Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar
But C is all yours, mi amiga. And from Sugar’s candy-sweet vantage point it is so very crystal clear that it’s what you need to do.
C is not fun. At first glance, parting ways with your seriously cool, smoking hot, but oh-so-very-attached wonder boy seems like the worst idea of all. But trust me when I say that it’s the only route to get what you believe you want. Which is him. But it’s all of him. Not him on the sly. Not him as a “friend” you want to sleep with but can’t (and don’t and won’t).
To get what you want in a romantic relationship you must say what you want. Shall we say it together? You want your friend to be free to fall in love with you for real if you are really going to fall in love. This tortured, half-assed, overheated game of faux friendship footsie the two of you are playing simply won’t do.
Maybe your decision to cut your friend loose will make it clear to him that he wants to explore what’s possible with you and he’ll do what needs to be done in his own life so you can. Maybe it will make it clear to him that losing a woman he loves in order to openly explore what’s possible with you is too high of a price to pay. Either way, dear Friend, you win.
Yours,
Sugar
THE HUMAN SCALE
Dear Sugar,
I’m writing this from my little couch/bed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Egelston Children’s Hospital in Atlanta. My husband and I just found out that our six-month-old daughter, Emma, has a tumor, and she is having brain surgery tomorrow. I am scared that I will lose her. I’m scared she could be paralyzed or her development will be messed up and she will have a hard life. I’m scared they will find out the tumor is cancerous and she will need chemo. She’s only a little baby.
People have poured all their thoughts and prayers into us right now, but to be honest, God is farthest from my mind. I’ve never been super religious but now I find myself doubting His existence more than ever. If there were a God, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery, Sugar? I never in a million years thought that my husband and I would be in this situation.
I want to ask you to pray and all your readers to pray, to a God maybe I’m not sure I even believe in anymore. Pray that my baby will be okay. And that we can walk away from this and forget it even happened. I have written you before about different things, which now seem so stupid and silly. I just want to get through this with my husband and daughter and look back and thank God that everything is okay. I want to believe in Him and I want to believe all the prayers being said for us are working.
Abbie
Dear Abbie,
I have been thinking of you and Emma and your husband nonstop since I read your email. Please know I’m holding you in my deepest thoughts and wishing the best for Emma.
I would like to publish your letter and my reply, but I want to be sure you sent it to me with that intent. If you didn’t—if you meant it as a personal email to me, that’s fine and I won’t publish it. If you do want me to publish it, I want to make sure you’re okay with including the identifying details—Emma’s name, the name of the hospital, and such. If not, let me know and either you or I can alter those details.
Sending you love, light, blessings, strength.
Love,
Sugar
Dear Sugar,
Thank you so much for replying. I would love for you to publish my letter. If you would like, you can also add this part to let everyone know that the surgery went well. The doctors think the tumor is benign. They had to leave one small, tiny part because it was attached to a blood vessel and one wrong move could have paralyzed her permanently. Emma has recovered so well that even the doctors seem a bit surprised. We’re most likely going home tomorrow.
At this point I am hoping there is a God and that the power of prayer is what kept my little Emma safe and well. We had people all over the country praying for us. I hope that everyone will continue praying that the tumor will not come back and we can walk away from this. All my life I have been on the fence about God’s existence. The hope He does exist and hears our prayers is something I think everyone has in them. To find out my six-month-old daughter had a tumor (cancerous or not) just put me right back to the part of me that says if God existed bad things wouldn’t happen.
I want to take her surgery going well and the good news we have received so far as a sign He does exist, but I also don’t want to assume such a large thing from what might be a coincidence. Whether He is there or not, or whether or not the prayers really work, I will keep praying for her speedy recovery and I hope all of your readers will join us in praying for Emma and all the children here at Egleston and everywhere else who go through such sad things early in life.
Feel free to post our names and locations. It won’t bother me at all. I hope you will still run my letter. I would love to read what you have to say about the existence of God. I can’t decide if I should take a leap of faith and believe since Emma is okay and attribute it to God.
Thank you for thinking of us.
Abbie
Dear Abbie,
I know everyone reading these words shares my relief that Emma came through her surgery so well. I’m sorry you’ve had to endure such a frightful experience. I hope that the worst of it is over and that you will be able to “walk away from this,” as you put it, and to keep walking—far and fast—into a future that does not contain the words “tumor” and “surgery” and “cancer.”
