Intro: 0:12

Hello and welcome to The Broken Pack, a podcast focused on giving sibling loss survivors a platform to share their stories and to be heard, something that many sibling loss survivors state that they never have had. Sibling loss is misunderstood. The Broken Pack exists to change that and to support survivors. I'm your host, Dr. Angela Dean. Were you close it's a question every grieving sibling gets asked and it misses nearly everything today i spoke with ann pinkerton author of were you close a sister's quest to know the brother she lost she shares how losing her brother david on a colorado mountain transformed her understanding of sibling loss continuing bonds and the power of writing through grief take a listen, All right.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:07

So welcome, Anne, to the show. How would you like to introduce yourself to our viewers or listeners?

Anne Pinkerton: 1:13

Thanks, Angela. Well, I'm Anne Pinkerton, and I am the author of the book, Where You Close? A Sister's Quest to Know the Brother She Lost, which is why I'm here today. I pay the bills as a marketing and communications person, but I would rather be writing or playing music or being with my dogs.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:32

Great. Thank you for that. I loved this book so much, and we can talk about that in a little bit. I think that's a question, even when I was interviewed for my own podcast by a guest host, that was a question that was asked, were you close? So I'm eager to talk to you about that and how you came to this. But before we get there, how would you like to introduce our audience and myself to David?

Anne Pinkerton: 1:55

Well, my brother David was 12 years older than me. So when I was born, he was substantially more mature, but also a total goofball. I think in part because of our age gap, but also in part because of just who he was, he became pretty heroic to me early on. I was the baby of the family, too, so I think it was sort of a natural tendency to look up to my brothers and to think that they were the coolest and that they were the ones guiding the way. So I had a very, very worshipful kind of approach to my relationship with him kind of from the beginning. He was a great caretaker of me. Then as we aged, I kept thinking we would be closer and more peer-like and he would be less like big brother, uncle type of person. And to some extent that happened, but I imagined a future that was not to be since at 47, he died quite suddenly while hiking in the mountains of Colorado. So kind of at the absolute prime of his physical life, at least, he was just suddenly gone. And that was, as you can imagine, and as I'm sure a lot of your listeners can imagine, a wildly disorienting experience that completely tipped my world on its side. But I've really enjoyed the opportunity to continue talking about him because it not only makes me feel connected to other people who've experienced this sort of loss, but also because it keeps him alive in a way that I think is really incredibly meaningful for me. He was a really incredible person. Even though I was the little baby sister looking up, he had a huge community of people who also wildly respected him, both as an elite athlete, which is what he did for joy, and in his professional life as a really successful radiologist.

Dr. Angela Dean: 3:55

Thank you for that. It did strike me as I read the book that this was the epitome of continuing bonds. Your story you're writing it but also just it sounds like the relationship as it has developed over time.

Anne Pinkerton: 4:11

I think it's a really startling reality that a relationship can continue post-death. It's not something that would have made any sense to me before it happened. But it's sort of profound. And I think now that it's been more than 17 years since I lost him, since we lost him, I almost feel like he's more with me than ever, which is a very surreal kind of declaration to make. But it's true. I've integrated him into my life in such a way that he's almost more present than ever. And it's a real gift to know that he is there in spirit, in my heart, in the stories I tell, in the world, in the way that I think about living my own life. The decisions I make, my perhaps slightly pathological sense that we're all going and we could happen anytime because of what I experienced losing him, which gives me a certain sense of gratitude, but also a certain sense of urgency about the way that I kind of navigate the world. So yeah, he's very, very much with me.

Dr. Angela Dean: 5:26

I'm so glad to hear that. What do you want to share with our listeners about losing him?

Anne Pinkerton: 5:33

Well, I think one of the things that is beautiful and hard about being here today with you and with people who will be listening is that I wouldn't wish this experience on any of you at all. And I'm terribly grateful to be a community with people who get it because sibling loss, as you've noted so much on your social media channels and on this podcast is a disenfranchised experience where culturally people are so challenged to talk about the realities of death and grief anyway, but especially when it comes to siblings, there's, as I've talked about it in the past, a hierarchy of grief in which somehow, even though we share more DNA with siblings and formative experiences with siblings than most people in our lives, They sort of get short shrift when it comes to the experience of their deaths and the way that society looks at us as the bereaved brothers and sisters left behind. So I guess I would want to say... You're not alone. It can be a very, very lonely experience. But the longer I've talked about it, the more I've realized how deeply connected we are in this whole type of loss and grief. You know, more than 80% of Americans have at least one sibling. So there's this huge reality that someone's going to go first, and you could be children, you could be 99. But regardless, it's an unmooring experience, just like any other kind of loss. And it has its own distinctions in that most siblings had an experience of growing up in the same household and understanding the unique proclivities of their parents and the ways that their childhoods shaped them. And there's this belief that we're going to grow old together, that we'll have all this time together and that they will continue to share that history with us. And so when they die, we lose a huge piece of that future. I found that to be a really difficult reality because, as I said, I had hoped that we would get old together. We would continue to know each other that way, know each other better and be closer, going back to that question, in terms of our experience in the world. So I found it very lonely. It made me question kind of everything that I had assumed about my future with my family. And I think that was one of the hardest things for me to get my arms around as I navigated what happened next.

