My Parents Refuse to Talk About the Horrible Thing That Happened to My Sister. I’ve Always Accepted That, But It’s Become a Big Problem.
Slate · L · trust 26/100
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My older sister, “Lana,” died of heart failure as a direct result of serious mental illness at 20. I still miss her. My parents deal with their grief and complicated feelings about her death by refusing to talk about her, ever. They both angrily leave any conversation if her name comes up. With people who didn’t know her, they pretend they only ever had my brother and me—that Lana never existed. I’ve always hated this, but I left it alone.
Now I have a daughter of my own, and I want to share my memories of my big sister with her in an age-appropriate way. How do I talk about this with a toddler? I have lots of good memories to share, even though Lana was sick for most of her short life. Still, I don’t want to erase the fact that she was very ill. Also, my parents are the ones who have all the childhood photos of her (if they even still exist). By the time I was old enough to have a phone of my own, she was very sick and hated to have her picture taken. She barely had a social media presence, especially as she got sicker. So all I have is a handful of unhappy photos of her in the late stages of anorexia, which are deeply painful to look at. They’re important to me, but not for sharing with a 3-year-old. I want access to photos of very young Lana, but my parents won’t even let me ask. How do I handle this?
I don’t think you necessarily need photos of your sister in order to talk about her with your very young daughter. Tell her about her aunt, whom you loved very much—tell her stories, share your happy memories (and repeating the same anecdotes again and again is especially effective as a way to instill a sort of memory-by-association in children)—and acknowledge that she died long before her niece was born, because she was very, very sick.
I know firsthand that it’s possible to do what I’m suggesting, as I did it myself. I began telling my daughter when she was a young toddler about my grandmother, and I never stopped (I still talk about her, and her great-granddaughter is in her 30s). To this day, my daughter sometimes forgets that she didn’t know her great-grandmother—that’s how firmly etched in her are my many anecdotes about Grandma Yetta. (If you were to ask my grown-up daughter if she loved her great-grandmother, I am fairly confident she would say, “Yes, of course!”)
I want to add this, though: Don’t give up on your parents or on the possibility of accessing photographs of your sister. If neither parent will countenance your speaking Lana’s name, then write them a letter (on paper, sent by postal mail) asking if they would pass along to you any photographs of her they have. Offer to accept these by mail (I would go so far as to include a self-addressed, stamped manila envelope (both to let them know you mean business and to make this as easy as possible for them), and to never speak of having received it, if they’d prefer. Tell them you understand how painful it is for them to talk about your sister, and even (I’m guessing) to allow themselves to think about her—but that, for you, it’s important to keep her memory alive. Tell them how much you loved and miss her, and that, for you, it’s a help, a balm, to talk about her, think about her, and (you hope) have photographs of her to look at. Tell them you want to share your precious memories of her with your own daughter—that you want her to know her aunt, because it fills you with sorrow that she didn’t have the chance to know her and love her when she was alive.
The worst that can happen is that your parents will say no, by implication, to your request by never responding to your letter in any way. If they respond with anger, that’s not so terrible: It forces them to talk, however obliquely and briefly, about Lana and their complicated grief about her. Who knows? It might result in the kind of argument that in the end does more good than harm.
If you never end up in possession of any photos, so be it. You don’t need photos to remember your sister. They are nice to have, of course, and to show your daughter, but they’re nothing as compared to what you can remember and thus pass along to your child. (Who will no doubt ask—if not now, then eventually—“What did Aunt Lana look like?” And you can tell her. She will remember whatever you remember.)
As she gets older, if Aunt Lana—whom she never knew but loves because you loved her—is part of the fabric of her life, she will ask questions about her illness and her death. Answer as honestly as you can, depending on her age when she asks. Your answers should get increasingly complete; by the time she’s 12 or 13, she should know that anorexia was the cause of your sister’s death, and that information should not come as a shock, because what you’ve told her before should point the way toward it. By then she’ll also be aware of what can and can’t be said in the presence of her grandparents, and why.
I am the mother of a newborn, six-weeks-old at the time of writing this. A few weeks back, we had a celebration for my grandmother’s birthday (she’s 95), and it was a big get-together for a lot of the family. I was feeling recovered enough from the recent birth to attend, and my daughter “Emily” stole the show, as it were. Everyone wanted to play with her, take photos with her, hold her. I’m the first in my generation of the family to have a child, so that’s probably behind some of it. However, there was a mild problem that has upset me.
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