My brother and only sibling, Steven Robert Mart, passed away surrounded by his family on April 30, 2026, after suffering a catastrophic hemmorhagic stroke on April 22. He was 39 years old.

Though I have some memories from before he was born, I basically don’t really know what it’s like to not have a brother. I have always had one! For his whole life, I was the big sister.

For his eulogy, I read my favorite poem about grief (My Dead Friends by Marie Howe – the short one, with the green vase), and spoke about how in our lives, we had never really been in competition, but one of us always had to be first.

And now I get to be the first of us to live without a sibling.

Except?

I’ve come to realize that’s… not actually reality. I have a couple of brothers*. Each of them I have a different relationship with, but I’ve known all of them for a decade+, and in that time (especially recently, in the last six years as I have become more disabled) they have each become… siblings.

I’m not sure which of us is ever the *older* sibling, honestly, which is a lot of fun. And sometimes it’s hard to draw the line between friend and sibling. But the love is there all the same, and I know with all of them that if they needed me (or vice versa) I would move the foundations of the earth to be there for them.

They’ve all stepped up too, since Steven died – each a constellation in the night sky that is my life, each a guide and a friend and a checkpoint. Each there to bust my chops when I need it, tell me I’m being dumb, tell me to go to bed. But also to talk about important things – death sometimes. Love, and how we each exist in the world and what it means to live in a world gone mad.

We definitely don’t agree on everything, but that never mattered with Steven either, and it certainly doesn’t matter here.

I can’t tell you the secret to finding out you have extra siblings in your 40’s. For most of my life, I had Steven – and then I had his wife, who is as much my sister as anyone ever could be. She is my family, and I will defend that with teeth and claws if someone tries to say that now that Steven is gone she’s somehow “less related”. But until Steve passed, I didn’t really look around and see… that I have different siblings too.

And I will defend with teeth and claws that I have living brothers too.

* I have several sisters too, and I’ll talk about them too, but this post is about brotherly love, literally 🙂