She was eight years old when her older brother was murdered.
She easily recalls the days her house filled with people she didn’t know. Adults stood in the kitchen speaking in hushed voices. They stopped altogether when she entered. Phones rang constantly. Flowers arrived at the door. Her parents moved through the house like people underwater—grieving, exhausted, stunned. Nothing seemed the same.
Everywhere she turned, someone asked the same question.
“How is your mom doing?”
“How is your dad holding up?”
She answered politely because that seemed like the right thing to do.
No one asked how she was doing.
Everyone was on pins and needles. Even the family dog had changed.
When she tried once to timidly ask her parents what had actually happened to her big brother, her mother’s eyes filled with tears and the conversation stopped immediately. Her father simply said, “Let’s not talk about that.” She never brought it up again. The message was clear: asking was wrong and it made her parents feel worse.
So she began filling in the blanks herself.
She imagined what might have happened. She wondered whether she could have done something differently. Did she cause this? She worried about leaving the house. She tried to be extra good so her parents wouldn’t have anything else to worry about.
Once, when her parents were outside working in the garden she quietly slipped into her brother’s bedroom. She was seeking information any way she could find it. That door had been shut for eleven months. Her heart raced as she poked her head past the forbidden boundary. To her astonishment everything was just as it had always been. His bed was unmade. One shoe was under his messy, now dusty, desk. Even his lamp was still on. It looked like he’d be back any minute. Time stood still.
Years later, she would say something that stayed with me:
“Everyone thought the tragedy was my brother dying. And it certainly was awful. But it didn’t end there. The part no one saw was how confusing it was to grow up in the void his death created.”
There’s an old saying that murder doesn’t just kill the victim. It kills the family, too. This is what she was referring to.
When a child is murdered, the family is forever changed. The parents’ grief is visible, raw, and often overwhelming. Communities rally around them. Meals appear at the door. Cards arrive in the mail. People speak in hushed voices about the unimaginable loss.
But there is often another person standing quietly in the shadows of same house—someone whose grief is real, complex, confusing, and almost always overlooked.
The surviving sibling.
Over the years, through conversations with guests on my podcast, I’ve come to understand that the homicide of an older sibling sends a series of emotional aftershocks through the life of the younger child who remains. These aftershocks can shape identity, relationships, and self-perception in ways that last for decades.
Several themes appear again and again in these conversations.
The Weight of Parental Fear
Parents who have lost a child to violence often become intensely protective of the one who remains.
The impulse is understandable. After experiencing the unimaginable, many parents feel that danger is everywhere. The world no longer feels predictable or safe.
But for the surviving child, this can feel like living inside a protective bubble that is difficult to escape. Normal milestones—walking to school, visiting friends, traveling with the soccer team—may become sources of parental anxiety. Friction soon follows.
So, instead of experiencing the ordinary freedoms that come with getting older, they grow up feeling fragile, watched, or responsible for easing their parents’ worries.
The Unspoken Pressure to “Make Up” for the Loss
Another pattern childhood survivors describe is a quiet but powerful feeling that they must somehow compensate for the sibling who is gone.
Parents never express this aloud. In many cases, parents would be horrified to know their child feels this way. Yet the message can still seep in through subtle cues.
A surviving child may feel that they must succeed for two people.
That they must not disappoint.
That they must fill a space that can never truly be filled.
For some, this becomes a lifelong pressure to perform, achieve, or behave perfectly—an unconscious attempt to restore balance to a family that has been shattered.
The Deafening Silence
Children are perceptive. They know when something terrible has happened.
But many parents, hoping to protect their child from further pain, avoid discussing the details of the homicide. Questions are deflected. Conversations change direction. Words become vague.
The intention is love.
The result, however, is often confusion.
When children cannot access the truth, they fill the gaps with their imagination. Sometimes the imagined version is far worse than reality. Sometimes it involves self-blame. Sometimes it leads to persistent fears about how and why the death occurred.
Years later, many surviving siblings describe a lingering sense of mystery surrounding the event that changed their family forever.
Honest, age-appropriate answers—even when painful—often bring more peace than silence. And it demonstrates you are safe to approach. A simple rule of thumb is this. If a child is old enough to ask the question, they are old enough for a straight-forward answer. No unnecessary details, no vague language. If they ask a question you are unprepared to answer (“You said he was cremated. What is that?”) the best response is “Let me think about that. I will answer your question before the week is out.” And keep your promise. This gives you time to mull over what you will say.
When the Community Looks Past the Child
After a homicide, communities often focus their compassion on the parents. People ask how the mother is holding up. They wonder about the father. They talk about the family tragedy.
The surviving sibling may stand nearby, listening, and feeling very much excluded and insignificant.
This absence of recognition can deepen the sense that their grief matters less—or that they must remain strong for everyone else.
