The Empty Room Understanding Sibling Loss [Paperback]

Ted is Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn's older brother, best friend, and the ringmaster of her days. On a September morning when she is six, she wakes up and Ted is gone. Her parents explain that he went to the hospital for a while. A while turns out to be eight years in a plastic bubble, where he dies of a rare autoimmune disease at age seventeen.
The Empty Roomis DeVita-Raeburn's unflinching, often haunting recollection of life with Ted, woven into a larger exploration of the enormous -- and often unacknowledged -- impact of a sister's or brother's death on remaining siblings.
With an inspired blend of life experience, journalistic acumen, and research training, DeVita-Raeburn draws on interviews of more than two hundred survivors to render a powerful portrait of the range of conditions and emotions, from withdrawal to guilt to rage, that attend such loss. Finding little in professional literature, she realizes that those who suffer are the experts. And in the end, it is DeVita-Raeburn and her experts who present a larger, more complex understanding of the sibling bond, the lifelong impact of the severing of that bond, and the tools needed to heal and move forward.
The Empty Roomis a fascinating literary hybrid in which Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn seamlessly fuses deeply affecting remembrance with a pragmatic, lucidly written exploration of the healing journey.Alison Smith author ofName All the AnimalsThe Empty Roomis one of those quietly revolutionary books. Through her own grief, through conscientious research and compassionate journalism, DeVita-Raeburn tells the story of a forgotten grief. In our culture, sibling grief is hidden. It is a nameless, faceless loss. DeVita-Raeburn gives these siblings a voice. And in doing so, she gives us back the story of our own lives.Judith Guest author ofOrdinary PeopleandThe Tarnished EyeThis book is a factual description of my own fictional preoccupations, and I found myself thinl§