Cindy Crawford Details ‘Survivor’s Guilt’ Years After Brother's Death

Cindy Crawford

Cindy Crawford wasn't afraid to dive deep while exploring her past in a raw new interview.

Over the weekend, the 58-year-old supermodel explained in detail that she felt "survivor's guilt" following the death of her 3-year-old brother, Jeffrey, while appearing on the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast.

“My dad wanted a boy, so the fourth was the boy and I think that there was a lot of guilt,” she told hosts Kelly Corrigan, 56, and Christy Turlington.

The runway star, who was 9 at the time Jeffrey passed away, suggested she wasn't the only one who struggled with comprehending the loss.

“There’s like that survivor guilt of the other kids and especially because we knew that my dad really wanted a boy," Crawford explained. "We felt like, ‘Well, it should’ve been one of us.'”

“It was so weird, for years, my sisters [Danielle and Chris] and I would all have these same nightmares, that it should’ve been one of us," she recalled.

“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?” she added. “I was like, ‘Whoa.’ It was so in your face, but he didn’t know what to say. We were in third grade.”

The Apple TV+ personality previously opened up about Jeff's battle with leukemia in an interview with Oprah, telling her that when she and her sisters first learned of their brother's illness, none of them understood how sick he was. "I think when my parents first told us our brother was sick, we didn't really understand what it meant," she said at the time. "They didn't use the word 'cancer.'"

Crawford, who is now a mother herself and shares two now-adult children–Kaia and Presley–with her husband Rande Gerber, said it wasn't until a few years ago that she received the closure she needed as a child navigating grief.

"Just 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," she continued. "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 has died, but we’re so happy you are here."

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