Cindy Crawford

Lifelong feelings of guilt over her brother’s death

Cindy Crawford has now revealed that she felt a lifetime of guilt over the death of her little brother.(Bild: APA/Getty Images via AFP/GETTY IMAGES/Cindy Ord)

It's a family trauma she's never spoken about publicly. But in the Mother's Day episode of the podcast "Kelly Corrigan Wonders: About Your Mother", Cindy Crawford revealed how the death of her little brother Jeffrey had haunted her into adulthood - because she suffered from guilt over having survived.

Crawford revealed that after three girls, her father John "desperately wanted a son". But then Jeffrey died of leukemia at the age of just three. The supermodel: "We daughters felt guilty because we were still alive. Especially because we knew how much Dad had wanted a son. The three of us thought it should have been one of us."

Guilt has plagued Crawford since childhood
The 58-year-old only found out that this feeling was still with her decades later when she underwent therapy coaching during the coronavirus pandemic: "I worked deeply on myself for the first time."

One of the questions she had to answer was: "What would you have liked to have heard from your parents back then, but didn't?" Her answer was: "My mother was 26 at the time, had just lost a child and wouldn't have been able to. But I would have wanted to hear: 'Yes, we're very sad that Jeff died - but also so happy that you're here!"

Talking about loss
Crawford regrets that "we don't talk about death and the loss of a loved one in our society". She remembers well how she had to go back to school after the death of her brother: "I was in third grade. Nobody spoke to me about my brother's death and offered their condolences. Only one older kid told me straight to my face: 'I read in the paper your brother is dead - is that true?"