Four Corners: A Practical Memoir About Siblings, Grief, And Learning How To Carry On Without Letting Go

By Erin Leigh Nigh

"Siblings can be so many different things for one another: friends, enemies, heroes, antagonizers, allies, teachers, defenders, competitors, advocates, path-breakers. I can't describe who I am without talking about my siblings.

They've made me the person I am.

They're a part of me.

There is so much that we lost when my brother died, but I can't lose any of that."

When her younger brother died at the age of nineteen, Erin turned to books both as a refuge and out of a desire to learn how others reconciled their own grief with the pressure to keep moving forward. She found a distinct thread in the stories of siblings: that the impact of a sibling's death can go unacknowledged and misunderstood, and the nature of sibling relationships can affect our perceived right to grieve.

Four Corners is a reflection on the complicated emotions that can characterize grief, the unique bond that ties us to our siblings, and the exploration of healing as a practice rather than an endpoint, with practical ideas for keeping a connection to the person you've lost. This is a book not only for siblings, but also those who are grieving a loss, supporting someone who is grieving, and for anyone looking for a compassionate approach to living alongside pain while still finding joy in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Erin Leigh Nigh
• Release date: Sep 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777832315

Book preview

Four CornersTitle Page

Copyright © 2021 by Erin Leigh Nigh

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover design: Erin Leigh Nigh

Openmoji by HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

ISBN: 978-1-7778323-0-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7778323-1-5

Contents

Author’s Note

Prologue

If You Feel Too Much

Does Anybody Have a Map?

Denial (Or Rather, Disorientation)

Vulnerability

Sensitivity

Protectiveness

Defensiveness

Anger

Bargaining

Depression

Guilt

Exhaustion

Insignificance

Anxiety

Isolation

Love

Acceptance

Grief Work

Grief Work: Introduction

The World Goes On

Time Lines

A Diagnosis

The Hierarchy of Grief

The Four of Us

Not Everything Happens For A Reason

Year One

Continuing Bonds

Grief Toolbox

Meaning Full

This Is Not The End

Acknowledgments

Four Corners Soundtrack

Adam’s Favourites Playlist

Resources

Bibliotherapy

Bibliography

Notes

About The Author

If you enjoy listening to music while you read like I do, you can access a playlist of the music that kept me company while I was writing.

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Scan the code with the Spotify app (search > camera) or search

‘Four Corners: The Soundtrack’

Spotify playlist link

Author’s Note

This book contains discussion of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and brief references to drowning. If those are things you are sensitive to, please take care of yourself.

For Adam, Em, and Aidan

And for myself

There’d been four of them all their lives… Four wheels, four walls, four seasons, four elements, four corners of the earth. But now they were three. Strange as their world had been, at least it made sense, to them. What happens when one corner is removed?

Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder

Prologue

Nightmares

Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.

Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

My dreams have generally eluded me come morning, but this nightmare is something different. I’m lying face down on the ground, trying to get as close as I can to the earth, to sink down into it. My heart feels so heavy that I can’t hold my body up. Sometimes I’m sobbing or screaming, a restless energy running through me. Sometimes I feel catatonic. I can’t move. I don’t always know how we got here, but the result is the same: one of my three younger siblings is gone.

I wake up and begin to realize it was just a nightmare, but it takes my body time to agree with my mind. I feel both physically and emotionally exhausted, as if I really did spend hours bawling on the ground. My muscles are tight, my heart hurts, and the heaviness follows me into my day.

I don’t remember how young I was the first time I got stuck here, but this dream has been visiting me for years and shakes me every time. I used to be able to check on my siblings to see that they were okay and give them a hug, but when I left for university and could no longer do that, the feeling of dread lasted longer.

Yet as much as it hurt, I could wake up. I could try to love my siblings better, grateful for their existence and aware of how lost I felt when I thought they were gone just for a short time. It was the worst thing I could imagine, but as real as it felt, it could only belong in a nightmare.

Early on a Sunday morning in mid-November, I woke up to the sound of heavy and insistent knocking on my door. I felt disoriented as the knocking continued before I finally realized who it was.

My brother Adam was in town the night before, meeting up with some friends from his automotive service technician program at Fanshawe College. He had been living with me during their eight-week semester that fall, returning to London to celebrate the end of exams and see his friends after a couple of weeks back home.

Since home was over an hour away, Adam planned to stay the night at a friend’s house. I knew he might stop by on Sunday, so my next thought was that it seemed early for him to be knocking on my door after being out the night before. But when I opened the door, it was a police officer asking me if I was Adam’s sister.

One of his friends lived on a hill overlooking a small lake, and they gathered there for a campfire. Someone suggested taking the family’s canoe out on the water in the early hours of the morning, and even though it was pitch black, three people got into the small two-person canoe without life jackets, including Adam. It wasn’t long before it tipped.

