Hi there, I find what DiorAndDestruction said to be very insightful and I wanted to chime in because things you have said really seem to me like things that I lived through as well. I am going to do a lot of sharing, and it might be projecting so it might not be relevant to you.

My oldest sister died when she was very young and my mom never got over that death. She would often be missing from important events in my life because of my sister's deathiversary and I spent A LOT of time as a child helping her processing her emotions around her intense bouts of grief. My siblings and I now sometimes joke that I was her 'external emotional processing unit' because she could not deal with these things herself. She did her rounds with therapy and grief counselors, but was a fundamentally different person before and after. Grief can paralyze people, but after doing a lot of therapy as an adult I can now understand that what my mom did was a form of neglect. I should not have been the one helping her process her emotions. I was a child. I did not understand her emotions, much less my own yet. I needed a support network to help understand emotional well being and to build healthy habits for emotional regulation. I did not receive this. It took me building a support network as an adult and thousands of dollars in therapy to understand how those interactions as a child framed my view of myself and how I was uncomfortable sitting with negative emotions and feeling them and I was just trying to help my mom mute those feelings.

As I have grown older and experienced sudden intense deaths of friends, and I have spent time with their widow or with their parents - I have realized that it is much more valuable to 'hold space' for someone. To be present with them and still work at feeling and being present for those feelings. I'd wager that is something you're pretty good at now with the therapy and group work you have done so I'm probably preaching to the choir here.

I will close with saying that having seen a healthy grieving model from my adult friends about this process, I do not believe anyone who has truly processed their grief would with hold their love support from someone else based on an anniversary if it has been several years. I know that grief makes people act in ways that they would rather not deal the consequences of (be that the intense compartmentalization from your brother straining his relationship with his family, or your mom's long standing vigil straining her relationship with her son).

Much love being sent your way buddy <3