At first it seemed there was nothing—that the horrible sound-maker had again gone away, or perhaps we really had imagined it—but a moment later two emaciated kittens appeared, coming to peer down at us from the jagged edge of the hole. They were the strangest things I’ve ever seen. So skeletal they should have been dead, visibly shaking with fear, caked in soot and spiderwebs and globs of black grease, their eyes enormous and blazing.
“Meow,” one of them said.
“Meow,” wailed the other.
My husband and I held up our palms and the kittens walked into them immediately. They were so light it was like holding air with the smallest possible thing in it. They were like two sparrows in our hands.
I’ve tried to write about this experience several times over the years. It was an odd thing that happened to me during a sad and uncertain era of my life that I hoped would tell readers something deep about my ex-husband and me. About how in love we were and also how lost. About how we were like those kittens who’d been trapped and starving for weeks. Or maybe not about the kittens at all. Maybe the meaning was in how we heard the sound, but did nothing about it until it was so loud we had no choice.
I never found a way to write about it until I wrote this letter to you, Ruler, when I realized it was a story you needed to hear. Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out—though surely there’s something there too—but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.
Yours,
Sugar
PART TWO
WHATEVER MYSTERIOUS STARLIGHT THAT GUIDED YOU THIS FAR
Are the letters you publish really sent in by anonymous people? Most are so well written that it seems you or The Rumpus writers must be creating them.
The letters published in my column and in this book were sent to me by people who sought my advice. In most cases the name and/or email address of the letter writer is not visible to me. I do not write the letters, nor does anyone at The Rumpus. Because I have thousands of letters from which to choose, well-written letters probably have a higher chance of being plucked from the proverbial pile simply because they’re more concise and complex. I agree with you that the letters are lovely. I have even more in my inbox.
Do you ever hear from the letter writers after they read the answers you gave them? I’d be interested in knowing what they have to say.
I’ve heard from about half of them. Each has responded warmly, even when my advice brought up difficult emotions. I imagine it’s very intense to have your letter published and answered. I feel honored they trusted me to ponder their lives.
You seem so emotionally healthy, but from your column I can tell you’ve had your own struggles in the past. Do you ever struggle anymore?
Of course.
Are you a therapist or have you gone through extensive psychotherapy?
I’m not a therapist, and I’ve only seen a therapist a handful of times in my life. Which means, in technical terms, I’m totally unqualified for this gig.
THE BABY BIRD
Dear Sugar,
WTF, WTF, WTF?
I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day.
Best,
WTF
Dear WTF,
My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat. I hated having to rub my grandfather’s cock, but there was nothing I could do. I had to do it. My grandfather babysat my sister and me a couple times a week in that era of my life, and most of the days that I was trapped in his house with him he would pull his already-getting-hard penis out of his pants and say come here and that was that.
I moved far away from him when I was nearly six and soon after that my parents split up and my father left my life and I never saw my grandfather again. He died of black lung disease when he was sixty-six and I was fifteen. When I learned he died, I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t happy either. He was no one to me and yet he was always there, the force of him and what he’d made me do moving through me like a dark river. For years, I didn’t say a word about it to anyone. I hoped silence would make it disappear or turn it into nothing more than an ugly invention of my nasty little mind. But it didn’t. It was there, this thing about which I’d wonder What the fuck was up with that?
There was nothing the fuck up with that and there never will be. I will die with there never being anything the fuck up with my grandfather making my hands do the things he made my hands do with his cock. But it took me years to figure that out. To hold the truth within me that some things are so sad and wrong and unanswerable that the question must simply stand alone like a spear in the mud.
So I railed against it, in search of the answer to what the fuck was up with my grandfather doing that to me. What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?
But I could never shake it. That particular fuck would not be shook. Asking what the fuck only brought it around. Around and around it went, my grandfather’s cock in my hands, the memory of it so vivid, so palpable, so very much a part of me. It came to me during sex and not during sex. It came to me in flashes and it came to me in dreams. It came to me one day when I found a baby bird, fallen from a tree.
I’d always heard that you’re not supposed to pick up baby birds; that once you touch them their mama won’t come back and get them, but it doesn’t matter if that’s true or not—this bird was a goner anyway. Its neck was broken, its head lolling treacherously to the side. I cradled it as delicately as I could in my palms, cooing to soothe it, but each time I cooed, it only struggled piteously to get away, terrified by my voice.
The bird’s suffering would’ve been unbearable for me to witness at any time, but it was particularly unbearable at that moment in my life because my mother had just died. And because she was dead I was pretty much dead too. I was dead but alive. And I had a baby bird in my palms that was dead but alive as well. I knew there was only one humane thing to do, though it took me the better part of an hour to work up the courage to do it: I put the baby bird in a paper bag and smothered it with my hands.
Nothing that has died in my life has ever died easily, and this bird was no exception. This bird did not go down without a fight. I could feel it through the paper bag, pulsing against my hand and rearing up, simultaneously flaccid and ferocious beneath its translucent sheen of skin, precisely as my grandfather’s cock had been.
There it was! There it was again. Right there in the paper bag. The ghost of that old man’s cock would always be in my hands. But I understood what I was doing this time. I understood that I had to press against it harder than I could bear. It had to die. Pressing harder was murder. It was mercy.
That’s what the fuck it was. The fuck was mine.
And the fuck is yours too, WTF. That question does not apply “to everything every day.” If it does, you’re wasting your life. If it does, you’re a lazy coward, and you are not a lazy coward.
Ask better questions, sweet pea. The fuck is your life. Answer it.
Yours,
Sugar
GO! GO! GO!