Dr. Angela Dean: 8:03

Yeah. I found myself, as I was reading your book and hearing... How you approached that and navigating what does this mean for my relationship with other people in my family and even going back home and rediscovering or discovering who your brother is. I found myself just nodding. I could relate to so much through the whole thing. Also, you mentioned wolves in there and I just nearly lost it when I reread that last night. I was like, I somehow missed that you mentioned wolves in there.

Anne Pinkerton: 8:33

A certain kinship just happened. Yeah, I think one of the biggest, most validating experiences I had, which I write about in the book, is when I connected with my surviving brother, and with whom, honestly, the thing we have most in common is our abiding love of our other brother. Very, very different people in so many ways. But when I asked him the question of, what do people say when they find out that David died? And they said the same things to him that they said to me. Was he married? Did he have kids? How's your mom? These were the things. That there wasn't a, oh my gosh, how are you dealing with it? How are you holding up? What was he like? You know, the things that we really want to be asked so that we feel seen in our experience. And he burst into tears, and I felt more connected to him than I ever had. And it was a sad way to acknowledge each other, but it made me feel like I wasn't nuts in that. Sensing somehow that people weren't seeing me, but were seeing straight through me to the other people that may or may not have been a part of my brother's life.

Dr. Angela Dean: 9:45

Right. I think those questions, including, were you close? Did he have children? How's your mom? All of the questions. There's some inherent judgment there. I wonder if you felt that when you answered, no, he didn't have children or wife. I mean, he had a girlfriend. And is that different?

Anne Pinkerton: 10:06

That's interesting. I'm not sure I had thought about it quite like that, but it is a really good point. I think I felt, yes, it was a bit strange to have to say no and no, and it certainly made the conversation awkward when it was already awkward. If there was a judgment, it was that I felt sort of like I was a second-tier relation.

Dr. Angela Dean: 10:29

Yes.

Anne Pinkerton: 10:30

That I was somehow not as relevant to the whole equation as those people would be. And certainly, I would never in a million years deny the relationship that anyone has with anyone. One of the things that's been most interesting for me in the aftermath is noticing how much we devalue people's experience of loss and grief in all kinds of relationships. Like, losing my dog was devastating in a way that is not sort of socially acknowledged as. But this is an animal who consoled me after my brother died and slept in my bed and who I walked every day, you know, someone who was in my house every day of my life. And yet, because they were an animal, we're just a dog. You know, I think about friendships. I think about all the ways that we deny each other's humanity by disallowing them to feel seen and heard in this way. It doesn't cost us anything. So I'm confused about it. It's been a very, very strange kind of social experience to realize that we've somehow acculturated to not assume that any kind of relationship and any kind of loss isn't complicated and hard in its own unique way.

Dr. Angela Dean: 11:55

Yeah, for sure. And I think you're very much defining disenfranchised loss in general. And I've had the honor of talking to Dr. Adoka directly, and he's offered to be on the podcast, and I'm hoping to take him up on that soon. But every time I hear him speak, he gives certain examples of this. And in a very naive way, when I first met him, I was at a conference and I went to the book fair at the conference and I bought Disenfranchised Grief as the title of the book. And I immediately opened it to the table of contents and I'm looking through it and there's nothing on sibling loss. And I went to the index and I looked for sibling loss and there was maybe a mention of it. And at that particular year that I was at the conference, there was one senior theorist who happened to mention sibling loss. So I went up to Dr. Joka and I was like, hey, just want to talk about this. But, you know, even pet loss was in there. And so it's among the disenfranchised losses, they're also disenfranchised in some ways.

Anne Pinkerton: 13:02

That's amazing.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:03

Yeah. Yeah, but I think that's what you're speaking to. I'm sorry, was it Trixie?

Anne Pinkerton: 13:08

Yeah, it was Trixie.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:10

I'm sorry.

Anne Pinkerton: 13:11

Yeah, thank you.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:12

You're welcome. For our listeners, who hopefully will read the book, you speak about Trixie quite a bit. And she's very present in your story.

Anne Pinkerton: 13:21

She was part of my family. Yeah. And I suppose I'm glad that she's also sort of immortalized there. So, she was a very special dog.

