Sibling estrangement is a hidden form of grief, leaving families to navigate silence, unresolved pain and the loss of relationships that once felt unbreakable.
FAMILIES prepare us for many kinds of loss. We learn how to mourn parents. We know how to comfort a friend who has lost a spouse. We understand the rituals that accompany death – the flowers, the condolences, the meals left at the doorstep. But almost no one prepares us for losing a sibling who is still alive – not through death but through silence.
Somewhere, there is a woman who still remembers the little boy who followed her everywhere. He trailed behind her through childhood with scraped knees, endless questions and the quiet certainty that his older sister would always know what to do.
She became more than a sibling. She stepped into spaces that life left empty. She attended school meetings when others could not. She sat across from teachers, untangled teenage dramas and became the keeper of secrets that felt too frightening to share with their parents. She celebrated his victories as though they were her own and softened his failures before they became scars.
She did these things not because she had to but because that is what love sometimes looks like between siblings. It is rarely grand. More often, it is found in ordinary acts repeated over many years until they become invisible.
Then, one day, the silence arrived. Not after a dramatic argument. Not because of some unforgivable betrayal. It crept in quietly, one unanswered message at a time, one missed celebration after another, until the relationship that had once felt unbreakable became something fragile and unfamiliar.
Somewhere along the way, a story was told. A conversation repeated. Words attributed to her that she insists she never spoke. Whether they were misunderstood, exaggerated or entirely invented, almost no longer matters. What mattered was that someone else’s version of events became more believable than years of shared history.
Perhaps that is what makes sibling estrangement so devastating. It is rarely just about the silence; it is about watching decades of memories lose their authority to a single misunderstanding. It is about realising that the person who once knew you best has begun to know you only through someone else’s telling.
Sibling estrangement is far more common than most families are willing to admit. Researchers have found that family relationships between adult siblings can fracture over unresolved childhood wounds, family politics, inheritance disputes, marriages, differing values or simply years of unspoken resentment.
Sometimes there is a defining incident. Other times, there isn’t. The relationship simply erodes until one day both siblings are living entirely separate lives, connected only by blood and shared photographs from another time.
Yet, it remains one of the least acknowledged forms of grief. There are no condolence cards for the brother who no longer calls. No funeral to mark the end of what once existed. No socially accepted way to explain why someone who shares your childhood no longer shares your present.
People often offer comforting advice.
“Give it time.”
“Reach out again.”
“People always come back.”
Perhaps they do. But there is a particular kind of heartbreak in waiting for someone to remember that you have never stopped loving them. There is an exhaustion that comes from carrying a relationship alone, hoping that one day the weight will be shared again.
Estrangement also has a cruel habit of rewriting history. The years spent showing up become forgotten. Acts of care are quietly erased. The sibling who once stood beside you in every important chapter slowly becomes a stranger or worse, a villain in a story you were never invited to tell.
Families often speak about forgiveness as though it were a destination but forgiveness is difficult when there has never been a conversation. Healing is complicated when one person is still trying to understand what broke in the first place.
Perhaps that is why sibling estrangement feels different from every other loss.
Hope never quite disappears; it changes shape. It becomes quieter, less demanding. It settles into the background of everyday life, surfacing unexpectedly at birthdays, festivals, weddings and family photographs where someone is noticeably absent. Because no matter how much time passes, a brother remains a brother. A sister remains a sister.
Love does not always disappear when a relationship does. Sometimes, it simply has nowhere left to go.
Perhaps, somewhere today, another brother has stopped calling. Another sister is staring at an old photograph, wondering when the distance began. Another family is pretending that nothing is broken because acknowledging the fracture feels harder than living with it.
Blood may be thicker than water. But it is not thicker than silence. And silence, left untouched for long enough, has a way of convincing even family that they have become strangers.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun
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