4. I’m a father while not being a father. Most days it feels like my grief is going to kill me, or maybe it already has. I’m a living dead dad.
5. Your column has helped me go on. I have faith in my version of God and I pray every day, and the way I feel when I’m in my deepest prayer is the way I feel when I read your words, which feel sacred to me.
6. I see a psychologist regularly and I’m not clinically depressed or on medication.
7. Suicide has occurred to me (this is what initially prompted me to make an appointment with my psychologist). Given the circumstance, ending my life is a reasonable thought, but I can’t do it because it would be a betrayal of my values and also of the values I instilled in my son.
8. I have good friends who are supportive of me, my brother and sister-in-law and two nieces are a loving and attentive family to me, and even my ex-wife and I have become close friends again since our son’s death—we’d been cold to one another since our divorce when our son was fifteen.
9. In addition, I have a rewarding job, good health, and a girlfriend whom I love and respect.
10. In short, I’m going on with things in a way that makes it appear like I’m adjusting to life without my son, but the fact is I’m living in a private hell. Sometimes the pain is so great I simply lie in my bed and wail.
11. I can’t stop thinking about my son. About the things he would be doing now if he were alive and also the things I did with him when he was young, my good memories of him, my wish to go back in time and either relive happy memories or alter those that are less happy.
12. One thing I would change is when, at seventeen, my son informed me he was gay. I didn’t quite believe him or understand, so I inquired in a negative tone: But how can you not like girls? I quickly came to embrace him for who he was, but I regret my initial reaction to his homosexuality and I never apologized to him for it. I believe he knew I loved him. I believe he knew I wanted him to be happy, no matter what path his happiness might take. But, Sugar, for this and other things, I am tormented anyway.
13. I hate the man who killed my son. For his crime, he was incarcerated eighteen months, then released. He wrote me a letter of apology, but I ripped it into pieces and threw it in the garbage after barely scanning it.
14. My son’s former boyfriend has stayed in touch with my ex-wife and me and we care for him a great deal. Recently, he invited us to a party, where he informed us we would meet his new boyfriend—his first serious one since our son. We both lied and said we had other engagements, but the real reason we declined is that neither one of us could bear meeting his new partner.
15. I fear you will choose not to answer my letter because you haven’t lost a child.
16. I fear if you choose to answer my letter people will make critical comments about you, saying you don’t have the right to speak to this matter because you have not lost a child.
17. I pray you will never lose a child.
18. I will understand if you choose not to answer my letter. Most people, kind as they are, don’t know what to say to me, so why should you? I certainly didn’t know what to say to people such as me before my son died, so I don’t blame others for their discomfort.
19. I’m writing to you because the way you’ve written about your grief over your mother dying so young has been meaningful to me. I’m convinced that if anyone can shed light into my dark hell, it will be you.
20. What can you say to me?
21. How do I go on?
22. How do I become human again?
Signed,
Living Dead Dad
Dear Living Dead Dad,
1. I don’t know how you go on without your son. I only know that you do. And you have. And you will.
2. Your shattering sorrowlight of a letter is proof of that.
3. You don’t need me to tell you how to be human again. You are there, in all of your humanity, shining unimpeachably before every person reading these words right now.
4. I am so sorry for your loss. I am so sorry for your loss. Iamsosorryforyourloss.
5. You could stitch together a quilt with all the times that that has been and will be said to you. You could make a river of consolation words. But they won’t bring your son back. They won’t keep that man from getting into his car and careering through that red light at the precise moment your son was in his path.
6. You’ll never get that.
7. I hope you remember that when you peel back the rage and you peel back the idle thoughts of suicide and you peel back all the things you imagined your son would be but wasn’t and you peel back the man who got into the car and drove when he shouldn’t have and you peel back the man who the man your son loved now loves and you peel back all the good times you had and you peel back all the things you wish you’d done differently, at the center of that there is your pure father love that is stronger than anything.
8. No one can touch that love or alter it or take it away from you. Your love for your son belongs only to you. It will live in you until the day you die.
9. Small things such as this have saved me: How much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.
10. Allowing such small things into your consciousness will not keep you from your suffering, but it will help you survive the next day.
11. I keep imagining you lying on your bed and wailing. I keep thinking that hard as it is to do, it’s time for you to go silent and lift your head from the bed and listen to what’s there in the wake of your wail.