Two of them were able to climb out on the other side of the lake, and it took them thirty minutes to round the top of the hill before they got back to the house and realized they couldn’t find Adam.

By the time the police came to notify me (one of Adam’s friends knew where I lived), they had been looking for hours and he was still missing. I was given the responsibility of sharing the news with my parents, who met us at the lake. There was nothing we could do but watch their efforts: a drone in the air, a boat slowly cruising the lake, and search crews combing through the brush. Even though I knew they were doing everything they could, it wasn’t enough if they still hadn’t found him five hours later.

Our younger brother Aidan soon came to meet us, but our sister Em was attending college in Sault Ste. Marie, seven hours away. We waited all day, alternating between standing outside the car and sitting inside, before Aidan and I eventually went back to my apartment. I rubbed his back as he fell asleep, needing to keep my hand anchored to him as I whimpered, "Adam, where are you?", murmuring his name every so often as if he might hear me.

On Monday morning after booking plane tickets for Em and their boyfriend Tim to come home that night, Aidan and I returned to the lake. As we walked up to the house, we met a makeshift receiving line of some of our family and friends, staggered between the road and the backyard. They had all arrived not long before us, but we didn’t realize that others knew what was going on or that they would be there.

The first person we met was our cousin Matt, and he enveloped us in a hug. Seeing all of these people there was emotional, both comforting to see their faces but also a realization that this was really happening. We were officially outside normal. This wasn’t just a little scare with a hopefully happy ending. People were travelling to be there, leaving their jobs to do so. I had packed hoping for a trip to the hospital, to sit around Adam’s bed and help him get better, but suddenly even that seemed out of reach.

Our parents were in the backyard, but no one shared any updates and our parents thought someone else must have already told us. Eventually I heard something that confused me and I asked my mom what was going on. Adam was found shortly before we arrived. He had drowned right where the canoe had tipped over.

We stood on the hill looking out onto the lake and it felt like a nightmare with no end.

This couldn’t be real.

This couldn’t be us.

It couldn’t be him.

I don’t think those vivid nightmares were any kind of omen or premonition; I think they were just an expression of my greatest fear: that I would lose someone I loved beyond measure. Their recurrence might mean that losing the people I love was something I worried about, but the idea it would ever happen still felt unimaginable.

I’ve since heard from other siblings who have had those same kinds of dreams, our fears playing out at night when we’re not able to actively push those anxious and uncomfortable thoughts to the side. It’s not something most of us want to think about because it feels awful to even consider, but then I found myself not being able to escape it. I suddenly felt overwhelmed with the idea of grieving Adam not only in this present moment, but every moment for the rest of my life. It was too much.

Emily St. John Mandel writes in Station Eleven that hell is the absence of the people you long for. Finding out my brother died was the worst kind of hell. I wanted to find him and hug him and assure myself that everything was okay, but it would never be okay. He was gone. There was no waking up from this.

If You Feel Too Much

Does Anybody Have a Map?

Grief was not a line, carrying you infinitely further from loss. You never knew when you would be sling-shot backward into its grip.

Brit Bennett, The Mothers

Everything I thought I knew about grief revolved around the five-stage theory proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. As a psychiatrist working with terminally ill patients, Kübler-Ross observed five common emotions that they experienced grieving the end of their own lives: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. ¹ While these are a few common emotions in the experience of grief, to grieve is a very individual process that unfortunately (and fortunately!) doesn’t have a road map.

Some people find themselves experiencing these emotions in a different order, not everyone finds them all to be reflective of their own grief, and many cycle through different stages or emotions repeatedly, coming back to some or all of them throughout their lives.

To even think of them as stages is to suggest we move through grief in a straightforward and orderly way from one step to the next, when the reality is that our brains don’t work that way. Grief isn’t a board game we progress through, overcoming all of the roadblocks before we make it to Candyland acceptance.

In Annie Hartnett’s book Rabbit Cake, a young girl named Elvis who has lost her mother learns that the typical grieving process supposedly takes about eighteen months. Hoping all she has to do is make it through until that point, Elvis crosses out the boxes each day on her calendar and waits for the warm glow of acceptance. A blueprint for what she might expect gives Elvis a more concrete sense of order in a world that suddenly feels disordered, but it’s probably futile and ultimately does herself a disservice to try to fit her grief into a rigid timeline.

When those eighteen months had passed and Elvis found she was still grieving, she felt there must be something wrong with her and was left wondering where to go from there. There are consequences of holding to these narrow interpretations of grief, and not only for those in the thick of it. For those of us who either haven’t experienced a major loss or if our grief has manifested in a different way, we might be less sympathetic because it can seem abnormal or concerning if someone hasn’t appeared to move on yet. In turn we can be more judgemental of ourselves when we go through our own hardships. It’s a cycle that isn’t kind to anyone.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross initially developed the stages of grief framework in 1969 to make sense of the way we reconcile the end of our own lives when death becomes an imminent reality. Over time, the five stages of grief have been misused by professionals and added to the lexicon of popular culture, informing our understanding of how grief should be expressed.

More recent studies have called these distinct stages into question, ² but they are already deeply embedded in our cultural beliefs. Most of us haven’t read her research, yet we are familiar with this theory.

Condensed and disseminated it has become even more simplistic than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross created it to be, applied to a form of grief she wasn’t studying, and can inspire compassion towards those who conform to it and ostracize those who don’t.

Though Dr. Kübler-Ross reiterates it is well to remember that it is not up to us to judge such feelings as bad or shameful but to understand their true meaning and origin as something very human, ³ we can mistakenly read this framework as an instruction manual where anything falling outside of it becomes pathological. Even for those with a terminal illness who are contemplating the end of their life in the near future, linear stages can seem strict and inflexible. While some people may find it describes their experience, many will not.

One of my biggest hang-ups when it came to the five stages was the last one: acceptance. It’s meant to describe the realization that there is nothing you can do to change your reality (something that might be more evident in anticipatory grief where the death hasn’t happened yet), but I interpreted it as letting go and moving on. When I hear letting go, I think letting go of him. Moving on means moving on without him. Like I’m being asked to forget what an immense loss I have suffered. Positioned as the last of these five stages of grief, acceptance seems to suggest a conclusion. The end of grief. Based on this definition, acceptance felt like an illusion.

My experience of grief is that it is certainly not straightforward or always predictable. There are good days and bad days, and even good hours and bad hours in the same day. Sometimes it’s a little at a time, and sometimes I feel all of that weight at once. Sometimes it’s depression over not being able to go back to before that point in time that splits everything into ‘before’ and ‘after,’ and sometimes it’s dread, an anxiety that has me on-edge, like his death is about to happen all over again and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

While I’ve experienced those emotions Dr. Kübler-Ross observed in her study, I didn’t relate to the idea that they could be separated into distinct stages and I didn’t like that it felt as if my grief could be packaged into a box and stored on a shelf when I was done going through it.

Thirty-five years after On Death and Dying was first published, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler co-wrote On Grief and Grieving, a follow-up to the initial presentation of her theory. She writes that the stages have evolved from her original conception in that they have been very misunderstood, and we were never meant to interpret grief as clean and straight-forward because our grief is as individual as our lives. ⁴

When turning towards those who are left behind, her thoughts are closer in line with a more fluid and open definition of acceptance:

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

When I first read On Death and Dying while doing research for a project in high school, I had yet to experience a major loss and thought it made a lot of sense. I was familiar with the five stages because they were everywhere—on TV shows, in movies and books—but usually presented in a simplified way without the context to clarify the concepts.

It was a comforting thought that even after going through something difficult, you can ultimately find acceptance, which I interpreted as a sense of peace. It’s hard to see other people in pain, and thinking they could ultimately find happiness again and move past their heartache sounded hopeful.

A couple of well-known studies (which have since been challenged) ⁵ have suggested that even after a tragic event, people eventually return to a baseline level of happiness. That if you were generally a happy person before a tragedy, you will find that happiness again. But it’s not as simple as willing yourself into the sweet spot of acceptance. It’s not as easy as choosing happiness and thinking positively.

In the first year after Adam died, I felt rather antagonistic towards the five stage theory of grief and this chapter looked a little different. (There was a lot of anger, and no, it’s not because I was in that stage!) When I was grieving myself, the theory felt confining and made grief seem like an illness to recover from rather than the natural, unpredictable, and individual experience that it is. I didn’t even want to be in this position, let alone told that I was caught in a formula that could predict my emotions.

After reading her elaboration in On Grief and Grieving and recognizing it has given us a language to talk about our feelings, I think Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ framework can be a good foundation as long as we are aware of the context and look at it as a tool rather than a set of instructions or even guidelines. Her theory has contributed to a conversation about what it means to lose someone you love or go through any hardship in your life, and there are ways it can help us be more understanding of our own and others’ suffering. Yet for me it’s more helpful to think of them as emotions rather than stages, and just like any emotion, we can often feel more than one at a time and revisit them more than once throughout our lives.

Denial (Or Rather, Disorientation)

I would close my eyes and sleep and when I awoke, this would all have been a dream. Even though there was pain, even though I could feel everything, this would be a dream because it couldn’t be real.

TJ Klune, Wolfsong

Oh, denial. There’s something I really hate about that word. Sometimes we wonder whether someone might be in denial because they appear to be holding up so well. Or we think because we are able to understand the reality of their loss, they should be able to accept it too.

