Cindy Crawford reveals she struggled with 'survivor guilt' after brother's death: 'Should have been one of us'
'My dad wanted a boy, so the fourth was the boy. And I think that there was a lot of guilt'
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Cindy Crawford is revealing the emotions she felt when her brother Jeffrey died of leukemia at the age of three.
The 58-year-old supermodel has four siblings, including sisters Chris and Danielle and her late brother Jeffrey. But during a recent interview with bestselling author Kelly Corrigan and fellow catwalk queen Christy Turlington, Crawford talked about the heartbreak that followed her brother’s death when she was just 10 years old, revealing that it was especially hard for the family because her father had always wanted to have a son.
“My dad wanted a boy, so the fourth was the boy. And I think that there was a lot of guilt … there’s that survivor guilt of the other kids, especially because we knew that my dad really wanted a boy, and we felt like, well, it should have been one of us,” she said during an appearance on the the Kelly Corrigan Wonders: About Your Mother podcast (per PEOPLE). “It was so weird for years.”
Crawford said she addressed the trauma of losing her brother and the emotions she went through after going through therapy recently.
“I was doing some coaching through COVID, I actually had time to do real work, and I realized that one of the questions the coach asked me was something like, ‘What did you need to hear at that time that you didn’t hear?’ and I realized — and my mom wouldn’t have known to say this, she was 26 years old and had just lost a child — but I needed to hear, ‘Yes, we’re so sad that Jeff died, but we’re so happy you are here,’ ” Crawford said.
The mother of two also spoke about how people didn’t talk about death when she was younger, making the experience difficult to navigate.
“We don’t talk about death in our culture, and we don’t talk about what you say to someone when they lose someone,” she said. “I remember when I went back to school after my brother died, not one person said one thing to me, no kidding, except for one kid who was like, ‘I saw in the paper your brother’s dead. Is that true?’ I was like, ‘Whoa.’ It was so in your face, but he didn’t know what to say. We were in third grade.”
Crawford has spoken about losing her brother in the past, telling Oprah Winfrey nearly a decade ago that she and her sisters “didn’t really understand what it meant” when her parents told them about Jeffrey’s illness. As a child, she didn’t comprehend that the disease was terminal, but looking back on it, she said Jeff “did know.”
“Right before he died he had told all his doctors, ‘I’m not coming back.’ … There’s some sense of completeness and peace that comes with knowing that he knew that, and he kind of decided he was done fighting,” Crawford remembers. “I don’t think that at age 10 that I knew that it was terminal, and I had not had any close experience with death and did not understand death. My brother did know. At one point for sure I know, because my mother said she found him sitting in his room. He was sitting at his little table, and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m praying.’ And she said, ‘What are you praying about?’ He said, ‘So that when I die, you’ll be OK.’ As a mom now, I can’t imagine hearing your child say that.”
Elsewhere in her conversation with Corrigan and Turlington, Crawford said her meteoric success as a model saw her making more money than her parents by the time she was 18 years old.
“I started modelling in Chicago, and in Chicago, it’s a small pond, so I was the big fish pretty quickly there,” the Illinois native recalled. “And I was making more money than my parents made, more money than they could ever have dreamed of.”
The experience led her to become “the son in a weird way.”
Crawford conceded that having so much more money than her sisters and parents at such a young age was “tricky.”
“If I’m giving my sister a nicer ring than her husband gives them or something like that, it just becomes this weird thing,” she said. “I was more about giving experiences and then helping them if they need a down payment on a house or something like that. My sisters have been awesome because they always paid it back. But navigating being in that financial position where you could do a lot is tricky.”
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