Passing on the 'how': A sibling's journey

So they got busy to move through into that next phase of, you know, that new ordinary life that they were forced to live in.

So why passing on the how? When dad died, was sick.

He got sick quite quickly and we knew that he wouldn't live very long.

And I had been kind of prodding him to put his pave the way stuff down.

And I was, you know, getting interested in webinars and online courses.

And I was saying, Dad, let's video you let's write it down um and he was a little bit interested but dad being dad jeremy being jeremy he was very much a people person meaning you know he wanted to be talking face to face not not through an online course right but it was in my mind um i felt that something needed to be to be written and as it was dad got sick and you know he wasn't going to live very long And the community resource unit had a little bit of funding to put together some resources for families.

And after dad died, one of the things that we did was put that, you know, all that wealth of information into a very small booklet.

And we tried to get as much of the important stuff as possible.

And I will say that this booklet, there's three of them in the White Manners series.

They all have additional resources on the website.

So there's kind of a few videos you can watch that have just been gathered.

And so I'll mention a couple of those.

So do go and check that out on the CRU website.

During the process, we held a panel, a couple of panels actually, with siblings and parents and other interested people.

And we asked the question, what keeps people safe? And the majority of the people that we talked to were siblings.

And there were a few messages that came up.

One of them was that some parents reported feeling guilty about passing on children.

the load or whatever you know like they there was there was guilt there was talk of guilt and i i hear that often some make assumptions that siblings will be there and not all siblings are made the same we're all different we all have our journeys to go on um and so there was there was a bit of talk about that some explicitly asked for help Some assume siblings will know what to do, and some provide a list of what to do, which is very helpful.

Many siblings report that they are unsure about how to do it.

And so that was really interesting to me, and it got me thinking, And I will try to circle back to that.

So in the booklet, we came up with six actions and I've called this passing on the how.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

I'm going to read out the six actions and then I'm going to talk to three of them.