Adulting with complicated grief: A writer's poignant journey

After Gina DeMillo Wagner's brother died, she longed to find others who understood the joys and heartaches of having a sibling like hers.

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Gina’s forthcoming memoir, available May 14.

Readers: Today’s newsletter is part of the interview series Your Stories about how people process midlife trauma and make meaning from their challenging experiences.

“Sibling support. Complicated grief. Nature + Nurture.”

Author Gina DiMillo Wagner’s Instagram bio made me want to reach out and hear her journey. Evocative of the famous six-word story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” her bio hints at the complexity of her loss—and how she moved forward.

In 2016, her older brother Alan died. Born with Prader-Willi syndrome, a genetic condition that can cause developmental delays, he was just 43. 

To process her grief, she started journaling, which eventually coalesced into a memoir, Forces of Nature: A Memoir of Family, Loss, and Finding Home. The book examines the complexity of her loss, the fraught relationships within her estranged family, the cause of her brother’s sudden death, and her quest to find meaning.

Disentangling grief and trauma

After Alan died, Gina was forced to reckon with the memories of a painful childhood, which led to the realization that she had complicated grief due to the nature of her sibling relationship.

Growing up, Alan could be affectionate and sweet—he loved Christmas throughout his life—but also violent. Gina always knew this was related to his condition, but she still had to be on high alert for his mood swings. Additionally, their mother had untreated mental illness, so Gina was Alan’s de facto caretaker from a young age.

“So the trauma that happened in midlife basically was an echo of the past,” she told me.  “It's complicated grief when there's a domino effect where one loss triggers or resurfaces other losses. I also think complicated grief can be because the relationship that you had with a person was complicated.”

In the immediate aftermath of her brother’s passing, she was baffled by the reactions of people around her; many of them assumed she was relieved because it ended the obligation to care for him in old age.

“To be honest, I was kind of surprised that I did not feel relieved,” she said. “I mean, I just kind of felt the immediate, unmistakable sadness of losing a sibling.”

Wanting to tell ‘the heartaches and the joys’

As she continued to process her grief, Gina searched for stories that validated her experience as a sibling of someone with special needs.

“There wasn't anything that I saw, really, from the sibling’s perspective, and certainly not anything that really covered both the heartaches and the joys of growing up in a family where somebody always needs a lot more,” she said.

She decided to start writing publicly about her experience. A big turning point came when The New York Times published her essay, Mourning the Loss of a Sibling Rival. The reader reaction helped her feel less alone.

“There was just a wide range of people that could relate to this idea of the complicated grief and growing up where you had to silence your own needs because somebody else needed more,” she said.

The wind and the trees work their magic

Gina’s healing was multi-faceted. She received EMDR for traumatic memories. She wrote. And she spent time in nature—a therapeutic tool she had been using since girlhood. (Always a sucker for sea turtle stories, I especially love her essay “Following Floodlights Instead of the Moon.”)

“As a girl I could go into the woods in my backyard, and I suddenly would feel some relief. I felt the spaciousness of being outside. I could kind of calm myself with listening to the wind and the trees,” she said.

With the book due to hit shelves in just a few months, Gina feels like the story has now taken on a life of its own—in a good way. She uses a metaphor from her career as an outdoors writer to describe this process.

“When I first started writing, there was an image I had of packaging up this story and putting it into a little raft and sending it down a river, and just imagining that whoever needs it finds it along the shore,” she said. “So I've launched it down the river. It's going to go out into the world and do what it needs to do, hopefully speak to whoever it needs to speak to.”

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Gina’s recommended resources

• SibNet, a Facebook group for adult siblings of people with disabilities 

• Claire Bidwell Smith's books for dealing with any kind of grief

• Modern Loss, which is “100% devoid of grief cliches and platitudes.” 

• "Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” a podcast that isn't afraid to examine complicated loss in all its many forms. (Here’s Gina’s episode, which is behind a paywall.)

• Also, follow

  Gina DeMillo Wagner
  here on Substack!