Cindy Crawford on 'Survivor Guilt' of Losing Only Brother as a Child: 'My Dad Really Wanted a Boy'

Cindy Crawford is reflecting on her younger brother's death.

On the latest episode of the Kelly Corrigan Wonders: About Your Mother podcast, the supermodel, 58, opened up about the "survivor guilt" she felt after her sibling Jeffrey died of leukemia at age 3.

Speaking of her parents, John Crawford and Jennifer Sue Crawford-Moluf, Cindy first told hosts Christy Turlington Burns and Kelly Corrigan, "I am not sure they definitely wanted four kids, but they wanted a boy."

"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 continued. "It was so weird for years."

"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 — 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,' " Cindy added.

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Continuing to reflect on loss in general, Cindy said, "We don't talk about death in our culture, and we don't talk about what you say to someone when they lose someone."

"My kids have both lost friends, sadly, through car accidents and fentanyl and all the crazy stuff that these young kids are experiencing now," the mom of two continued, referring to son Presley Gerber and daughter Kaia Gerber. "They're always like, 'What do we say?' And I try to give them words."

Looking back at how her younger brother's death was handled when she was a child, Cindy 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?' "

"I was like, 'Whoa.' It was so in your face, but he didn't know what to say. We were in third grade," she continued. "So modeling for our children, those skills of not being afraid ... sometimes that opens the door."

Cindy added: "But a lot of people just kind of ignore it, or they don't want to bring it up because they don't want to upset the person. And for me anyway, I don't feel like that's inviting an opportunity to cry, laugh, share or whatever."

Every Mother Counts works to help make pregnancy and childbirth safe for everyone, everywhere. To donate, go to everymothercounts.org/donate. Listen to the special five-part podcast series, created in partnership with Kelly Corrigan Wonders, wherever you get your podcasts.