Why I Didn’t Grieve My Sister’s Death 

By Mary Garden

When my sister died, I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel heartbroken. I felt relief.

It was August 2023. My sister Anna had just passed away. Instead of overwhelming sadness, I felt a quiet calm ‒ even a sense of safety.

Grief isn’t always what people expect. Sometimes it’s mixed with anger, exhaustion, or, yes, peace. And sometimes, like in my case, relief.

We’re told that sibling bonds should be lifelong, sacred. That blood is thicker than water. That we should “get over it” or reconcile when things go wrong. But what if your sibling was the source of your fear? What if the relationship was marked by violence, betrayal and trauma?

That was my reality.

For much of my life, I carried an invisible wound I didn’t fully understand until a psychologist gave it a name: sibling abuse. Even then, I hesitated to use that label. It felt taboo to say my own sister abused me. Society expects siblings to love each other unconditionally, no matter how they behave.

But Anna’s aggression wasn’t childhood squabbling. It was physical violence and emotional torment ‒ and it continued into adulthood.

I wrote about it in My Father’s Suitcase, my memoir exploring our fractured relationship, and the violence that rippled through our family. My book was my way of shedding light on a neglected form of family violence that many people don’t even realise exists. Research shows it’s the most common form of family violence, yet it’s often dismissed as “just kids being kids”. Its impact is lasting. It affects mental health, relationships, self-worth. 

In our family, sibling abuse was just one layer. My father was controlling, volatile. My mother, trapped. Anna had struggled with her mental health from childhood, eventually being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. But long before that, her behaviour was unpredictable and, often, frightening. I was usually the target. I was told I was provoking her. That I was too sensitive. 

That gaslighting shaped me. I internalised the blame ‒ and repeated the pattern in adult relationships with violent men.

Writing helped break the cycle. My Father’s Suitcase wasn’t just a memoir. It was a reckoning.

And yet, when Anna died, my first thought wasn’t the funeral. It was an old leather suitcase that had belonged to our father.

That suitcase had sat under his bed for decades. Scuffed, battered, stuffed with logbooks, photographs, and press clippings from his 1930 solo flight from England to Australia. He had been a pioneering aviator, flying for British Airways in the 1930s, and later across the Tasman in majestic flying boats. The suitcase was the last physical link to his glory days. He had sold everything else; he was a compulsive gambler who spent more on horses than on his family. Mum once said he was the meanest man she’d ever known.

I wrote about him in Sundowner of the Skies, my biography that took me years to research and write. It was published in May 2019. 

Just over a year later, I found that Anna had written her own book ‒ Oscar Garden: A Tale of One Man’s Love of Flying. Written in secret over just nine months, it plagiarised my work, as well as other aviation books and 1930 articles. It was withdrawn from sale, but the damage was done.

This felt like an extension of her abuse, another betrayal. 

That suitcase meant everything to me. But after Anna’s book was published, I was reeling. I sent the suitcase to Anna in Auckland, not out of generosity, but out of despair. I just wanted it ‒ and my father ‒ out of my life.

But when Anna died, the first thing I thought was: I want the suitcase back. Not because I needed the object. But because it represented something I had lost ‒ history, inheritance. I wanted to reclaim that part of myself.

I asked my brother if I could have it back. He said, “For sure.”

That battered case was more than a relic. It was a symbol of survival. Of stories stolen and returned. 

Anna lived longer than anyone expected. She died peacefully at Northhaven Hospital in Auckland, at 1:35am on 19 August 2023.

Two weeks earlier, I’d had a vivid dream. We were on holiday together, talking and laughing like we were young again. At one point, I said, “I’m sorry if anything I’ve said has hurt you.”

She smiled and replied, “Maybe you need more therapy.”

It was such a strange thing for Anna to say. She didn’t believe in therapy ‒ and she was the one who needed it most. I’d had plenty! 

When I woke up, I felt calm. Warmth. Even love. As if she was in the room with me.

Despite everything, we’d once been close. We’d shared a bedroom for years. As children and teenagers, we’d been best friends ‒ closer to each other than to anyone else.

After her death, I didn’t grieve. I’d already done that years earlier ‒ grieved the sister I’d become estranged from. What I felt now was closure. And, unexpectedly, a sense of peace.

A week later, the suitcase arrived from New Zealand. Battered and scuffed, just as I remembered it. It felt like something had come full circle.

—

Bio:  Mary Garden is a freelance journalist with a PhD in Journalism (USC). Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including The Australian, Meanjin, The Guardian, New Zealand Herald, Newsroom (NZ), and The Humanist. She is an award-winning author of three books: The Serpent Rising, a memoir of her years with various gurus in India in the 1970s; Sundowner of the Skies, a biography of her father, Oscar Garden, a pioneer aviator; and My Father’s Suitcase, which has won multiple international book awards.

MY FATHER’S SUITCASE

A gripping tale of resilience and survival that offers hope to others who have experienced family violence and suffered at the hands of a sibling.

A deeply personal and heartbreaking memoir that explores the troubled relationship between Mary Garden and her younger sister, Anna. (Anna died in 2023, after a short illness.)

Mary unpacks her life of growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s and ’60s, before making Australia home. She reveals complex layers of intergenerational trauma, including the baggage of her eccentric, deeply flawed father and the secret her mother kept from all of them, revealed only after her death. Mary deals movingly with her sister’s long battle with mental illness and how she once saved Anna’s life.

As she unravels these narratives, Mary touches on the guilt and shame familiar to anyone who has had to deal with secrets, violence and ‘madness’ in their family.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing