In my memoir, Remembering Ruth, I devote a chapter to books written years ago that helped me cope with the loss of my sister.  Today I recommend two recently published memoirs that deal with the death of a young sibling.

Tragedy + Time, by comedian Adam Cayton-Holland, is about the suicide of his younger sister, Lydia, when she was 28 and he was 32.  (They have an older sister, Anna.) Lydia had threatened suicide many times before, and her siblings and their parents had desperately tried to help her.  One day Lydia sends them a “goodbye” email, and Adam races over to her apartment where he finds her dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Adam is tortured by his beloved sister’s death, compounded by his finding her body.  He walks around with a giant void inside. His world begins to improve once he starts seeing a therapist who specializes in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (EMDR).  The technique, originally designed to treat soldiers with PTSD, has helped many other victims of severe trauma.  It is vital that he get past the horrendous experience of finding his sister’s body.  By going over that experience again and again in excruciating detail, he is slowly able to deal with the terrible event and her loss.

Richard Beard is haunted by his brother, Nicky’s, accidental death more than forty years ago.  Richard was 11, and Nicky 9, when they made the fatal decision to venture away from the beach where the rest of their family was hanging out to explore a smaller, deeper cove.  Nicky swam out too far and drowned.  For over forty years, Richard blocked all memory of the horrific incident.  He can’t remember the details of his brother’s death, including the actual date on which it happened.

The Day That Went Missing is Richard’s journey back in time to discover the truth about what occurred that day.  To do this, he reconstructs what happened, hour by hour.  He talks to the emergency personnel who found Nicky’s body, other townspeople who had been on the beach, his mother (his father had died), and two other brothers.

Toward the end of Richard’s search for the truth, he re-enacts what happened that day and finally breaks down. “In the natural shelter of the family camp, where in August 1978 we laid blankets beside the rocks . . . I sob.  The place is in me, the physicality of the memory.  Tears drop onto the lenses of my glasses and I bring up huge gulps of undigested grief . . . .”

Richard says Nicky’s life and death is not a story with an answer, or a resolution.  Nonetheless, it’s a gripping and compelling tale that contains a number of surprises.