12. It’s your life. The one you must make in the obliterated place that’s now your world, where everything you used to be is simultaneously erased and omnipresent, where you are forevermore a living dead dad.
13. Your boy is dead, but he will continue to live within you. Your love and grief will be unending, but it will also shift in shape. There are things about your son’s life and your own that you can’t understand now. There are things you will understand in one year, and in ten years, and in twenty.
14. The word “obliterate” comes from the Latin obliterare. Ob means “against”; literare means “letter” or “script.” A literal translation is “being against the letters.” It was impossible for you to write me a letter, so you made me a list instead. It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.
15. It’s wrong that this is required of you. It’s wrong that your son died. It will always be wrong.
16. The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.
17. You have the power to withstand this sorrow. We all do, though we all claim not to. We say, “I couldn’t go on,” instead of saying we hope we won’t have to. That’s what you’re saying in your letter to me, Living Dead Dad. You’ve made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can’t take it anymore. But you can. You must.
18. More will be revealed. Your son hasn’t yet taught you everything he has to teach you. He taught you how to love like you’ve never loved before. He taught you how to suffer like you’ve never suffered before. Perhaps the next thing he has to teach you is acceptance. And the thing after that, forgiveness.
19. Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you’ll learn if you’re strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.
20. When my son was six he said, “We don’t know how many years we have for our lives. People die at all ages.” He said it without anguish or remorse, without fear or desire. It has been healing to me to accept in a very simple way that my mother’s life was forty
-five years long, that there was nothing beyond that. There was only my expectation that there would be—my mother at eighty-nine, my mother at sixty-three, my mother at forty-six. Those things don’t exist. They never did.
21. Think: My son’s life was twenty-two years long. Breathe in.
22. Think: My son’s life was twenty-two years long. Breathe out.
23. There is no twenty-three.
24. You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.
25. Letting go of expectation when it comes to one’s children is close to impossible. The entire premise of our love for them has to do with creating, fostering, and nurturing people who will outlive us. To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
26. The entire premise of your healing demands that you do let go of expectation. You must come to understand and accept that your son will always be only the man he actually was: the twenty-two-year-old who made it as far as that red light. The one who loved you deeply. The one who long ago forgave you for asking why he didn’t like girls. The one who would want you to welcome his boyfriend’s new boyfriend into your life. The one who would want you to find joy and peace. The one who would want you to be the man he didn’t get to be.
27. To be anything else dishonors him.
28. The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. Finding a way in my grief to become the woman who my mother raised me to be is the most important way I have honored my mother. It has been the greatest salve to my sorrow. The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you experience my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place. I’d give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. It showed me shades and hues I couldn’t have otherwise seen. It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach.
29. Your grief has taught you too, Living Dead Dad. Your son was your greatest gift in his life and he is your greatest gift in his death too. Receive it. Let your dead boy be your most profound revelation. Create something of him.
30. Make it beautiful.
Yours,
Sugar
PART FIVE
PUT IT IN A BOX AND WAIT
You give a lot of advice about what to do. Do you have any advice about what not to do?
Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to do. Don’t stay when you know you should go or go when you know you should stay. Don’t fight when you should hold steady or hold steady when you should fight. Don’t focus on the short-term fun instead of the long-term fallout. Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore. Don’t seek joy at all costs. I know it’s hard to know what to do when you have a conflicting set of emotions and desires, but it’s not as hard as we pretend it is. Saying it’s hard is ultimately a justification to do whatever seems like the easiest thing to do—have the affair, stay at that horrible job, end a friendship over a slight, keep loving someone who treats you terribly. I don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.
Do you think the advice you write in your column is always right?
I stand by the advice I’ve given. I don’t take anything back. But I wouldn’t claim that what I have to say to any given person is “right.” Mostly because I don’t think of the advice I give as necessarily on the right–wrong continuum. I sometimes state that I firmly believe a person should do one thing or another, but more often I try to help those who write to me see a third way. I’m not so much telling people what to do in my columns as I am attempting to either present a perspective that might be difficult for those who write to me to see on their own or to more complexly hash out the either/or options that the letter writer has posed. I think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we’re angry or scared or in pain. We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes. I want my column to reflect that, but it’s always only my opinion. There are others too.
