How the death of my brother Liam inspired me to improve support for grieving siblings

by Callum Fairhurst, aged 27, founder of Sibling Support

Just bringing up your sibling’s name and remembering certain things, even writing them down, can help; externalising those thoughts and memories is quite special.

My brother Liam died when he was 14 and I was 12. He was first diagnosed with cancer when he was ten. We thought the cancer had gone after an operation, but it spread to his lungs and quickly became terminal.

The day my parents found out his cancer was terminal; they were late picking me up from school. When they arrived, they explained everything to me. I remember crossing the road with them, and the lollipop lady, obviously thinking I was just a sad kid, said: ‘Oh, not a good day then?’ and one of my parents saying: ‘No, his brother’s been re-diagnosed with cancer’. I remember these moments quite strongly, but at the time I often tried to ignore things and didn’t like finding out the details of what was going on.

Liam was gravely ill at points and going to and from hospital the whole time. He raised so much money for charity that he became quite a big figure regionally and nationally. We went to London once and the taxi driver and someone in Burger King knew who he was. In our own town people were always wanting to chat with him and congratulate him on his fundraising - it was constant. I was always the other little kid in the corner who was quite shy and didn’t want to speak about things. There wasn’t as much attention, but it was understandable, and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

Liam was told multiple times he had weeks left to live but in fact it turned out to be years. He was just the most incredible person - you would never have guessed he was as ill as he was. On a snowy day in February, he came home from hospital in London with an oxygen tank. The journey had taken hours and hours because of the snow. I knew at that moment the end was near but a week and a half later he was back to normal again. So, whenever something happened, I thought in the back of my mind, that he’d get through it and that was what kept me going.

I guess I knew the finality of his illness and that in general terms he wouldn’t be there at some point, but Liam just kept defying the odds. Now that I am emotionally more stable and able to deal with it, I try to live with the memories a bit more. When I was younger though, I put them aside and did everything I could to ignore what was happening because I didn’t feel ready.

I don’t really know how I felt straight after Liam died, although it was of course the hardest day of my entire life. Yet I remember what I was doing before and what I was doing after, I remember who was in the house, I remember the exact moment, I remember the words that I said to Liam. I remember absolutely everything about it so clearly.

I felt so emotionless in many ways, so sad but trying to block that emotion from my head. And in the weeks that followed, I also had a burning drive and ambition to live Liam’s life as well as my own. And still now, I remind myself that I’ve got two lives to lead. Some would debate how healthy this feeling is, but for me, it’s a useful one.

A few hours after Liam died, I went outside to play with my friends. A couple were in Liam’s year and were his friends, so they were also grieving. They were all sad and shocked, but they rallied around me, not in a way that you’d get adults dealing with a grieving person, more in the way that they were just there for me.

I was trying to get back to some normality as soon as I could and within a week I went back to school. My parents were worried that I wasn’t dealing with it, but they realised that this was my way of dealing with things. At school I didn’t want any support as the idea of speaking to a counsellor, therapist, teacher or friend seemed like the worst thing. I didn’t want to talk about it - my brother had just died, and this was for me to deal with, so I was going to hide my emotions.

There were attempts to try and get support and help but I threw them away. I knew I needed support that wasn’t formalised, something where I could just research how I felt. Was it OK to play outside? Was I wrong to not want to visit his grave or for crying a little bit and then just getting on with life? I wanted an informal way of Googling this kind of thing without anyone else knowing.

I began seeking support on reaching milestones that Liam didn’t make, and when I became older than he was when he died. For instance, when I moved from secondary school to sixth form I had some support, but it didn’t work for me as I wasn’t responsive to it.

It was after sixth form, during my gap year and upon starting university, that I started really grieving. It took me seven years to start grieving in typical ways that many people express, which is when I sought some form of support. It really helped to talk things through and not be rushed into it. I had two or three sessions of just chatting and trying to find some logical way of processing the feelings I was having.

My advice to other grieving siblings is that people experience grief differently. It’s OK to feel how you feel and it’s OK for others to feel how they feel. Don’t compare your grief to other people’s; just because you don’t feel as sad or feel sadder, doesn’t mean someone cares more or less than you or that you’re in a different stage, it’s just that you experience things differently at various times.

My second tip is to speak about it. I struggled to speak about it when I was younger, but it really does help just chatting to someone else. You don’t have to talk about how awful you feel, you don’t have to talk about your deep emotions. Just bringing up your sibling’s name and remembering certain things, even writing them down, can help; externalising those thoughts and memories is quite special. My final piece of advice is to remember that you’re not alone and that there are lots of people who have experienced grief, even if it’s differently.

Something that comforts me is that, although Liam isn’t here physically, there are times in my life where I can see Liam in me. I see me do or say things, or act in a certain way that reminds me of Liam, so he’s still here, albeit not physically. I go through peaks and troughs and a full range of different emotions but, in a bizarre way, Liam’s death and keeping his legacy alive, has made me who I am today.

I call siblings the ‘forgotten grievers. Lots of amazing charities do some magnificent work with all sorts of children affected by bereavement but siblings are so frequently and unintentionally forgotten about, which is why I started Sibling Support.

I had identified a huge gap in terms of the type of informal support that many young people wanted. I’d done loads of research looking at academic studies, of which there are very few that are sibling specific. I’d also looked at websites which, if they spoke about siblings, were either too adult or complicated in their approach for young people.

I thought that it would be good to have a website that would reassure grieving siblings that they are not alone, that it’s OK to feel the way they do and it’s OK to get formal support. I also wanted somewhere where all the questions young people had could be answered, and where they could read stories about other bereaved siblings who had the same or similar experiences and spoke about them honestly.

That idea is grown, and now Sibling Support sends out thousands of sibling specific bereavement resources every year. It supports bereavement professionals to ‘think sibling’. We’ve got a mindfulness walk around the Norfolk broads to help grieving children and so much.

I’m an ordinary 27-year-old - other than that my brother died. It feels weird when I get to know people who don’t immediately know about Liam’s death, especially as where I grew up everyone knew about him and knew I was his brother. I’m now forging my own life path where people don’t know the story of Liam, but for me the story of Liam is the reason I do what I do.

Photo: Callum and Liam

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