I agonized about whether to publish your letter. Not because it isn’t worthy of a reply—your situation is as serious as it gets and your doubts about your faith in God are profound and shared by many. But I couldn’t help but wonder who the hell I thought I was in daring to address your question. I wonder that often while writing this column, but I wondered it harder when it came to your letter. I’m not a chaplain. I don’t know squat about God. I don’t even believe in God. And I believe less in speaking of God in a public forum where I’m very likely to be hammered for my beliefs.
Yet here I am because there I was, finding it impossible to get your letter out of my head.
Nearly two years ago I took my children to the Christmas pageant at the big Unitarian church in our city. The pageant was to be a reenactment of the birth of Jesus. I took my kids as a way to begin to educate them about the non-Santa history of the holiday. Not as religious indoctrination, but as a history lesson.
Who is Jesus? they asked from the backseat of the car as we drove to the show, after I’d explained to them what we were about to see. They were four and nearly six at the time. They’d heard about Jesus in glimmers before, but now they wanted to know everything. I wasn’t terribly literate in Jesus—my mother was an ex-Catholic who spurned organized religion in her adult life, so I had no religious schooling as a child—but I knew enough that I was able to cover the basics, from his birth in a manger, to his young adulthood as a proselytizer for compassion, forgiveness, and love, to his crucifixion and beyond, to the religion that was founded on the belief that Jesus, after suffering for our sins, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.
After I finished with my narration, it was like someone had served my kids two triple-shot Americanos. Tell me about Jesus! became a ten-times-a-day demand. They weren’t interested in his birth in the barn or his philosophies about how to live or even what he might be up to in heaven. They wanted only to know about his death. In excruciating detail. Over and over again. Until every ugly fact sank into their precious bones. For months I was compelled to repeatedly describe precisely how Jesus was flagellated, humiliated, crowned with thorns, and nailed at the hands and feet to a wooden cross to die an agonizing death. Sometimes I would do this while making my way in a harried fashion up and down the aisles of the hoity-toity organic grocery store where we shop and people would turn and stare at me.
My children were both horrified and enthralled by Jesus’ crucifixion. It was the most appalling thing they’d ever heard. They didn’t understand the story within its religious context
. They perceived only its brutal truth. They did not contemplate Jesus’ divinity, but rather his humanity. They had little interest in this business about him rising from the dead. He was not to them a Messiah. He was only a man. One who’d been nailed to a cross alive and endured it a good while.
Did it hurt his feelings when they were so mean to him? my son repeatedly asked. Where was his mommy? my daughter wanted to know.
After I told them about Jesus’ death, I wondered whether I should have. Mr. Sugar and I had managed to shield them from almost all of the world’s cruelty by then, so why, for the love of God (ahem), was I exposing them to this? Yet I also realized they had to know—their fascination with Jesus’ agony was proof of that. I’d hit a nerve. I’d revealed a truth they were ready to know. Not about Christianity, but about the human condition: that suffering is part of life.
I know that. You know that. I don’t know why we forget it when something truly awful happens to us, but we do. We wonder Why me? and How can this be? and What terrible God would do this? and The very fact that this has been done to me is proof that there is no God! We act as if we don’t know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that’s changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.
It’s no surprise you have such doubt in this moment of crisis, sweet pea. It’s perfectly natural that you feel angry and scared and betrayed by a God you want to believe will take mercy on you by protecting those dearest to you. When I learned my mom was going to die of cancer at the age of forty-five, I felt the same way. I didn’t even believe in God, but I still felt that he owed me something. I had the gall to think How dare he? I couldn’t help myself. I’m a selfish brute. I wanted what I wanted and I expected it to be given to me by a God in whom I had no faith. Because mercy had always more or less been granted me, I assumed it always would be.
But it wasn’t.
It wasn’t granted to my friend whose eighteen-year-old daughter was killed by a drunk driver either. Nor was it granted to my other friend who learned her baby is going to die of a genetic disorder in the not-distant future. Nor was it granted to my former student whose mother was murdered by her father before he killed himself. It was not granted to all those people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when they came up against the wrong virus or military operation or famine or carcinogenic or genetic mutation or natural disaster or maniac.
Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking If there were a God, why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life-threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.
