Reflection: Where have I mistaken someone’s coping for rejection?

📖 Proverbs 14:10 (NIV)

“Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.”

When my mom died, the world didn’t just take her. It took my brother too. It wasn’t through death. It was a separation so brutal and unnatural that my child-brain couldn’t make sense of any of it.

He wasn’t just my brother. He was my anchor. My protector. My little piece of courage wrapped in a human body. My hero. And then suddenly… he was gone.

We didn’t just end up in different homes; we ended up in different worlds. Nine hours apart. Two states. Two strangers’ routines. Two versions of grief unfolding in silence. Adults talked about “placements” and “decisions” and “what was best.” They did not stop to think about the feelings of an eleven-year-old girl. She lost the last familiar person in her life the same week she buried her mother.

There is a particular loneliness that lives in a child who loses everything at once. And for me, my mother and brother were my everything. It isn’t quiet. It screams inside your rib cage. It echoes in every room you sleep in after that.

Those years between childhood and adulthood, stretched out slow, painful, and cold. Our parents — the ones who were supposed to fight for us to keep a relationship— didn’t. We got a visit every couple of years, maybe. Seven days together if the stars aligned. Seven days to remember what it felt like to have a brother. Seven days to pretend we were still a team. Seven days to heal just enough for the goodbye to tear everything open again.

Every time we reunited, I felt like a puzzle piece. I was trying to fit into edges that had shifted without me. We were both changing and reshaping without each other. Every time we separated again, I felt myself crack a little deeper.

While I was trying to survive my grief in one place, my brother was falling apart in another. I didn’t know he was turning to drugs. I didn’t know the darkness he wrestled with. I didn’t know the demons that crawled into the empty places where our childhood used to live. And the truth — the part I never say out loud — is that I wasn’t far behind him. We were both walking the same line, just on opposite sides of the map.

After our mom died, something in him shut down. It wasn’t subtle. It was sharp. It was sudden. It was like someone turned the light off behind his eyes. He didn’t see it, but I did. Even from hundreds of miles away. Sometimes still even today .

When he started unraveling, he stopped answering the phone. He started disappearing for months at a time. Sometimes he’d talk for a minute, but if I mentioned Mom, the line would go dead. No explanation. Just silence. Just loss stacked on top of loss for me.

I thought it was me. I thought I had become the reminder he didn’t want. I thought maybe he saw my face and saw everything he was trying to outrun. I thought he didn’t love me anymore. But even then — even through the confusion and the ache — I made myself a promise:

If he ever called me in pain, I would answer. No matter what. And I did.

On the rare nights when he cracked open, I was there. When grief finally split him wide enough for the truth to spill out, I was there. If he was angry, I listened. If he cried, I held that space. If he talked about girlfriends, or heartbreak, or the memories he was trying so hard to numb, I stayed.

I was a child playing the role of emotional first-responder. The only person I had left needed me. I accepted any type of communication I get.

But he never knew that I needed him too. He never knew that I was drowning in the same ocean — just nine hours away. For years, the question chewed at my insides: Why did he shut me out when I needed him the most? Why did my hero stop showing up? Why did the one person who understood me suddenly turn into a ghost?

And then… life happened. Healing happened. Perspective happened.

It finally hit me — like a quiet truth settling on the bones:

He didn’t distance himself because he didn’t love me. He distanced himself because he was terrified. Fear was his coping. Drugs were his escape. Silence was his armor. Avoidance was his survival instinct. Keeping me at arm’s length wasn’t rejection. It was a wounded boy doing everything he can to not fall apart completely. We were two broken kids living through the same trauma. We coped in opposite directions. Both of us prayed the other one wouldn’t shatter.

And realizing that doesn’t erase the hurt — but it finally gives the hurt somewhere to land.

Because now, when I look back, I don’t see a brother who turned his back on me. I see a boy who was grieving too hard to stand upright. I see a child trying to be brave in all the wrong ways. I see two siblings who never stopped loving each other. They just didn’t know how to hold the weight of so much loss at once.

We weren’t siblings who failed each other. We were children who were failed — and we did the best we with what we had. And somehow… we survived.

🌙 Closing Prayer

God, You saw the miles between us. You saw the silence, the unanswered calls, the grief we didn’t know how to share. You saw two children trying to survive loss in opposite directions.

Please heal what distance and trauma fractured. Soften the memories that still ache. And help me hold compassion for the ways we coped, even when they hurt.

Remind me that love doesn’t disappear in silence — and that understanding can still bring healing, even years later. Amen.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower