loss comes in many forms and usually in unexpected ways it can be devastating leaving you facing an uphill struggle to go on with life without someone you thought would always be there but life does go on and even in the deepest despair we can find hope welcome to grief really with your hosts doctors gloria and heidi horsley brought to you by the open the hope foundation helping people find hope  years my oldest sister and my oldest brother now i lost a son thirty years ago and i'll have to say that i think it's a different losing adult siblings but i think there are some of the commonalities so i'm going to be interested in working great singers and they're going to sing a very heart rendering song about sisters and how do you want to set up a little bit about that song it's really powerful and i actually saw them do it at the new york film festival it was a music festival  telling hot and it's a song about it's based on harriet tubman's life and it's a song about the very last time that harry and her sister together and they will never ever see each other again and just how heartbreaking it is to suddenly be separated from your sibling forever and you know key and jordan and i know what it's like to have someone in the prime of your life your sibling all the sudden be completely gone right and that's basically what th story is and when i saw it in harriet tubman all i could think about was scott and the fact that you know he was in my life and then all the sudden when i was twenty he was just gone in an instant and i want to say quickly before we get under a guess that i'm very proud to sister laurie died in a car accident while serving in the navy and he is very active in the compassionate friends sibling program he oversees the compassionate friends facebook page which we'll talk a little bit about he's presented a lot of  compassionate runs workshops and he also gets lectured in my class a clubby university he knocked it out of the ballpark my students loved it they knew nothing about sibling loss and they're big they're going to be their best so you know they need to know what is unique about some loss and what are the issues that we as siblings face so he's a fabulous person and i'm really glad to have him here and he does his work basically as a tribute to his sister lori so thank you keith for being here and then there's jordan ferber who's also another one of my favorite people jordan's brother russell died in a car accident when he was only twenty one years old both jordan and keith are only siblings they were her only sibling he facilitates the compassionate friends sibling meetings here in new york city he is the go to person for that manhattan and he has presented workshops compassionate friends for over nine years he just did one that said what was that what about how was your mother was called how's your mother which i loved i will talk more about that and how you came up with that name jordan and he's a stand up comic and he's very funny and i think humor is so important when you're grieving just the kind of shift your energy around absolutely and we're going to see a little rol yes which i did that came through i basically lived with my parents until it was no longer socially acceptable and even then i only left because that's when it starts getting a lot harder to lie to women but the thing is really my parents are my parents are pretty cool they didn't make it easy for me to want me my parents are pretty cool my dad might be the coolest seventy one year old you will ever meet in your life but they're very supportive my dad actually funny don't my dad bought me a t shirt a number of years ago that said bank of dad let me get institution for as long as i can remember a little and i used to wear it was really cute till he i saw a homeless i guess that's why sometimes my cousin stingy with the loans covered more than just me i told him the story he was like oh come on you're not homeless i was like hey thanks for dinner i love that now it's so good yeah like i said it's so important i think when you're grieving when you're in that place to be able to laugh and i think the hard part is joining my mom and i talked about this earlier the guilt that you have when you st start to laugh and you st start to think things are funny yeah well i think you know that was that was early on you know the st couple of years there you catch yourself smiling or enjoying yourself and then there's that moment where you think oh well you know the person that i probably would have shared this moment with and here is the sort of feel that guilt as well as feeling like the like it's the moment has passed you know there's not it's not there's no one to share it with what's the point of being able to but i think it's important to to have those moments for yourself where you can laugh especially in the darkest parts of of life absolutely and i'm wondering how long it took for you i mean initially after russell that did you stop doing your like stand up and i did it while i was i was working with a group at the time called comedy gold wild men the guy that produced those shows would put together a series of showcases at madison square garden in the comedy garden so i was about sixty thousand six hundred seats the st one was in june of two thousand and two and russell was at that show and then he died in july and the nd one was in august wow and i didn't know if i was going to be able to do it at all but i i felt like i needed to it was i sold one hundred and twenty five tickets to the show you know people were coming to the myself that that that my life wasn't over you know that i had i still had things that i wanted to accomplish and as difficult as some of that stuff was i don't think i was particularly good on that show in august but i think it was the act of doing it was very important well for me making a point because we need people to realize that life isn't totally over and destroyed and i'm sure keep can speak to this too i think for me  took me a long time to deal with it i mean for me i didn't deal with the loss i just sort of ignored it i was away at college so i sort of went back to i was able to escape go back to college also my sister was in the navy so for me a lot of it was she still a navy out of sight out of mind so it wasn't until years later that started to i guess holding off holding off it will start to come down where it started to hit me all at once now with the with the advent of the internet you've been able to help with the compassionate friends talk a little bit about that sure so we have a group on facebook so actually it allows siblings to talk openly among just other siblings so where it's very open and honest and and no fear of parents or anybody else or anyone else they know having to see or hear about how they feel so it's it's pretty amazing keith and i know that jordan is on this too and i've seen you guys i'm a member it's called sons of the siblings now it's the compassionate friends and the facebook page and i've watched you know some of them just watching and i'm a member there but you know some of them come in and say look i'm new to this group my brother died three weeks ago i don't harm and survive and i see you guys coming in you know saying i've been there we're there for you kind of like we're in our hope until you find your own and you will eventually survive and it's so important for people especially during university dates and during difficult times which we all have to know that they're not alone out there yeah well the biggest part of that is also it's very important that we all get a chance to vent  is one of those situations where you go to try to vent about this stuff to some of your friends that haven't been through it and they said they mother and they you know they say that they find ways to avoid that conversation you really you know put a spin on it that's to understand that there is no real fixing that you know you just have to it's important event it and to give legitimacy to what you're feeling and for how long yes i think another issue is that eventually like ok we get in the beginning for six months maybe they'll  but after that point you know the rest of the world sort of expects you to sort of ok get on and now you know you're over yes so so this this group really gives you an opportunity also not only new people but also people that have been briefed for a year or two years five years you know able to come into the group and not feel where you know not get that response where oh you're still here still grieving after sixteen years right what's wrong with you right into that and then realizing that you don't get over it we learn to live with  scott and marilyn and bill not to ever exist in our lives we are who we are today because they were in their lives you know one of the problems that i don't have is that i my parents are also passed away so even though my siblings have died people are saying to me how are your parents doing right so i honestly get a little you know more support in a different way than you guys because there's a big how are your parents doing so would well and i think that's why jordan did come up with the title for his workshop how is your mother you know the problem really is not that people ask how's your mother it's that they very often ask how's your mother without ever asking how are you but it's kind of funny that my before i started to do what i really decided that i was going to go and do that show in august at the garden i had to get ready for it i didn't you know i had a handful of shows that i did where i was not sober and didn't really care  and so i had to get some it was probably about a week before that show that i started to put together some shows that i that i did that got me back on my feet you know cleared my head out and got back up there  i didn't know what else to do with myself so wasn't wasn't a question of whether or not i was going to continue it was how long i was going to be away from it for and i went to a show that a friend of mine was doing and i think was about three weeks after russell died that i went to the show and i just left my butt off for an hour and a half and it was the st hour and a half that i had spent that i didn't think about how sad i was for that hour and a half and i thought to myself well that's that's why part of the reason that i do this as well is to give that solace to other people that come to see me because when people say to me was hard for your parents my question my answer usually is yes and it was hard for me yeah well i would usually i remember the beginning when people would ask me how was your mother i would say what i imagine she's doing about as badly as  sure i think they're great i think that it allows if you don't have something someplace to go locally or somebody that you can talk to locally i think that it takes down barriers it takes on all walls next and all the barriers  opens up doors for people all places all across the world actually to sort of come together and i want to add something to that i totally agree with what you're saying he you know we grieve sometimes we creep in the middle of the night sometimes we grieve when everybody's asleep the war at the window looking outside going it's anyone else out there and now we can just log on to facebook and we can either share or we can follow what other people have been through and feel like ok you know what w to have a brother or sister die and when it happens to you when you're young and we were all young when it happened to us you feel like you're the only ones ever happened to my friends and never had a brother or sister die you know so it's so nice to be able to go on facebook and go on this site me and i go on those so you know definitely going to any time yes any any time you want mom because like you said you always hear if your sibling with a long life but you never knew the world without them going to your older brothers and sister exactly and i can call them up and get all sorts of information from and you know hang out with them yes this this facebook page is for any age anybody that's also a brother any age i mean i lost a sibling i would say not for parents we do sometimes get requests from parents they just want to sort of follow along and we  in july yeah and i know they have adult siblings classes and all sorts of great things going on and you know for older adults and you know i think that i did a workshop this year because you guys i think both of you somebody told me ok this is what we need heidi we need an adult sibling loss workshop and so i did one for adults and was in a lot of the dots in there had had children and siblings died and so yes there is a need for that so we've got another hear all the time absolutely dead lot of pressure but i think it goes further than that to say there's a lot of pressures and there's a general about now being an only child being the only one that has to take all that weight of the parents and it's not like i'm going to say hey what we do i do feel that way i feel but the pressure to to even to have children the say i'm going to rush to do it because i know that you know she's she's getting older and would love to have grandchildren but i'm not really ready at this very nd and i would feel like if you know my sister then maybe i could share some of that and say hey you're up you know i always felt like russell was supposed to be the one that had a responsible family anyway the lifestyle of a comedian doesn't necessarily lend itself to having a baby right as you know i don't know there be some good jokes right that most of them are going to be on me though i wanted to add well maybe if we got another question what if not i wanted to ask you guys if you have any special rituals or anything that you do rituals related to your son playing well i mean we do what we do the balloon launch russell birthday roses but these new years so we do we do a big party at midnight  ship and now we're going to have to compete yet jeff jenkins and amber inman singing we will never be apart at sisters and we want to thank you for watching our show today and please watch it next week and please tell people about  hope they can go on the internet we have many things going on on the internet we have t v shows we have radio shows all sorts of things for you and for them to find hope after a loss and that's our true hope that that will happen and we want to thank you for watching