went to the grief section looking for something that might help.
And there were books on losing a parent, a child, a friend, a pet, and there was nothing on siblings.
She says it made her minimize her own grief.
At the time, I took that to mean that I shouldn't be grieving, that I was being dramatic, that I was overreacting, that my grief didn't matter and that I should be fine.