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This enormously moving book presents Joanna Fanos's interviews with young adults who had lost a sibling to cystic fibrosis. Her initial concern was that the impact of such a catastrophic loss was little discussed in the professional literature. This professional silence turned out to have many distressing parallels - in the absence of provision geared specifically to the needs of siblings; in the inability of most of the parents to help their surviving children; and, ultimately, in the survivors’ failure to mourn. Not surprisingly, Fanos encountered a high incidence of emotional disturbance and psychosomatic illness; on the hopeful side, the interviews were experienced as therapeutic.
Extensive quotations from Fanos's interviews with the siblings are skilfully woven together so that a composite picture emerges of the immediate and long-term impact of the death. Chapter headings signal the broad themes around which the wealth of material is organized: ‘The family setting’, ‘The sibling relationship’, ‘The sibling's view of the illness’, ‘The ordeal’, ‘The aftermath’, ‘The next year’, ‘Fear’, ‘Waiting’, ‘Guilt’, ‘Resolution’. Statistical methods and results are presented in the Appendix. This mode of presentation works well: quotations tell the reader enough about individual interviewees to convey a feeling of what they were like as human beings and to stimulate the generation of hypotheses.
On the statistical side, rating scales for guilt, anxiety and depression were developed and correlated with such variables as age at the death of the sibling, degree of parental availability, communication within the family about the illness and death,