Hello Tom,
So very sorry to hear of the loss of your brother and sister. I can understand why you feel so listless and are having so much difficulty getting past these losses. You must be in so much pain.
I think perhaps the way forward is to find a way to retrieve your good memories of them. It is so easy to involuntarily focus on the end of someone's life and the manner of their passing and the memory of the feelings you had at that specific time remain with you and the images of those weeks remain sharp in your mind and the good times you had with them are obscured and hard to see anymore. I think it is important for your own recovery to find a way to bring back into focus all the good things about the people you have lost and the times you had with them.
There are lots of positive ways of doing this. Karena has touched on some of them. I think you have to look past what happened to them and let yourself hear in your mind what they would be saying to you now. The chances are they would probably be telling you to move forward from all this by living your life to the full and doing that for them, in their memory, because they will not be able to do that for themselves now. They would want the best for you and would want you to be able to make the most of the gift of life while you are still able to do that, especially as they no longer can.
You can look at it from the point of view that, when/if you meet them again, you will need to have lots to tell them about. It will be a short conversation and a boring one otherwise! So go forward in your life, doing all the things you have ever wanted to do and perhaps some of the things your brother and sister might have had ambitions to do in memory of them. Make a list of the things those might include and throughout your lifetime, work your way through the list. Celebrate their lives by living your own and knowing that you are honouring their memories by doing this for all of you.
In terms of remembering them, I found it helped to put together an album of photos of the person I had lost that I could look at when I was missing them. In terms of helping yourself remember the good times and helping your children find out about them, it might help to start a memory book where you can write down any thing you can remember about them; character traits, what was special about them, about their smiles, their personalities, the kinds of things they said, how they made you feel, experiences you shared together, daily things like what they liked to eat, things that made you laugh, holidays you enjoyed together, colours they liked, things they enjoyed doing. Your brother and sister both had years of life that must have been good for you to be in the pain you are in. Their deaths, however terrible, were a short episode in their lives and not the main parts of them. Celebrate the good things about them and try to bring those back into focus. Don't focus on the end of their lives. These were not them. They were things that happened to them and to you, but is not who they were and not the relationship you had with them. It is this that matters now and remembering that.
Grief never really gets better. You just adjust to the fact that it is part of you and you learn to live with that, but that takes effort. It doesn't happen on its own. YOu will never just wake up one day and feel better. You have to work at that. Little things can help. I found it helped to have flowers around and walk in the park, where I found it easier to sit and try to come to terms with the losses I had experienced, because it was a calm and peaceful environment. Grief also changes you and so the other problem is trying to come to terms with this new person it has made of you. It shifts your focus in life and causes you to see things differently and feel differently about them, so you also have to come to terms with the fact you will never be the same person you were before you suffered these losses. There is nothing easy about grief and in my experience, you have to work at getting back to any form of normal and accept that normal will now forever be something different to what it was before. It does take time. In a way it takes forever, because there are good days and bad days and difficult times of year and that is how it stays. Happy times of year become tinged with sadness because those people are missing from you at those times.
You can get through this, but you have to find the things that will help you do it and you have to work at it. Your children should be a help in this regard, but it sounds to me like the difficulty for you is that you need to find a way to deal with the loss you have suffered, so perhaps try some of the things I have suggested and if those don't help, look for something that does. For me, it helped a lot to take up a new hobby. It was something the person I had lost also enjoyed, so in a way, I felt I was doing it for both of us. But for me it helped, because it gave me something to look forward to each week, a reason to go out (which also helped), and made me think about something else. I also ended up making some new friends and that helped too.
Find what works for you, but make the effort. This will not get any better on its own. Wishing you well.