A BIT OF SULLY IN YOUR SWEET
Dear Sugar,
I’m a twenty-nine-year-old woman who is engaged to be married. I’m very close to my sister. She’s much older than me (fifty-three) and she’s technically my “half” sister (we share a father who had one marriage very young, another quite old). My sister and I have always been close, but because of our age difference she’s been more like an aunt to me, though over the past couple of years our relationship has shifted and we’ve become more like equals. Recently, we went on a weekend trip together, just the two of us, and I learned things about her life that make me feel … I don’t even know what the word is, Sugar. Sad? Uncomfortable? Angry? Disappointed? A mix of all four. That’s the reason I’m writing to you.
My sister has been married for twenty-five years. I love my brother-in-law almost as much as I love my sister. I’ve always considered them to be my “role model couple.” They are still in love after all these years and still best friends. Everyone who knows them, including me, thinks they’re the perfect couple. They are proof to me that happy marriages are possible. Or at least they were.
You see, what happened is that while I was away with my sister I asked her what the “secret to marriage” was, and during our conversation about it she revealed things that surprised and upset me. She said while it’s true she and my brother-in-law are happy to be married to each other, there were several times over the years she doubted they’d make it. She confided that both she and my brother-in-law have cheated on each other. Several years ago, my brother-in-law had a full-blown affair that lasted a few months, and at another point my sister had a brief, “technically unconsummated fling” that she opted not to tell her husband about (she figured why hurt him when she’d “learned her lesson” and wasn’t going to break up her marriage over it). Together, they eventually repaired these breaches, but it wasn’t easy.
I know they’ve been happy too. They’ve raised two kids together, traveled, and shared many interests. It isn’t as if everything I’ve seen in them is a facade. I understand that. But I can’t help but admit my picture of them has changed and I’m having a hard time with that, as I plan to have them walk me down the aisle at my wedding. I know this might sound naïve and judgmental, but I’m shaken and bummed and now I don’t know if people who cheated should play such a big role in my wedding.
I know couples have to work on their relationships, but my position on infidelity is that it’s a deal-killer. My fiancé and I have agreed that if one of us ever cheated on the other it would be automatically over between us, no conversation required. When I told my sister about this she actually laughed and said we were being “too black and white,” but, Sugar, I don’t want to think that in twenty-five years I’ll be saying that there were times I didn’t think my husband and I would make it. I want healthy love.
From reading your column, I know you’re married and I wonder what you think. It seems to me that you and Mr. Sugar are a perfect couple too. What’s the secret to a good marriage? Have there been times you didn’t believe your relationship would make it? Isn’t infidelity a deal-killer? Can my sister and brother-in-law still be my role model couple now that I know they’ve failed to keep their vows at least at some points along the way? Should they walk me down the aisle?
Why do I feel so let down? My heart feels heavy with the fear that marriage can’t work for anyone if it can’t work for them. Is marriage this horribly complex thing for which I’m ill prepared? Am I being stupid to ask why two people can’t just love each other?
Signed,
Happily Ever After
Dear Happily Ever After,
One day about a year after Mr. Sugar and I moved in together, a woman called our house and asked to speak to Mr. Sugar. He wasn’t home, I told her. Could I take a message? She hesitated in a way that made my heart beat faster than it had any right to. When she finally said her name, I knew who she was, though I’d never met her. She lived in a city thousands of miles away, where Mr. Sugar occasionally went to work. They weren’t exactly friends, he’d told me when I’d inquired about her a few weeks before, after I’d found a postcard from her to him in our mailbox. “Acquaintance” was a better word, he’d said. Cool, I’d replied.
And yet as I held the phone, I got a funny feeling, in spite of my internal scoldings that I had no reason to feel funny. That Mr. Sugar was crazy in love with me was entirely apparent, both to me and to everyone who knew us, and I was likewise crazy in love with him. We were a “perfect couple.” So happy. So meant to be together. So utterly in love. Two people who leapt from the same pond to miraculously swim down parallel streams. I was the only woman he’d ever called the one. And who was she? She was just a woman who sent him a postcard.
So I surprised even myself when, that afternoon as I held the phone, I asked in my gentlest, most neutral voice, while everything inside of me clanged, if she knew who I was.