Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn

Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn is the author of The Empty Room: Surviving Sibling Loss, a memoir and journalistic exploration of sibling loss. Her brother, Ted, suffered from a rare immune deficiency disorder and spent 8 years in an isolation room behind a plastic curtain before he died. He was one of two boys upon whom the movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” was based. She is a contributing writer for More magazine, and has also written for Self, Discover, Psychology Today and Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications. Elizabeth is currently working on a new book, The Death of Cancer, with her father, Dr. Vincent T. DeVita. She lives in New York City with her husband, writer Paul Raeburn, and her son, Henry. To learn more about Elizabeth and her work go to: www.devitaraeburn.com or visit her blog: www.tedishere.blogspot.com Elizabeth appeared on the radio show “Healing the Grieving Heart” discussing the Death of a Sibling. To hear her interviewed by Dr. Gloria & Dr. Heidi Horsley, click on the following link: www.voiceamericapd.com/health/010157/horsley070705.mp3

Articles:

Open to  hope

Poem: For George

I received this astonishing poem in the mail, along with a letter from the author, Robin Standish, in 2005. Unfortunately, it got lost in the pile of papers on my desk. A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning up (finally), and came across it. I can’t tell you how moved I was, how blown away by what Standish captured, about early sibling loss. Standish was 7 when her 2-year-old brother, George, died of leukemia. She didn’t even know he was sick. Or rather, her parents had neglected to define what was wrong with him. She assumed, as she writes […]

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Film Review: “Ghosted”

All I needed to hear about the movie, “Ghosted,” was that it explored the aftermath of grief and loss and, of course, I was interested. Having lost my brother when I was 14, I have had a life-long interest in these topics. “Ghosted” is the story of Sophie Schmitt, a Hamburg-based video artist, and her lover, Aing-Lee, a young woman from Taiwan. They meet when Aing-Li travels to Germany to visit an uncle, work in his restaurant, and uncover a secret about her birth. We learn all of this in flashback. The movie actually begins the tale after Aing-Lee’s death. We don’t […]

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Film Review: Departures

“Departures” is the story of Daigo Kobayashi, a passionate cellist with a dream job in an orchestra, who finds himself abruptly out of job — and in huge debt for a very pricey cello — when the orchestra dissolves. What do you do when your dream has fizzled and you’ve got to re-group? You go home, and you look for another job. Daigo and his apparently unflappable wife, Miko, head to Hirano, in northeastern Japan, where Daigo grew up. Daigo has inherited the house he grew up in from his mother, who died while he was abroad some years earlier. […]

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How Does Sibling-Loss Affect One’s Parenting?

By Elizabeth Devita-Raeburn — If you poke around in sibling loss literature, one unanswered question you come across is–does losing a sibling make sibling survivors more or less likely to have children? And do they tend to have “extra” children, just in case they lose one? FYI, I don’t have an answer to this. In my case, I simply had too much baggage to deal with to have children earlier in life. (I had my son, Henry, at 40.) But the question does interest me. As does the issue of how sibling survivors, like myself, parent siblings (something I have […]

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Holden Caufield: Still relevant?

First off, I love J.D. Salinger and all of his books. So I was surprised when, as my step-kids went through that particular reading phase in high school when they were assigned Catcher in the Rye, they reported that they kind of hated it. Whaaaat? One big problem, they said, was that they couldn’t really relate to Holden, the teenage, trash-talking, car-wreck of a main character. As I thought about it, it made sense. I mean, the language is dated. Holden’s lifestyle–tony prep school, money, a lot of freedom, doesn’t resemble the way most kids live. (Unless you watch “NYC […]

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Gorgeous short movie about the loss of two siblings—check it out

So, a few months back, I gave a talk about sibling loss at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As you might imagine, there tend to be quite a few bereft siblings in the audience at these things. And they all have stories. Amazing, sad, beautiful ones that both elate me—because they’re a celebration of the bond—and make me want to cry. This particular evening was no exception. After the talk, a woman named Chrissy Rubin came up to me and told me that she had lost two siblings—Greg, 22, on July 9, 1984, and Carolyn, 43, exactly twenty years later, […]

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Carrying

Okay, I talk about “carrying” a lot, with regard to sibling loss. What do I mean by that? I mean the tendency we surviving siblings have to find a way to “carry” our lost siblings forward into our present-day lives. It’s a way of continuing the relationship with some one who is gone—in fact, grief-speak for this phenomenon is “continuing bonds.” How people do it varies, but why we do it is more straightforward. We try to carry our siblings forward because they are part of our identities, and our half of the relationship doesn’t end with their deaths. We […]

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What is Disenfranchised Grief?

When I was 14, my brother and only sibling, Ted, died. One of my more memorable experiences from that time is of standing next to his grave, watching, devastated, as they lowered his casket into the ground. A woman separated herself from the crowd, leaned down, took me by the arm, and leaned in, close enough so that I could see the lipstick on her teeth and smell her perfume. “You’ll have to be very good now,” she said, somberly. “Your parents are going through a lot.” I wrote about that scene in my book–apologies to those of you who […]

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What a Coincidence!

Yesterday I posted on a new study that looked at the impact of losing an infant sibling when you were very young, or even before you were born. I commented that, though understudied, the stories I’d heard from people suggested that this was a huge—huge!—life event. Then last night, my friend (and one of Open to Hope’s founders), psychologist Heidi Horsley, PsyD, who also lost a sibling, and who now specializes in grief, called my attention to a really spectacular essay by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, in The Wall Street Journal. Roth was asked to write a […]

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The Impact of Losing an Infant Sibling

When I was working on my book, I interviewed a couple of people who either lost siblings very early in that sibling’s life, i.e. in infancy (and were thus very young themselves) or who were born after the death of an infant sibling. I didn’t have enough people to make a huge case, but it was very clear to me that these were very significant losses. Sadly, however, because these people had been so young at the time, or were born after the death, few had ever acknowledged them as “real” mourners. Result: Disenfranchised grief. They were often confused about […]

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