The Mixture of Confustion, Grief and Resentment
Another theme that sometimes emerges is the quiet presence of the sibling who is gone.
Photos remain on the wall. Stories are told. Birthdays and anniversaries are remembered.
These rituals can be healthy and loving. But for a younger sibling, it can also create the feeling that they are growing up beside an invisible presence. And that is especially true if they were born after the homicide of their older sibling took place.
Some survivors describe feeling as though their life is constantly compared—sometimes subtly—to the sibling who died. Others struggle with the feeling that the deceased child has become “perfect” in memory, making it difficult for the living child to simply be human.
It is not uncommon for teachers to ask “Oh, so you are the younger sister to our student here who was killed?”
Some surviving siblings also describe a complicated emotional territory that few people talk about openly. When a child dies, the attention of the family and community understandably centers on the one who was lost. Memorials are created. Stories are told. Photos remain in places of honor. For the child who is still growing up, this can sometimes produce an uncomfortable mixture of feelings—love for the sibling who died, grief for the loss, and occasional quiet resentment for how life has changed. Many survivors carry guilt about these feelings for years, not realizing that such reactions are a normal response to living in the shadow of a profound family tragedy.
The Burden of Protecting the Parents
Children are surprisingly perceptive about their parents’ pain. They hear what is not spoken. Many surviving siblings describe learning, at a very young age, that certain topics upset their parents. They notice the tears, the sudden silence, the stiffened posture, or the emotional withdrawal.
So they stop asking questions. They hide their own fears. They try to be “the strong one.” In doing so, they often become emotional caretakers long before they are developmentally ready for that role.
The Invisible Survivor
When homicide strikes a family, the surviving sibling often becomes what I think of as an invisible survivor. They are grieving, adapting, and trying to understand a world that suddenly feels unpredictable. Yet much of the attention—understandably—flows toward the parents.
Listening to these stories has made one thing clear to me: surviving siblings carry their own complex form of loss. It is not secondary grief. It is not smaller grief.
It is simply a different grief.
When Friends Don’t Know What to Say
For school-age children and teenagers, another aftershock appears in their peer relationships.
Children and adolescents are still learning how to respond to ordinary sadness, let alone something as incomprehensible as homicide. When a classmate’s sibling is murdered, their friends often have no idea what to say or do.
Some avoid the topic entirely.
Some become awkwardly silent.
Some disappear.
And a few are even inappropriate.
The result can be another kind of loneliness.
At the very moment when a child might benefit from companionship and normalcy, their social world may suddenly feel unfamiliar. too. Friends may worry about saying the wrong thing. Teachers may treat the child differently. Ordinary conversations can feel impossible.
Many surviving siblings recall returning to school and sensing an invisible distance between themselves and their classmates. Their peers were still living in the ordinary rhythm of childhood—homework, sports, friendships—while they themselves were suddenly living in a world that felt far older and more complicated.
The gap is caused by immaturity, not cruelty. Children simply do not yet have the emotional tools to accompany a friend through such profound loss. Its even difficult for adults.
But for the surviving sibling, the effect can still be painful. It is one more place where the child may feel alone with an experience that few people their age can understand.
For some surviving siblings, that early experience of feeling emotionally “out of step” with their peers can linger into adulthood, influencing how much they trust others with their story or their comfort level in allowing others to see their vulnerability.
What Surviving Siblings Often Needed
Looking back, many of the people I’ve interviewed say that a few simple things would have helped:
- Honest answers to their questions using simple words
- Permission to talk about the sibling who died
- Adults who asked about their feelings, not just their parents’
- Space to grow without feeling responsible for repairing the family’s loss
In other words, they needed to be seen, heard and allowed to be themselves.
A Quiet Reminder
Hosting Domino Effect of Murder for so many years allowed me to hear stories that are rarely told in public. Again and again, surviving siblings have described the same quiet realization in adulthood: while everyone understood that their parents’ lives had been shattered, very few seemed to notice that their childhood had been altered just as profoundly. Their grief unfolded quietly, often without language or acknowledgment.
If you know a family that has lost a child to violence, remember that the surviving siblings are navigating their own landscape of aftershocks.
A simple question can make an enormous difference.
“How are you doing?”
Sometimes that small moment of recognition tells a child something they may not have heard in a long time:
Your grief matters too.
Listening to these memories made something clear to me… As a psychologist I’m struck by how predictable these patterns are, once they are named. Children adapt to the emotional climate around them. When grief crowds the room, they learn to move within it. And in so doing they become protectors, achievers and sometimes silent observers of a. loss they dont have words to understand.
Being seen, being extended normal developmental opportunities for independence, ensuring they are not their parents’ emotional caretakers, parents interfacing with the school to reinforce appropriate social cues, can go a very long way in healing a grief that lives quietly inside them that could well influence their adulthood.
