There is a particular kind of love that makes a person cross oceans for someone they can't yet find. It sends parents to countries they've never visited, chasing rumors and blurry photos. It keeps siblings awake at 3 a.m. messaging strangers in a language they don't speak, because somewhere out there is someone who might know something. Families do this constantly, quietly, all over the world, and most of the time no one is watching. I know, because four months ago, I became one of them.
On August 30, the U.S. observes National Grief Awareness Day, a day set aside to talk openly about loss. But grief has a hierarchy most people don't notice until they're standing inside it. There are days for parents who lose children, for spouses who lose partners, even for the loss of a pet. There isn't one for what I am. I am a sister who lost her only brother, and I've learned that sibling grief is often the quietest kind, partly because it's rarely acknowledged as its own category of loss at all. But I've also learned something bigger this year: that the lengths a family will go to for someone missing, and the grief that follows if they don't come home, deserves recognition regardless of what the relationship was called.
Dates are arbitrary numbers on a calendar until there is meaning behind them. Usually that meaning is happy: a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday. I've learned this year that the opposite is true too. For me, the dates that carry the most weight are June 12 and June 30, the date I found out my brother was missing and the date his body was found.
My brother Ian loved life. He was charismatic, quick-witted, inquisitive and a bit of a wanderer. He was also my little brother, and for our entire childhood, my best friend. The stereotypes about older sisters and younger brothers exist for a reason. We fought like cats and dogs, but we were the first to protect each other. There wasn't anyone on this Earth who knew me the way he did, and I knew him the same way.
As kids, we had our own language. Just 22 months apart, we grew up building sandcastles in the summer, playing on our farm in Virginia and watching "Avatar: The Last Airbender" together more times than either of us could count. We had a lot in common, too. We chose the same boarding school. We both spent an exchange year in Bonn, Germany, living with the same host family, though he'd say it was his idea and I'd counter that I'm older, so I did it first. Our adult lives looked different, and we drifted the way siblings sometimes do, but he never stopped being my little brother.
That's why on June 12, when a stranger in Peru messaged me on Facebook and explained to me in Spanish that she'd met Ian and just found out he was missing, my world turned upside down. This was the brother who called me "a puppy" for years because he knew it drove me crazy. Who used to come over every week just to snuggle with my dog. Who called me from Germany at whatever hour worked for him, because he just wanted to talk. Finding out he was missing from a stranger and then having to tell my father is a moment I will carry for the rest of my life.
Ian had gone to Peru chasing what he always chased: new places, new people, memories worth keeping. He'd planned to backpack the Ausangate Loop, a roughly 40-mile, high-altitude route that climbs above 13,000 feet and reaches nearly 17,000 feet at its passes. He told my mother he'd be gone four to six days. He didn't tell her the route. He wasn't reported missing until early June, and my father and I didn't find out until June 12.
What followed were 18 days that felt like a lifetime, and that taught me exactly how far a family will go. I spent them researching trails, messaging hundreds of contacts in Spanish on WhatsApp until the app temporarily banned me for volume, coordinating with a cousin trained in search and rescue who hiked sections of the route Peruvian police hadn't reached yet and leaning on a local guide and a volunteer search and rescue team who agreed to help look for my brother. None of us had done anything like this before. All of us would have done far more.
On June 30, an alpaca shepherd found Ian. We were told he died of severe altitude sickness, likely after crossing one of the high passes, and that he did not suffer. My brother, just 29 years old, died doing exactly what he loved: looking at mountains. I wish every day that he were still here, but there are worse ways to have lost him.
Ian wanted to leave a legacy. Since his was cut short, I intend to build one on his behalf. The volunteer search and rescue team that agreed to search for him did so without proper gear, having just finished a basic rescue skills training. They said yes anyway. That is the norm for volunteer teams across Peru's Andes: enormous willingness, even with minimal resources. The Ian Treger Foundation exists to close that gap, funding equipment and hands-on training so these teams are ready before someone goes missing, not scrambling after. And it’s a way for us to process our grief – to help others avoid the same painful fate he, and by extension our family, endured.
And my brother wouldn't have wanted a legacy built only on sadness. He'd have wanted people to laugh at his jokes, remember the good, and know that something came of this that outlasts the loss.
Every year, families somewhere are doing what mine did: crossing borders, sleeplessly searching, refusing to stop until they have an answer. Some get their person back. Some, like mine, get a body and a date to carry forever. Either way, that devotion is its own kind of love, and the grief on the other side of it deserves a place in how we talk about loss, whether or not there's a name for the relationship, and whether or not there's a day on the calendar for it.
Sarah Treger is the co-founder of the Ian Treger Foundation.