Dr. Angela Dean: 13:32

Do you want to tell any of the story about losing David or how you found out navigating through to where you are today?

Anne Pinkerton: 13:41

Sure. So at the time I was married to a musician who was touring, which is only relevant because I'm glad that he was home when I got the call. The call was not actually that he had died. The call was that he was missing, which was terrifying in its own weird way. Because David was an adventure racer and a mountain biker and an ultra marathon racer and all these things, he was often in some exotic location that my mom and I weren't always clear on. But he traveled as much as possible. So this was so sort of commonplace for him that I didn't even know he was in Colorado at the time. But he had been hiking a number of what they refer to as 14ers that are 14,000-foot-plus mountains in the state, and they're incredibly beautiful. And it didn't surprise me in retrospect that it was something he was really interested in doing because he loved a great landscape and an amazing view. But the call that he was missing in the mountains was terrifying. And we spent the better part of 48 hours wondering now this was 2008 and he did have a cell phone on him so that was strange but more importantly he had a spot beacon on him which is like a little gps locator that tracks the movement of where you are which is really the only reason that he was ultimately found i think or it would have taken eons longer at any rate but he had fallen someone determined somehow that he'd probably fallen about 200 feet from close to the top of a peak called Little Bear, and it died instantly. So by the point his body was found, my mom had flown up to Colorado from Texas, where they lived, and was there for the discovery and the horror of identification and all of that terrible death admin that happened in the aftermath immediately. So I was in Massachusetts where I live when I got the call that he was missing, and then my mom called and told me that his body had been found. But there was a very strange kind of suspended animation feeling in the missing when he was missing. You know, there was a lot of bargaining with the universe at that point and a lot of sort of scheming and trying to pretend we had control over something that we didn't. It was already a done deal. But it was very hard being so far away and it was very hard that we hadn't talked, you know, in recent days. Even though I felt absolutely good about our relationship and knew that we loved each other and that I was deeply gratified to know we hadn't suffered. It was a pretty crazy experience. My reaction to it in the immediate aftermath was a little crazy, too, in that once I stopped bawling, I told my then-husband that we had to go hike. I'm sure he thought he was looking at a crazy person, but, of course, the immediate aftermath of getting that kind of news makes people a little insane. I don't know why I had this kind of sudden impulse that I had to go climb something. Even in retrospect, I don't know how I arrived there. This is what we have to do and it's urgent. But blessedly, we were close to a very small, very safe mountain that we could hike and stand at the top and think about what had happened. That was the immediate outcome when he died.

Dr. Angela Dean: 17:23

It's almost like you felt this urgency to be close to him doing the thing that he loved.

Anne Pinkerton: 17:28

I think that was it. I couldn't have named it at the time, of course. It was just this impulse. But yeah, I really, really wanted to feel closer. I did.

Dr. Angela Dean: 17:38

And for reference, I looked up the 14ers after I read that because I had hiked what I thought was a really big mountain. In retrospect, it was only like 3,800 feet or something. And I was like, oh, so now I have a reference. The fact that he did three of those in one day. That's amazing.

Anne Pinkerton: 17:58

It's pretty crazy. Now, something that I also mention in the book is that he was so fit that the search and rescue guy who was also a mountain climber that I interviewed thought he was well within his athletic kind of abilities to do it. And i suppose the harder thing too was that he was alone and so we have no idea what actually happened whether a storm rolled in or he was exhausted or it was altitude or he just made a misstep like there's no knowing that piece of it is something that i probe pretty heavily in the book too because for whatever reason the curiosity of trying to understand exactly how such a mistake had occurred felt really important and pressing as well.

Dr. Angela Dean: 18:46

I wonder if there's some level of wanting to solve the problem even though we know we can't change the ending.

Anne Pinkerton: 18:53

Hmm. That's probably true. I think one thing that's pretty pervasive in the book is my obsession to get closer to who he was, what happened, and to feel him in a bigger way. I think there's a line in there somewhere that's, if I could play it like a movie and pull back the film and play it again, that somehow I could change the outcome. And so I do, as irrational as that is, I do think there was a sense that I needed to solve something there. I think that's really well put. That somehow that would give me some kind of peace or resolution.

Dr. Angela Dean: 19:29

You're not the first guest that I've talked to about that or even the people I work with clinically or myself, because my brother also died alone, but it was a medical event. And I think of, well, if I had just called him instead of texting him about a certain thing, or if I had done this, this or this, or what if he had done this and I go into this? Okay. But that doesn't change the outcome. But I think it's a natural thing that we do as human beings, this curiosity of, we need more information. Also, and I think you talked about this in the book, was wanting to know if he suffered, wanting to know if it was quick.

