Sibling Grief Resources
plus some books and movies about sibling relationships from Lissa
One night when Carrie was in hospice, I found myself wandering the hallway and came upon a small dark room outfitted with a comfortable rocking chair. I went in, sat in the comfy chair, turned on the lamp beside me, and closed the door, not sure what I planned on doing. The shelf in front of me was littered with pamphlets on grief, so I picked some up and flipped through them before neatly returning them to their respective plexiglass homes. Not ready to leave, I searched the shelves for something else to read and found When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Over the next couple of hours, I rocked slowly back and forth in the dimly lit room and read the beautiful words the author had written about his diagnosis with lung cancer and the twenty-two months he had fought the disease. The final chapter was written by his young widow after his death, their only daughter just eight months old.
Almost four years later, l sat on the worn brown couch of my family room, TV tuned to CNN, and picked up my laptop, looking for distraction from the constant COVID coverage. Some combination of googled words brought me to the lifestyle blog, Cup of Jo, and I loved it immediately, the articles about fashion, beauty, family, and recipes reminding me of my favourite magazines from back in the day. When I later discovered the owner of the website, Joanna Goddard, was the sister of the late Paul Kalanithi’s widow, Dr. Lucy Kalanithi, it seemed fitting it would soothe me from my pandemic anxieties as the memoir had soothed me many years before. I’ve often wondered if Carrie would love it, too. If our conversations would be peppered with recommendations or references to the blog. Or if, like avocado, she’d hold the wrong opinion and hate it as passionately as I love it ;)
Below is an incomplete list of resources about sibling loss and sibling relationships. Feel free to send us your own in the comments.
Resource books about sibling grief:
Always a Sibling by Annie Sklaver Orenstein
Still I Cannot Save You by Kelly S. Thompson
The Empty Room: Surviving the loss of a Brother or Sister at Any Age by Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn
Grieving For the Sibling You Lost: A Teen’s Guide to Coping with Grief and Finding Meaning After Loss by Erica Goldblatt Hyatt
Websites about sibling grief:
https://thegrievingsibling.com
https://www.compassionatefriends.org/adults-grieving-death-sibling/
Books that feature authentic sibling relationships:
Educated by Tara Westover
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
All of Marian Keyes books about the Walsh sisters (Rachel’s Holiday, for one)
Movies that do the same:
Millers in Marriage (2024)
Little Women (2019)
The Glass Castle (2017)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)
Lilo and Stitch (2002 and 2025 versions)
The Outsiders (1983)
I thought you might include the 1994 version of Little Women with Winona Ryder as Jo and the 1993 version with Katherine Hepburn as Jo, both of which I prefer to the 2019 version.
Catcher in the Rye by is EXACTLY about sibling grief, even tho it is rarely seen in that context.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith is also a very striking novel about siblings, and the movie from 2003 is also lovely.
I can also recommend two memoirs about dying:
Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture is by a prof with pancreatic cancer who delivered his memoir in the form of a lecture
and Alphose Daudet's In the Land of Pain is by an artistic Parisian watching himself dying of syphilis at the end of the 19thC