Annie Sklaver Orenstein was 25 when her brother Ben was killed while serving in Afghanistan.

She found solace in writing about him and others who have lost siblings. Earlier this year, she published Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief, a book about processing grief.

The cover of Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief

Hachette Book Group

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Orenstein spoke about the complexities of loss and how people respond in the moment in a Morning Edition interview with Michel Martin. We reached out to Orenstein in the wake of the pop singer Mariah Carey losing both her mother and sister on the same day. Carey’s mother was 87, according to public records, and lived in an assisted living facility in Florida. Her sister was 63 and in hospice care in New York state.

Carey was reportedly estranged from her sister. And that got us to thinking about how complicated grief can be when there are multiple deaths, for example, or estrangement — something that just doesn’t fit common narratives of what grief should look like.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Martin: One of the reasons you started writing about this is that you lost your brother in Afghanistan in 2009. And I just want to make it clear that you were not estranged, that you were, in fact, very close. Let’s just start with losing a sibling. You’ve written that people act like it just doesn’t matter. Like, how so?

Orenstein: Once I started actually doing the research, I realized that my experience is actually very common — the diminishment of sibling grievers. And it’s through a lot of small actions. It’s things like people asking how your parents are doing, but they don’t ask you how you are doing. Or if they find out you lost a sibling, the first question might be, “Were you close?” as if your answer to that will determine whether or not you’re allowed to be grieving or the extent to which you’re allowed to be grieving. But we grieve imperfect people. We grieve imperfect relationships, sometimes even more so or more complicated than if you were really close. And so those qualifiers, they’re not really relevant, but they can make you question your own grief and whether or not you are allowed to grieve.

Martin: And adding to that, it gets complicated when there is estrangement, as we think there was in Mariah Carey’s case. Can you talk more about that, how that complicates things, whether people know that or not in your circle?

Orenstein: You know, I think there is a feeling that, you know, if you’re estranged, you’re probably not grieving. In some cases, that might be true. There’s something called abbreviated grief where you just don’t grieve very much. That can happen if you had a weak emotional attachment. You know, there is a type of grief called anticipatory grief, where you’re essentially grieving the person while they are still alive. And so when they die, you might not grieve as much as you think you will, but that’s because you’ve already grieved them. And so in some cases of estrangement, you know, that might be what happened, but in other cases, people often hold out a hope that there can be some reconciliation and death takes away those opportunities.

Martin: Why do you think we have such a hard time in this country supporting people through grief?

Orenstein: I think in our country, we’re uncomfortable with things that we can’t fix, things that we can’t solve. You know, people want to say the right thing because they want to fix it and they want to make you feel better. And so grief makes us really uncomfortable because there’s nothing you can say that will fix it.

Martin: So let’s talk about what you can do to support someone who has lost a sibling or in Mariah Carey’s case, has lost a sibling and has lost a parent, or is dealing with this, what you’ve called this complex grief. What are some things not to say? Are there some things that you can say or do, even if you know you can’t fix it?

Orenstein: We can’t grieve for someone else as much as we often want to. But what we can do is go over and do their dishes. We can go grocery shopping for them. We can drop off dinner. We can do small things to reduce that overwhelm and overload so that our brains and our emotions do have the bandwidth and capacity to process what’s going on. So a lot of what we can do is show up. Community support is proven. It is a huge way to help someone who is grieving.

This digital article was edited by Obed Manuel.

There’s no place in the world quite like L.A. If you’ve spent any time living in this diverse, vibrant city, chances are you have a few stories under your belt that only could have happened here.

Here are two favorites from my own life:

Several years ago my husband and his parents took my 8-year-old son to a magic shop. (My kid was really into magic at the time.) Afterward I called my husband to ask how it went. “David Arquette bought him a magic set,” my husband said. I didn’t think I heard him right.

But when I asked him to repeat himself, it turns out I did. Arquette, who was a regular at the shop, heard the salesperson talking to my kid about magic, and he added a big magic set to his own purchases that he left at the counter for my son.

This next story is even stranger. My first dog’s foster mom asked me to go with her to the Bodhi Tree (an iconic New Age bookstore in West Hollywood that has since closed) to hear a lecture from a chiropractor who claimed he was given healing powers after an encounter with an alien. The chiropractor transmitted his power to my dog’s foster mom and she transmitted it to me so I could provide healing to my aging dog.

Only in L.A.!

Now it’s your turn. Please submit your best only-in-L.A. story below (300 words or less), including your full name and email address so we can contact you if we publish it.

Thanks for sharing, and we can’t wait to read your stories!

Some people may flinch at the genre of reality TV – it’s full of tropes and manipulative editing and ridiculous premises. It’s been referred to as a funhouse mirror of our culture. But it can reflect back to us new ways of understanding what we accept as a society – especially when it comes to things like gender, sexuality, class and race. Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s Code Switch that zeroes in on the The Bachelor and Love Island.