Anne Pinkerton: 20:05

Yeah. For some reason, I found it just extra harrowing to think about him being miserable. That just seemed like an extra injustice on top of everything else. So, yeah, that was a component of my exploring, was needing to know that he had not suffered unduly.

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:26

Yeah. So you mentioned it's been almost 18 years, right?

Anne Pinkerton: 20:30

Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:31

Yeah.

Anne Pinkerton: 20:33

Pretty wild.

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:34

Where are you today in your grief?

Anne Pinkerton: 20:37

You know, it's interesting.

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:39

I know there's no timeline, but I'm just curious.

Anne Pinkerton: 20:42

Which is a great thing to reinforce that there's no timeline, because there's a terrible misconception that somehow you go through certain steps and then you're all fixed, and it's fine. It's never really fine. It's very much something you just integrate into your life and carry with you. But I did something just before this that was kind of cool. A friend of mine, who of course I made through doing this kind of conversation, who's a grief counselor, had a photography exhibit that opened in the town next to mine called Faces of Grief. And it was all of these people who were photographed holding something of their loved ones. And sometimes it was a picture of them holding a picture, which was kind of meta and interesting. Sometimes it was them holding something that their person had owned that was important to them. Sometimes it was showing a memorial tattoo, things like that. So really, really neat. But my friend Shelly, who had helped organize this, said, there's an in-memoriam wall. We can take your Polaroid right now and you can be on it. And so literally right before I came home to get on the podcast with you, I pulled up a picture of my brother on my phone and took a picture of us together like that. And I thought, you know, this is kind of cool that I can sort of take a new picture with my brother. I mean, it's weird, and it's certainly not like it was in life, but I kind of love that right now, as of this morning, there's a new picture of us on a wall somewhere, and that people will see us together as siblings, and that's part of the whole continuation of the relationship that we touched on earlier. I think at this point, I can say that I get more joy about talking about him more. Which is a real gift. And I think maybe a reminder for people who are fresher in their loss that it really does get easier to carry and that now I can spend more time feeling really grateful that David was part of my life at all and that I get to talk about him and share his story with people as opposed to that raw, immediate, disorienting, devastated feeling. I don't feel devastated anymore. I feel sad, and I always will. And I feel ripped off, and I always will. But I don't feel gutted every day. I, in fact, feel more happiness about having had my brother at all than I do the loss, you know, which I think is a big perspective shift. And so that piece of it has actually been surprisingly rewarding. Yeah. Certainly, having the book out was something that helped a lot in terms of being able to feel like I'm carrying him forward.

Dr. Angela Dean: 23:34

Right. I truly believe that grief, because it's lifelong, is that we need to learn how to adapt that loss into our day-to-day. And what I'm gathering from you is that you've learned how to do that in a lot of ways, and I'm sure it's not easy at times. But it's nice to hear that there's some joy.

Anne Pinkerton: 23:52

There's a certain kind of reassurance too which makes this might sound a bit woo woo but i know i know that lots of other people get this way after they've lost someone that they cared about there's a mention in the book about orange subarus and i have this complete obsession with orange subarus because they feel like a wink from my brother and i've certainly talked to other people who you know see cardinals and think that's a sign of their loved one or it's the north star It's whatever these things that just show up. I mean, I have a friend whose mom believes that her dead sister is in every dime because her sister loved collecting dimes. I mean, it's whatever it is that was sort of part of your person. So I have this thing where every time I see an orange Subaru, I assume that my brother is saying hi to me. Now whether this has any basis in reality doesn't actually matter. It just gives me a good feeling and so I just have allowed that that's part of my world now. And I'm grateful so many people here in western Massachusetts drive them still because I see them all the time. I'm not hallucinating, that much I can tell you. Other people see them too. But I mean, I saw him this morning and I thought, well, that's him saying, cool, you're going to be on this podcast. You know, I just, I take it as this kind of affirmation that I'm okay. And that I've got this little guardian angel brother somewhere sort of thing. It's not something I talk about a lot because I don't need people to think I'm a weirdo, but I think it's perfectly normal for people to want the reassurance that there's a loving presence of your person somewhere. Since we don't know exactly what happens to us after we die, I think there's a natural tendency to just want to feel like they're okay. And so I take it as a nod that he's okay and that he's somewhere and he's still being my big brother, which is super weird because I'm older than him now. That's another piece of this puzzle that's been very strange is out aging my big brother. Because right now I'm five years older than he was when he died. And so that's an incredibly weird thing to say out loud.

Dr. Angela Dean: 26:02

It sure is. I remember struggling when I became older than my older brother. Like, that's weird. But he's still my older brother. So, yeah.

