National Sibling day was last week in the United States. It’s a day where everyone sends their siblings sweet messages to remind them why they are lucky to have them as a sister or brother. It’s a nice sentiment, a little like Mother’s day or Father’s Day but without gift exchanges. Just like Mother and Father’s days, Sibling Day can be a rough day for those who have lost a sibling. This loss can be real as in actual death or the feeling of loss due to circumstances beyond our control such as addiction and mental health.

Watching everyone else celebrate with cute posts on their facebook page and instagram accounts can be the cause of laughter or the cause of tears. It’s not easy to know you have a sibling that you haven’t seen or perhaps you’ve lost to addiction. Maybe you send a wish to heaven or maybe you just stay off of social media altogether for the day. You do what works best for you.
I wanted to write about this because I know how hard it was on my other children when some of their peers would make comments or talk behind their backs. They knew it was happening and they didn’t know how to respond. This is just a reminder of how much it hurts to be a sibling, a child, a parent or a friend of an addict. No one else seems to understand what you’re going through and sometimes they don’t even care to understand. So the loved ones of an addict become excluded, stressed, depressed and suffer great mental distress. When it is said that addiction is a family disease some of us truly understand what that means.
If you know someone in this situation it would mean the world to them if you reached out, if you included them and not acted as though somehow they were contagious. It hurts deeply to love someone with all your heart and not be able to help them, but to then see people you called friends backing away from you, talking behind your back and leaving you out of plans makes you want to just crawl into a cave away from the world.

When you hear of the suicide of someone you thought had it all together, sometimes their own family and friends can push them over the edge. I speak from personal experience. My husband attempted suicide, he was blaming himself for all the things listed above that were happening and felt we would be better off without him. Thankfully I am a light sleeper and heard his breathing changing. I tried to wake him up but couldn’t. The ambulance came. His heart stopped on the way to the hospital and again in the ER. It was touch and go for several hours. I prayed, I cried and I prayed some more and was blessed that he survived. He spent several weeks in an outpatient setting before they felt he was ready to come home. I was terrified when he came home. Thankfully we have worked through this and have been able to go back to our normal life. He had been given the tools to use when he felt under stress and was also able to go back to group meetings when he needed to. Addiction IS a family disease.