Trigger warnings – suicide, death, grief

After my elder brother James’s recent death — sudden, brutal, yet also layered and nuanced — I found myself gripped by a red-hot anger that lasted for weeks and that still bubbles beneath the surface. I find this much more unsettling than grief, which I am not afraid of. I have lived inside it for long enough now to know the territory well. But anger, particularly when it comes with such force, feels destabilising and is exhausting in a completely different way.

James’s death was shocking. Suicide deaths are like that. There had been rupture beforehand, and longstanding fractures before that. In the days and weeks that followed, I noticed that what rose most quickly in me was not sorrow but a sense of profound injustice. The way so many events unfolded felt abrupt, cutting, unfinished. Even in death, there were layers of interference, narrative, and silence that left me feeling as though the relationship I had with my brother had for so long been shaped and constrained by forces beyond my control.

My anger is rarely random. It usually points somewhere precise and shows me what most matters when an injustice has been committed. Despite my familiarity with anger and my relative ease in accessing it, I can also be quick to dismiss it, knowing as I do that — for me at least — it can act as a cover for sadness and grief. But anger also carries information about sovereignty. About whether I have been allowed to stand in my own relationship, to speak in my own voice, to grieve in my own way.

What startled me was not that I was angry. It was how quickly I wanted to smooth it over with understanding. I can see complexity. I can see the strain inside relationships, the defensive reflexes people reach for when shame or guilt feels intolerable. I know that suicide is not a single-cause event, and I would never want to collapse it into blame. The person who dies is the one who makes the final act, even when the surrounding circumstances feel constricted and choices seem diminished.

And yet.

Understanding can arrive so quickly within me that it smooths over my own injury before I have allowed it to register. When I move too fast toward empathy, I risk skipping the part where I honour that I, too, have lost something precious. The impulse to zoom out and contextualise becomes a violent form of self-abandonment.

In conversations with two wise therapists, two notions have been guiding me. The first is that anger is not an obstacle to mourning; it is part of it. If grief is the landscape, anger is one of its climates. Beneath it, I can feel the older sadness — not only of the death itself, but of the relationship with my brother that was lost ten years ago. There is grief for what was, and grief for what might still have been had he chosen differently at critical junctures in his life.

The second idea is sovereignty. When I ask myself what my anger is protecting, the answer is not revenge or vindication. It is dignity. It is the right to tell my own story. It is the right to hold my relationship with my brother in the way that feels true to me, without being pulled into curated versions or silences. It is the refusal to let someone else’s defensive storytelling determine the meaning of the sibling bond I had for decades before our relationship was interfered with.

This does not require public accusation. Nothing is gained by villain-making. In families, especially when young adults are watching and navigating their own grief, my capacity to remain on moral ground matters, if only to me. Responsibility is a more useful stance than blame. We are each responsible for how we speak to one another, how we withdraw, how we stay connected despite brutally hard circumstances, and how we refuse or make steps to repair. It does not change the harshest immediate outcome, but it shapes ongoing connection.

I have also been reflecting on forgiveness. Western culture pushes us toward it as though it were a moral milestone we must eventually reach. But forgiveness, if it means absolving someone of all responsibility, feels like saccharine to me. There are harms that cannot be undone. There are ruptures that cannot be repaired because one of the parties is no longer alive. What may be possible, eventually, is not absolution but release — a loosening of the heat in my body so that I am no longer bound to the pain of it. That is different, and it cannot be rushed.

For now, what feels more honest is that the shape of my anger matches the shape of my relationship. It is layered, complicated, threaded with love, frustration, loyalty, and distance. The grief of an adult sibling is not the grief of a beloved child or a spouse. It does not have the same cavernous, life-altering depth. That does not make it minor or irrelevant; it makes it specific.

If I stay long enough with the sensations — the surge in the chest, the heaviness down the front of the body, the moment when strength evaporates through my pathetic arms — I know that anger is not my enemy. It is a messenger pointing toward something unfinished and something precious. It asks where my agency is, where my voice is, and where I stand in my own story.

My work now is less to transcend anger than to feel it fully. To allow it to clarify the boundaries of my own sovereignty before moving more fully towards grief. To grieve in a way that honours the bond I had with James without needing to agree with the stories others may want to tell. To love him as my amazing, loving, generous, and caring big brother without erasing any of the injury that accompanied our later years. To remain upright, grounded in my own sovereignty, despite the intense complexity. And to trust that peace, when it comes, will come from standing fully in that place rather than from minimising the hurt.

I am blessed to have so many supportive practices in this process — from journalling to mushrooms, from meditation to mountain walks, from cuddling the dog to playing the piano. I need them all.