Not only does this speak to the added suffering people can experience from unmet expectations when they stray from the cultural script of grieving, but it makes it sound like we as outsiders are living in reality and waiting for the bereaved to catch up.

Denial is a word I hear as patronizing. It’s a word we use to describe someone else, not ourselves. I prefer to call this feeling disorientation or shock, because it can take some time to process a new reality that feels like it can’t be real. And if it is real, you don’t want it to be.

Most of the time, denial is usually more symbolic than literal. Even when you understand they have died and nothing can bring them back, there can still be a search for that person you’ve lost. It can take some time to register that you’re separated in a way you have never been before.

I had to keep reminding myself this was forever; that after we got through the unbearable week of the visitation and the funeral, we didn’t get Adam back.

Confronting that reality every single day was difficult. He wasn’t just on a long trip, though sometimes that’s what it felt like. After he was gone for a few weeks I thought, Okay, he’s been gone for long enough now… when is he coming back?

After a few months it was much too long to be away from my brother and I missed him immensely.

After a year, I couldn’t believe we had been separated from him for that long. It didn’t seem possible that we could survive without him for that many days in a row.

For months afterwards when none of this seemed real, I would return to the image of Adam lying in the casket to give me confirmation. It felt like my tether to reality and actually quieted my anxiety, because otherwise my mind kept panicking and searching for him, to place him somewhere in this world. He’s not in pain anymore. There is nothing I can do to save him. This is our new reality.

When we lose someone, there is a lot for our minds to work through. Confusion or disorientation is normal because it can feel like you’ve been spun around on a teacup ride and pushed out at full speed, not knowing which way is up.

There might be a feeling of numbness, of needing time to understand, especially when the death was unexpected. In the short-term, it’s a way of coping. I thought of this shock as my brain protecting itself, an emotional anaesthesia. Of course that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, but that reality can be overwhelming and it takes some time to process not only the loss, but the trauma of it.

There can be trauma and grief and pain all the same whether you have the chance to say goodbye or you don’t, but sometimes when it’s a sudden unexpected death it doesn’t fit into any of the patterns our brains understand. One minute they were there and the next they are not. The world changed in a frighteningly irreversible way. You don’t know what to do with that.

And so even though I knew my brother was gone, there have been many different moments of realizing he’s really gone and it didn’t end after a certain period of time before moving into another stage.

First it was being told he had died. Going home without him. Telling other people. Seeing his body. Going through his things. Moving back to London without him. Meeting with the police for a review of their investigation.

Figuring out how to honour his birthday in his absence. Moving through the holidays. Walking past the places we went together. Starting the new race season without him in the lineup. Attending a family wedding. Knowing he won’t be at ours or have his own. Beginning a new year without him.

It happens less often now than in the first days, weeks, and months, but even though I know what happened, the shock of it keeps surprising me and there are still moments when I have a hard time believing this is really forever.

When we buy into the idea that there’s a right way to grieve, it hurts all of us.

Are we supposed to be stoic and hold back our emotions? Because concealing them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Are we supposed to show we’re mourning what we lost in a way others can understand?

We’re told to be strong and given the responsibility to put on a brave front for the people around us, but crying is a normal part of sadness. And so is not crying! Tears aren’t a measure of the depth of someone’s pain, and they aren’t the only way we have of expressing it.

The numbness that can come with shock also means you might not cry, especially right away. There are times when I can’t talk about what happened to my brother without my body shaking and my heart rate increasing, and there are other times when it feels like someone else’s story or just a collection of facts and I might sound cold or unfeeling.

There is no right or wrong, and it’s not fair to judge love or sadness or grief based on what you can observe from the outside. Laughter or even smiling might seem like an inappropriate response if we only equate it with joy, but it is also a completely normal response to shock.

Denial sounds to me like someone who refuses to believe in their new reality, as if it’s a choice. Grief is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that.

Freedom for both ourselves and the people we love comes from sharing our true feelings with people we trust, whatever they are. Not locking grieving people into boxes of what they should and shouldn’t be doing, not judging them based on what stage they appear to be in or how long they seem to spend in it. And in turn, letting ourselves grieve (to feel whatever we’re feeling even if it seems confusing) without the rigidity of a checklist.

What works for other people is less important for your own life than what works for you.

Jonathan Safran FoerTwo men bent over the hood of a car signing autographs with a boy off to the side and a fence with stadium seating in the background.

Adam met Wayde Thorne in a high school music class and they soon formed a friendship that went beyond school. They played on the football team together and bonded over their love of cars, planning on eventually running their own shop together.

Adam was friendly with many

Reviews for Four Corners

[Marie Polega · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best books I’ve read on sibling grief, which is not only an excellent memoir but also includes research and general information about grief.