That’s where you were the other night when you wrote to me, dear woman. Pinned in place by your suffering. I woke up at 3 a.m. because I could feel you pinned there so acutely that I—a stranger—felt pinned too. So I got up and wrote to you. My email was a paltry little email probably not too different from the zillions of other paltry little emails you received from others, but I know without knowing you that those emails from people who had nothing to give you but their kind words, along with all the prayers people were praying for you, together formed a tiny raft that could just barely hold your weight as you floated through those terrible hours while you awaited your daughter’s fate.
If I believed in God, I’d see evidence of his existence in that. In your darkest hour you were held afloat by the human love that was given to you when you most needed it. That would have been true regardless of the outcome of Emma’s surgery. It would have been the grace that carried you through even if things had not gone as well as they did, much as we hate to ponder that.
Your question to me is about God, but boiled down to its essentials, it’s not so different than most of the questions people ask me to answer. It says: This failed me and I want to do better next time. My answer will not be so different either: To do better you’re going to have to try. Perhaps the good that can come from this terrifying experience is a more complex understanding of what God means to you so the next time you need spiritual solace you’ll have something sturdier to lean on than the rickety I’ll-believe-he-exists-only-if-he-gives-me-what-I-want fence. What you learned as you sat bedside with Emma in the intensive care unit is that your idea of God as a possibly nonexistent spirit man who may or may not hear your prayers and may or may not swoop in to save your ass when the going gets rough is a losing prospect.
So it’s up to you to create a better one. A bigger one. Which is really, almost always, something smaller.
What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?
Yours,
Sugar
PART THREE
CARRY THE WATER YOURSELF
If you had to give one piece of advice to people in their twenties, what would it be?
To go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry and read them each five times.
Why?
Because the truth is inside.
Anything else?
To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.
Why?
Because in your twenties you’re becoming who you’re going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. Also, because it’s harder to be magnanimous when you’re in your twenties, I think, and so that’s why I’d like to remind you of it. You’re generally less humble in that decade than you’ll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery. Be a warrior for love.
Do you know who you are?
Yes.
How long did it take you to truly figure out who you are?
Thirty-some years, but I’m still getting used to myself.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Dear Sugar,
I’m an average twenty-six-year-old man, exceptional only in that I’m incredibly ugly. I don’t hate myself, and I don’t have body dysmorphia. I was born with a rare blood disorder that has had its way with my body from a young age. It has left me with physical deformities and joint abnormalities. One side of my body is puny and atrophied compared to the other.
I would not have been a beauty even without this illness, but it’s impossible to remedy the situation with normal exercise and physical therapy. I’m also overweight, which I admit I should be able to fix. I’m not an unhealthy eater, but like anyone, I could consume less. I’m not ugly in a mysterious or interesting way, like a number of popular actors. I look like what I am: a broken man.
My problem—and my problem with most advice outlets—is that there’s not much of a resource for people like me. In movies, ugly characters are redeemed by being made beautiful in time to catch the eye of their love interest, or else their ugliness is a joke (and they aren’t actually ugly). In practical life, we’re taught that persona
lity matters more than physicality, but there are plenty of attractive (or at least normal-looking) people who are also decent human beings.
What is there for people like me who will never be remotely attractive and who are just average on the inside?
I’m a happy person and have a very fulfilling life and good friends. I have a flexible job that allows me enough free time to pursue my hobbies, with employers who understand when I have to miss work for health reasons. But when it comes to romance, I’m left out in the cold. I don’t want my entire life to pass without knowing that type of love.
Is it better to close off that part of myself and devote my time and energies to the aspects of my life that work, or should I try some novel approaches to matchmaking? My appearance makes online dating an absolute no-go. In person, people react well to my outgoing personality, but would not consider me a romantic option. I’m looking for new ideas or, if you think it’s a lost cause, permission to give up. Thanks for your help.
Signed,
Beast with a Limp
Dear Beast,
Once upon a time I had a friend who was severely burned over most of his body. Six weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday, he didn’t realize that there was a gas leak in the stove in his apartment, so he lit a match and his entire kitchen blew up. He barely survived. When he got out of the hospital four months later, his nose and fingers and ears were burnt nubs and his skin was more hide than flesh, like that of a pink lizard with mean streaks of white glazed over the top. I’ll call him Ian.
“I’m a fire-breathing monster!” he roared to my kids the Thanksgiving before last, crouched beneath them near the edge of the bed. They shrieked with joy and fake fear, screaming, “Monster! Monster!” Ian looked at me and then he looked at Mr. Sugar and together we laughed and laughed.