Recovering from the Loss of a Sibling by Katherine Fair Donnelly

Author:Katherine Fair Donnelly [Donnelly, Katherine Fair]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504012034
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2015-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Other Heartbreaks

The following stories are of individuals who have had many heartbreaks. The two men below not only suffered the loss of a sibling, they also endured the death of a child.

When Andrew Pustay was sixteen, his brother George died of a kidney disorder at age twenty-eight. “In his early youth, George contracted an illness and was treated with sulfa drugs,” Andy relates. “This was before the advent of penicillin. My parents always believed, although it was never proven, that the sulfa drugs had had a bad effect on my brother and his kidneys.”

George left a widow and three small children, Mary, age two, Joe, one, and George, Jr., two months old. “It was incredibly sad,” Andy recalls. “Here was this beautiful young family starting out in life and my brother’s life was cut short in his prime.”

When George became seriously ill, he was living in Troy, New York, and there Andy and his parents joined the sick man. Andy tells us, “He knew he was dying, but he kept his spirits high and he would always greet me with, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ However, I never stayed very long in the hospital with him—maybe five or ten minutes—because I could see he was in a great deal of pain. After each visit I returned to the home of a friend with whom I was staying, and it was there I got word from my parents that he had died.

“It was a numbing experience. He was my only sibling and, although there was a wide spread in our ages, we were very close. We shared a bedroom and bed until he left to work in Schenectady. He had always been protective of me and we got along very well.”

After his brother died, Andy experienced a certain attitude of overprotectiveness from his parents. It was not until many years later that Andy understood how his parents felt. “Now I can understand why,” he says, “because my wife, Monica, and I have lost two children. We now have a surviving daughter, Katie, and I can understand how my parents felt. They didn’t want to lose me. Our first child, Jessica, was two days old when she died of congential heart problems. Suzanne was eight years old when she died as the result of a bacterial infection, H-Croup influenza, which is not a flu we were told. The symptoms were a sore throat and a low fever.

“Katie, our surviving child, was four at the time. This past December, when Katie was going on eight—the same age at which Suzanne died—was a family milestone. Getting past it was difficult for us, just as getting past twenty-eight was a milestone for me, because that was George’s age when he died. Both my parents and I breathed a sigh of relief when I got past my twenty-eighth birthday.

“When George died, although I was compassionate and caring, I did not know what my parents were going through. I was not to know that until I too had lost a child and experienced that kind of pain.

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