Anne Pinkerton: 26:13

Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 26:14

About the signs, I interviewed a different author, Karen McLean, and we spoke very much about her book and her approach to finding signs and asking for them, which I was a skeptic about. And then I started engaging in that, so…, I really encourage everyone to read your book, but I wonder if there are things that you would like to say about it, about the writing process.

Anne Pinkerton: 26:39

Yeah, I love talking about writing about loss in general. I actually occasionally do workshops about writing, writing through loss, because I like people to feel like there's a path that will move people forward. It's not over, it's forward. You don't get over it, you go through it.

Dr. Angela Dean: 26:57

Exactly.

Anne Pinkerton: 26:58

Was always a writer. And so that was part of my core identity. But I had not written anything like this before. And in fact, I didn't know I was going to write it at all, except I ended up in a bereavement writing group because a friend of mine who knew that writing was my jam suggested it when I was feeling stuck and alone. And she said she had done it and had been a great processing tool therapeutically now understand how much it does help people come to terms with whatever they've been through to work it through on the page. The bereavement writing group is really, I have to give major credit to in terms of being the complete launching point for what ended up becoming the book. In that experience, I not only realized how meaningful it was to work through losing David in writing, but to share it with other people who are around this table with me. These raw, not polished and very emotional pieces we were all sharing. And the way that people were relating and feeling seen and heard and acknowledged, which is such a big piece of, I think, feeling any kind of consolation about these kind of experiences. I was really blown in a way, it doesn't seem surprising to me at all. And saying it out loud, it's sort of a duh.

Dr. Angela Dean: 28:25

But at the time.

Anne Pinkerton: 28:27

It was revelatory that people thought what I was writing, was helpful in some way. And the longer I did that sort of writing, the more I thought, you know, maybe there's something more to this. And I do talk about this in the book, the process of moving from bereavement writing group into an MFA in creative nonfiction program, because I so wanted to figure out if and how I could write this story in a compelling and professional way. I had always written poetry and song lyrics before. And so narrative nonfiction just was something I knew I wasn't an expert in. And I knew that I wanted to figure out what that was all about. I also write as a big part of my job. And so it's relevant to that too. So anyways, I went to this amazing online grad program that I did while I was full-time working. And not only did it satisfy something that my brother David had always wanted for me, which was to go to grad school, it really taught me how to approach this writing in a really constructive way. And so my graduate thesis was the first draft of Were You Close? And it wasn't a finished manuscript. I kind of knew that at the time. I knew there was more to the story. But I had a great writing retreat about a year after I graduated, maybe two years after I graduated. And I finished the book then, shopped it around, which took a, you know, that's a whole other podcast to talk about the publishing world. It's a very, very long journey, but I literally had no idea that anybody would want to read my little story. I had no sense that what I went through and what my family went through would be of interest to anybody else. And I think the experience of just continuing to write about it and share that writing with others and get the feedback that, oh, yes, indeed, it was very interesting and helpful, made me feel sort of Almost... I'm obliged to finish it and make it into a real published book because, as you know full well, there's not a lot of literature about sibling loss. There's certainly not a lot of memoirs about it. And when I started writing it, there were even fewer. I've been heartened to see that there are a lot more that have been coming out in recent years, which is so helpful and important because stories are what connect us. Stories are what give us a sense of shared humanity. And so I'm really grateful to be part of that conversation in print. And I'm really, really grateful that the were you close question has resonated with people so much. I think that anyone who's lost anyone gets asked that at some point along the journey. It's a really strange question.

Dr. Angela Dean: 31:09

It is. I think it simplifies or minimizes the complexity of relationships and the human experience, because regardless of if it's a sibling or a spouse or a child, friend, you name the relationship, at some point you might be whatever close is, and then tomorrow you might not feel that way. And so to ask this very simplistic question, I know that in thinking about my own brother, at times Tony and I were, I would have said we were really close and then other times not. And in the last couple of weeks of his life, we were. And so when I was asked that question, I was like, I don't know how to answer that. Yes, I guess, but not as much as I'd want. So I was actually loving that you validated the complexity of that question and also how awkward it is that people ask that.

Anne Pinkerton: 31:58

Thank you.

Dr. Angela Dean: 32:00

No, thank you.

Anne Pinkerton: 32:01

And to let people off the hook who ask it, we don't give people good examples of how to talk about any of this.

Dr. Angela Dean: 32:07

Right.

