Writing a tribute to a brother or a sister
2 min read
A sibling is the only person who knew you both before anyone else was watching. Parents came earlier and saw you from above; children came later and saw you already formed. A brother or sister was there at the same height.
That is what a sibling tribute can do and no other can.
Use the shared childhood
The bedroom you shared. The game with rules only you two knew. The holiday where everything went wrong. The word one of you mispronounced at four, which the family still uses.
These details are invisible to everyone else and instantly recognizable as true. They are also the fastest way to make a room understand a relationship that lasted forty years without describing it.
Put the fights in
A sibling relationship rendered as uniformly loving is one nobody believes, including the people in the room who have siblings of their own — which is most of them.
We didn't speak for most of 1998. I genuinely cannot tell you what it was about. He could, and he'd have told you in detail, and he'd have been right.
Conflict recalled with affection is the most convincing proof of love available to you. It says: this was real, and it held anyway.
The private language
Most siblings have one: nicknames, a phrase from a film, the thing one of you always says when the other is being ridiculous.
Explain it once, briefly, then use it. It lets the room in on something and they will feel the loss of it, which is exactly right.
A structure
- Who you are and where you came in the order. One sentence.
- One memory from childhood.
- One from adulthood — the relationship changed, and showing the change is what makes it a life rather than a nostalgia piece.
- Something they did for you that you have not said out loud before.
- A short ending.
Worked example
I'm Michael. Dan was eighteen months older, and he never let me forget it.
We shared a room until I was fourteen. There was a line down the middle, negotiated in about 1991, which he moved roughly once a month in his own favor while maintaining that he had not.
When my daughter was born, he drove up the same night. He didn't say anything about it. He brought a bag of shopping, put it in the kitchen, held her for about a minute, and left, because he had work in the morning. That was the whole visit. It was a six hour round trip.
We spoke most weeks, usually about nothing. I keep going to call him about nothing.
That last line is the kind of ending to aim for: concrete, small, and doing the work that a sentence about grief would not.
If it was estranged
You are allowed to write a narrow tribute. What they were like as a child. One thing you are glad of. Nothing else.
An honest short piece will be respected by everyone who knows the history, and there is always someone in the room who does.