I didn’t grow up with you. But I grew up inside the space you left behind.

In the Silence of My Brother’s Memory

Mourning a sibling I never met — and how unspoken grief shaped the way we loved.

Jeremy, in one of the only photos we have. Just a few months old. A soft smile, a whole lifetime that never got to unfold.

My brother died before I was born.
His name was Jeremy. He lived for a few months — long enough to be real, but not long enough to leave behind more than a ripple. There are no home videos, no hand-me-down toys, no stories of us playing in the yard together. And yet, I grew up with the sense that he was always there. Not with us, but in us.

The Photo on the Wall

His photo hung quietly on the wall. A baby in white with soft eyes. I used to stare at it for long stretches of time, even as a child. There was something about it that felt different to everything else in our home. Maybe it was the tenderness in your face, or the stillness that seemed to live in that photo. A kind of calm that didn’t match the energy of the family I knew.

We visited his grave often. I remember standing beside Mum, watching her go somewhere else entirely. She’d fall silent in a way that felt heavy, like there were things inside her that had never been spoken. Sometimes she cried. Other times, she just cleaned…