Anne Pinkerton: 32:09

And I've had people say, well, if not, were you close? What do I say? And I go, first of all, I'm not going to prescribe a solution because I don't think that there's a one-size-fits-all here. Every relationship is different. Every loss is different. Everybody's relationship to grief is different. I try to encourage people to say things like, what was their name? What were they like? Because I think I'm not the only one who likes remembering my person. And so that gives people an opportunity to do that. But other than that, I, you know, just say you're sorry if you can't come up with anything, because at least it acknowledges that something hard happened. But, you know, we don't we don't have good tools, at least in American culture, to deal with any of this. And so I don't mean to shame anybody who's who's asked the question, because most of us have. And it's because it's one of the only things people have ever heard in relationship to death. But you're absolutely right that it minimizes what happened and denies the complexity because, as I said before, I felt really good about my relationship with David. There wasn't anything there that was unresolved, unsaid, you know, but what if there was? That would make it harder in a different way, too. If we weren't close, but what if I wished that we were? You know, that makes it hard. So it brought up all of that kind of thing for me. As I was writing, I was probing that question. And interestingly, I wrote the opening chapter, which is sort of, sort of functions like a prelude, prologue. What am I trying to do? Prologue, both. Yeah, and it's and of course it's titled were you close just like the the actual whole book is titled and I remember one of my professors in grad school said that's a great title. It's very provocative. It's very compelling and I said, oh. Because I had a weird working title that I wasn't attached to. And so I was really grateful that she gave me that gift of observing that and making that recommendation. And it has been a really good opener because it's so universal, at least in our culture. But as you say, it's way too blunt a tool. You know, it doesn't do justice to what's actually happening.

Dr. Angela Dean: 34:29

I know in my clinical work and partly because of training, you know, when I'm asking people about relationships and that first intake, part of what I used to ask was tell me about parents, children, whatever we're working on. And I did used to ask that question, were you close? And I started to change it a little bit after my brother died. That's a strange thing. I'm asking people, tell me about your relationship and were you close? And then when I read your book, the first time I was like, I really need to stop asking that question as a psychologist. I just don't ask that in that same way anymore.

Anne Pinkerton: 35:05

Wow. Well, I'm touched that it was that poignant for you.

Dr. Angela Dean: 35:09

Yeah. I find sometimes it's helpful for people to, you know, sort of like what I did at the beginning of the podcast. Tell me about your brother, right?

Anne Pinkerton: 35:19

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Angela Dean: 35:19

Let's make him present in this conversation.

Anne Pinkerton: 35:23

I think that's really nice.

Dr. Angela Dean: 35:24

Because that gives us the freedom to talk about it in whatever way we want to.

Anne Pinkerton: 35:28

I like that. And I think a lot of people like talking about their person. And you can just say, what was your relationship like? If you really want to probe the whole closeness thing.

Dr. Angela Dean: 35:41

Yeah. It is also a more open-ended question. What was your relationship like?

Anne Pinkerton: 35:47

Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 35:49

Well, so you have your brother Tommy. me as well. And it sounds like the relationship there has changed over time.

Anne Pinkerton: 35:58

It has and it hasn't, which is really interesting. I mean, of course, the thing about writing a memoir is that you captured a moment in time and then there's the time after it. And certainly things continue to evolve. Tommy and I are still not what I would call close. Yet I love him terribly and I want the best for him because he's my brother. We just don't have a lot of the same interests or values. And that's tricky business sometimes, we will always have, in a way that nobody else will have, our shared love of David and our shared pain over losing him, which is a bond that is pretty powerful despite everything else. I think that he and I both have kind of mutually struggled at our attempts to find our way into each other's lives in other ways i mean. I don't see him often i don't talk to him often we did as i captured in the book have years of playing words with friends together which was very funny um because every day we would at least do like a move of letters and it showed the other person we're out there somewhere. He still lives in Texas. So we're 1500 miles apart and I don't make it back nearly enough. And he has only come this way once when I got married a long, long, long time ago. That one's at least easy for me to say, no, we're really not close. It doesn't mean that when he dies, if he predeceases me, It isn't going to be difficult and painful in all kinds of unique ways, obviously. But we don't even play words with friends anymore. I mean, I actually did a book event and people had read the book and said, I think there was this desire on the part of some of the readers to know that we had gotten closer, which I thought was such a loving kind of wish. It's not true, though. I'm trying to think. We talked at Christmas. But when I say talked, we sent a couple of texts. It's not a deep situation. I don't think I've kind of come to terms with the fact that it's just not going to be. We both know that the other person is out there somewhere and is accessible should we meet each other. It's just such a different relationship. And I'm sure that everyone who's had multiple siblings has wildly different relationships with each of them. And I think it was very, very hard that we both lost the sibling we were the closest to. So, I mean, it reminds me a little bit of when I had four cats and two of them died and they were the ones that the living two were connected with. And I was like, I'm so sorry, you're the ones left behind because they don't like each other. You know, but it reminded me of Tommy and me being left behind where we were both like, oh, no, like we're the ones left. I mean, it's it's sort of funny, but it's a horrible thing to say anyone should have gone. But it's ironic that the two of us, who had a barely there relationship to start with, were the ones that were left behind to try to figure out whether there was anything else. Turns out it's not a lot. Even though I know we love each other. And I know we wish each other the best. It's just not tight.

