Cindy Crawford reflects on the death of her younger brother.
In the last episode of the series Kelly Corrigan Wonders: About your mother podcast, the supermodel, 58, opened up about the “survivor’s guilt” she felt after her brother Jeffrey died of leukemia at age 3.
Speaking about her parents, John Crawford and Jennifer Sue Crawford-Moluf, Cindy first told hosts Christy Turlington Burns and Kelly Corrigan, “I’m not sure they definitely wanted four kids, but they wanted a boy.”
“My dad wanted a boy, so the fourth one was a boy. And I think there was a lot of guilt… there was that survivor’s guilt from the other kids, especially because we knew my dad really wanted a boy, and we felt like it should have been one of us,” she continued. “It was so strange for years.”
“Recently I was coaching through COVID-19, I actually had time for real work, and I realized that one of the questions my coach asked me was something like, ‘What did you need to hear at that time that you weren’t ‘not hearing?’ and I realized — and my mom wouldn’t know how to say this, she was 26 and she’d just lost a child — but I needed to hear, ‘Yeah, we’re so sad that Jeff died, but we’re so happy that you’re here,’ Cindy added.
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Cindy Crawford.
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Continuing to reflect on loss in general, Cindy said, “In our culture, we don’t talk about death and we don’t talk about what you say to someone when they lose someone.”
“My kids have lost friends, unfortunately, to car accidents and fentanyl and all the crazy things these young kids are going through now,” the mom of two continued, referring to son Presley Gerber and daughter Kaia Gerber. “They always ask, ‘What should we say?’ And I try to give them words.”
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Reflecting on how her younger brother’s death was handled when she was a child, Cindy recalled, “I remember when I went back to school after my brother died, no one said anything to me, no joke, except for one kid who was like, ‘I saw in the paper that your brother is dead?’ ”
“I thought, ‘Wow.’ It was so in your face, but he didn’t know what to say, we were in third grade,” she continued. “So modeling for our kids, those skills to not be afraid … sometimes that opens doors.”
Cindy added: “But a lot of people just ignore it, or don’t want to bring it up because they don’t want to upset the person. And in any case, it doesn’t seem to me that it invites an opportunity to cry, laugh, share or whatever.”
Every mother is important, working to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for everyone, everywhere. To donate, go to everymothercounts.org/donate. Listen to a special five-part podcast series, created in collaboration with Kelly Corrigan wonderswherever you get your podcasts.
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Source: HIS Education