ABSTRACT
I have a cousin Alex, with whom I have always been especially close, who has a gentle and sensitive nature. I needed to tell someone in the family about the book I was writing, so after I had been actively compiling my notes for a couple of years, I decided to confide in him. A year later he mailed me an article that appeared in People magazine in March of 1987 concerning a center, which two psychologists had opened in Chicago, called the Rothman-Cole Center for Sibling Loss. The article detailed a variety of interesting points on the topic of sibling loss, which convinced me that writing my memoir was the correct thing to do. It also confirmed that many of my unvoiced suspicions were true regarding people like me who had lost a sibling.