Dr. Angela Dean: 39:21

That speaks to sibling relationships. We can't assume that they're all similar.

Anne Pinkerton: 39:27

For sure.

Dr. Angela Dean: 39:29

Even within the same family.

Anne Pinkerton: 39:31

So, like, yes, I have him. But barely, you know, I have tons and tons of people in my life that are more sibling-like to me on a regular basis, and they're just not blood relations, so... That's the luckiness, I guess, that we at least have chosen family to fill some of those gaps.

Dr. Angela Dean: 39:50

And you shared early on in the conversation what you would want people to know about sibling loss. Are there other things that come up that you think that you'd want to share?

Anne Pinkerton: 40:01

I mean, I just wish that people would acknowledge that it's a big one. I just wish that, and by people, I mean people who haven't been through it, because if you've been through it, you know it's a big one. I suppose I wish that in general we would talk about death and grief more. Because if you live long enough, it happens to all of us in some way. And as I noted, so many of us have brothers and sisters. It's going to happen. So given that something is such a universal experience and is so not talked about, I just wish people would talk about it because I think that that's the way we keep it from being taboo or shameful. I felt particularly broken. I thought, well, there's something really wrong with me because other people don't think this is a big deal. And I can't overestimate how much it's become a pretty prevalent mission in my life to let people know that they're not broken if they are devastated by losing their brother or sister. It is a normal thing to feel bad about. It doesn't seem like rocket science that it would be, but somehow we have made it very difficult as a society. And so I guess that's what I would say Just don't undermine anybody's experience of loss and know that brothers and sisters are really unique relationships in this life. There's nothing quite like them. Even all of that chosen family I just talked about, they don't know what it was like to be a kid with me. They don't know what it was like in our household. There's something that gets lost along with the person, which is that history and understanding. It's a very big deal.

Dr. Angela Dean: 41:42

Right. It's a loss of that past and, like you said, the future as well.

Anne Pinkerton: 41:47

Right.

Dr. Angela Dean: 41:48

Thank you for all of that. What are your favorite memories of you and David?

Anne Pinkerton: 41:54

What a good question. I've never been asked that before. I loved growing up with him. Because he was 12 years older than me, he was out of the house before I was very old. But when I was tiny, tiny, he was so fun and so lovely. And I, in retrospect, kind of get stunned by how fun he thought having a baby sister was. Because I don't think Tommy thought it was that fun. I think Tommy was annoyed.

Dr. Angela Dean: 42:25

A 12-year-old boy thinking you were fun.

Anne Pinkerton: 42:27

It's sort of surprising that a 12-year-old boy thought that having a baby sister was fun. But I think he really thought it was fun because he took really good care of me and was incredibly sweet. I do talk about some of these things in the book, but he taught me how to ride my first bike. And I remember so badly wanting to make him proud and how encouraging he was and how incredibly celebratory he was. That's a very formative thing to have happen with somebody. You know, it wasn't my dad. It wasn't my mom. It was my big brother teaching me how to do pedals. And it was so on brand for him since he became a cycling driver. Lunatic. I mean, he probably liked biking as much as anything. So it was really appropriate that I learned that from him. So I love that. I also love the times we went on trips together as a family. Interestingly, I'm not a terribly sporty person now, but our family was kind of sporty. We went water skiing and snow skiing. And so it was terribly fun doing that kind of stuck with him too. So in a way, some of my loveliest memories of him have to do with the things that he was so big on doing, which was being outside and doing athletic stuff. Those were really, really good things. I also, I know that he told me bedtime stories that were hilarious. I talked about this at his memorial service and did get a giggle, which is quite something given that there were like 600 people who were all devastated in this church. But I talked about the fact that he had a really funny sense of humor and was a complete goofball and would tell me stories about characters called Humpy and Bumpy. Humpy was a camel and Bumpy was a boy with terrible acne. And I mean, just the premise alone, it's hilarious. And so Humpy and Bumpy is something I'll never forget. And he just did that kind of cool stuff with me when I was little. And I just remember him being loads of fun and terribly supportive and really, really always egging me on, which I think being my cheerleader was such a huge thing. And nothing made me more gratified than when his friends told me that he would talk about me and that he was so proud of me. I mean, that makes me emotional to think about because. I wasn't ever a success like he was. He was a doctor. He was an athlete. He had trophies. I went off and was the weird artist in the family. And so to know that he was proud of me making music and writing and all the things that I identify with and love doing, that he didn't think that doing words and pictures as a job for marketing was lame, which I think Tommy thinks is kind of lame, to be honest. You know, David treated it with great curiosity because it wasn't what he did, but he was always really interested in it. I loved that he didn't do the sibling thing of thinking that what I liked was dumb. Even though we liked such different things, he always thought it was interesting and wanted to understand why I liked what I liked. I think I reflected that back to him because I was always wanting to hear about his races and about his radiology practice. And I was interested in the things that he was interested in simply because he loved them. So, yeah, I have a lot of good memories. I have a lot of stuff to keep me warm in that capacity. I wish I had more, but I'm grateful. I'm very, very grateful for that stuff.

Dr. Angela Dean: 46:01

Do you find in writing that you discovered more of those memories?

Anne Pinkerton: 46:05

Yes, yes, yes, yes. In fact, I'm so fascinated with memory, and I think it's safe to say I don't actually have a terribly good one, sort of at face value. Writing is an incredible tool for remembering. It's absolutely stunning. In fact, there's a prompt that I have used in a bunch of writing workshops, which is one that I stole from my grad school advisor, called I Don't Remember. And you start with I don't remember and you keep writing and ultimately you get to things you remember it's a funny little trick that like it turns it turns on its head you know you could say I don't remember that scar on his chin but then all of a sudden you do you remember you know you remember it or it just it takes you into a place that you you can't even imagine oh yes I did I remembered all kinds of stuff in the writing and with the caveat that memory is fallible and absolutely there there's so much that i wonder if i remember because we took really great pictures of it or my parents told me about it or whatever you know that maybe i wasn't even actually on the scene for but memoirists make those disclaimers that memory is fallible but i certainly did, find in the writing that there were there were lots of openings to places that i didn't realize i was going to be able to go and it was great yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 47:28

Thank you for that someone recently told me that as they were writing about their life they were discovering more and i was like because as i was reading your book i was like you have an incredible memory for all of these details and.

Anne Pinkerton: 47:42

Well, you know, I think that probably the most interesting chapter as relates to that is the one called looking up to where I talk about being a kid. I have dialogue and I didn't have a journal where I was writing this down when I was five, you know, like, that's not a thing. So that's one of those creative nonfiction things people. Oh, it's creative nonfiction. So you make things up. Now, it's creative nonfiction because you're trying to recreate something to the best of your ability with the information and memories that you have. It's the one chapter that I showed anybody before I published it because I wanted to make sure it was more correct since I wasn't an adult at the time. So my dad took a look at that. And it was so validating that he said that absolutely feels like a scene that would have happened with us in real life that he felt I had captured the essence of. Because I needed to give some kind of context to readers about what it was like growing up with them. And so I felt like this one scene at our cabin where we went water skiing was an important place. It has a nice metaphor in it too. But anyway, it's not journalistic, you know, it's not documentary, it's memory. And so there is an important distinction there. But the fact that it felt true to my dad, who was there as an adult many, many times, was a really nice kind of gut check for me. Certainly parts of it I was writing while I was living, which is also interesting. So those details were crystal clear because I was actually doing research while I was writing. I didn't call it research at the time. I called it just following my curiosity. You know, talking to Mark Scott Nash, who wrote the Colorado 14er Disasters book, poring over things online in various 14ers chat rooms and stuff. It was happening in the moment. So that stuff was easier for me to relive. And then there was the kind of vividness of just, I don't think that it's easy to forget where you were and what you were doing when you get that call. So, it was a combination of things that I had to utilize to put together the actual storytelling process.

Dr. Angela Dean: 49:56

Well, thank you so much. And where can our listeners find you? And I will put this all in the show notes as well.

Anne Pinkerton: 50:03

Sure. I have a website where all of my stuff is collected. That's annepinkertonwriter.com. And certainly there are plenty of links to purchasing the book at all the places. I would encourage listeners not to use the one that starts with a capital A if they can avoid it. But it is available there also. And I have links to my social media there and all that good stuff. So that's probably the best hub to send people to.

Dr. Angela Dean: 50:30

All right. Well, thank you. And then as we develop a few more things, maybe our listeners will hear from you. Thank you.

Anne Pinkerton: 50:37

I would love the opportunity to talk again. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Angela Dean: 50:41

You're welcome.

Outro: 50:43

Thank you so much for listening. Our theme song was written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean and performed by Joe Mylward. The Broken Pack is more than a podcast. Visit thebrokenpack.com to sign up for Wild Grief, our newsletter. And to explore everything else we're building. If today's episode resonated, you can send us fan mail or support the show using the links in the show notes. Information on Wild Grief, our social media, resources, and our guests can be found wherever you get your podcasts. Please like, follow, subscribe, and share. Thanks again.