Dear Sugar,
I’ve been playing music (guitar and bass) since I was eleven years old. I’ve been in the same band since I was twenty. I’m now twenty-six and still living in the same town, still playing the same gigs. I love my band. It’s a part of who I am. And we’ve released an album that I’m proud of (self-produced, but the local kids love it). Still, I wonder what would happen if I left. I want to see other parts of the country. Move around. Explore before I have a family to take care of. But then again, my band is my family, and I feel I sh
ouldn’t abandon them. We’re never going to make it big, and that’s fine. But am I selfish if I decide to leave?
Thanks, Sugar,
Considering Going Solo
Dear CGS,
Go! Go! Go! You need it one more time, darling? GO.
Really. Truly. As soon as you can. Of this I am absolutely sure: Do not reach the era of child-rearing and real jobs with a guitar case full of crushing regret for all the things you wished you’d done in your youth. I know too many people who didn’t do those things. They all end up mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions of the people they intended to be.
It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely and your bandmates will have a fit and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.
But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful, Solo. It will open up your life.
Yours,
Sugar
THE BLACK ARC OF IT
Dear Sugar,
I’m a thirty-eight-year-old guy and engaged to be married. My fiancée is thirty-five. I don’t need romantic advice. I’m writing to you about my fiancée’s mother, who passed away from cancer several years before I met her, when my fiancée was twenty-three.
She and her mother were close. Her death was an awful blow to my fiancée at the time and it still hurts her deeply. It’s not like she can’t get out of bed or is struggling with depression. She has a great life. One of her friends calls her “joy on wheels” and that’s accurate, but I know it isn’t the whole story. Her mom’s death is always lurking. It comes up on a regular basis. When she cries or talks about how much she misses her mom, I’m supportive, but I usually feel insufficient. I don’t know what to say beyond lame things like “I’m sorry” and “I can imagine how you’d feel” (though I can’t because my mom is still alive). She never had much of a relationship with her dad, who left the picture a long time ago, and she and her sister aren’t very close, so I can’t rely on someone in her family to be there for her. Sometimes I try to cheer her up or try to get her to forget about “the heavy stuff,” but that usually backfires and only makes her feel worse.
I don’t know how to handle this, Sugar. I feel lame in the face of her grief. I know you lost your mother too. What can you tell me? I want to be a better partner when it comes to handling grief.
Signed,
Bewildered
Dear Bewildered,
Several months after my mother died I found a glass jar of stones tucked in the far reaches of her bedroom closet. I was moving her things out of the house I’d thought of as home, but that no longer was. It was a devastating process—more brutal in its ruthless clarity than anything I’ve ever experienced or hope to again—but when I had that jar of rocks in my hands I felt a kind of elation I cannot describe in any other way except to say that in the cold clunk of its weight I felt ever so fleetingly as if I were holding my mother.
That jar of stones wasn’t just any jar of stones. They were rocks my brother and sister and I had given to our mom. Stones we’d found as kids on beaches and trails and the grassy patches on the edges of parking lots and pressed into her hands, our mother’s palms the receptacle for every last thing we thought worth saving.
I sat down on the bedroom floor and dumped them out, running my fingers over them as if they were the most sacred things on the earth. Most were smooth and black and smaller than a potato chip. Worry stones my mother had called them, the sort so pleasing against the palm she claimed they had the power to soothe the mind if you rubbed them right.
What do you do with the rocks you once gave to your dead mother? Where is their rightful place? To whom do they belong? To what are you obligated? Memory? Practicality? Reason? Faith? Do you put them back in the jar and take them with you across the wild and unkempt sorrow of your twenties or do you simply carry them outside and dump them in the yard?
I couldn’t know. Knowing was so far away. I could only touch the rocks, hoping to find my mother in them.
Not long before my mother died, a friend told me a story about a woman she knew, a resident at the group home for those with brain injuries where my friend worked. Several years before, the woman had been attacked as she walked home from a party. Her head hit the sidewalk so hard in the course of the assault that she’d never be the same again. She was incapable of living alone, incapable of so very much, and yet she remembered just enough of her former life as a painter and teacher that she was miserable in the group home and she desperately longed to return to her own house. She refused to accept the explanations given to her as to why she couldn’t. She had come to fervently believe that in order to be released she had only to recite the correct combination of numbers to her captors, her caretakers.
93480219072, she’d say as they fed her and bathed her and helped her get ready for bed. 6552091783. 4106847508. 05298562347. And on and on in a merciless spiral. But no matter what she said, she would never crack the code. There was no code. There was only the new fact of her life, changed irrevocably.
In the months after my mother died, I thought of this woman an inordinate amount and not only because I was distressed by her suffering. I thought of her because I understood her monumental desire and her groundless faith: I believed that I could crack a code too. That my own irrevocably changed life could be redeemed if only I could find the right combination of things. That in those objects my mother would be given back to me in some indefinable and figurative way that would make it okay for me to live the rest of my life without her.
And so I searched.
I didn’t find it in the half-empty container of peppermint Tic Tacs that had been in the glove compartment of my mother’s car on the day she died or in the fringed moccasins that still stank precisely of my mother’s size six feet a whole year later. I didn’t find it in her unfashionably large reading glasses or the gray porcelain horse that had sat on the shelf near her bed. I didn’t find it in her pen from the bank with the real hundred-dollar bill shredded up inside or in the butter dish with the white marble ball in its top or in any one of the shirts she’d sewn for herself or for me.
And I didn’t find it in those stones either, in spite of my hopes on that sad day. It wasn’t anywhere, in anything, and it never would be.
“It will never be okay,” a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.”
At the time she said this to me she wasn’t yet really my friend. We’d chatted passingly at parties, but this was the first time we were alone together. She was fiftysomething and I was forty. Our moms had been dead for ages. We were both writers with kids of our own now. We had good relationships and fulfilling careers. And yet the unadorned truth of what she’d said—it will never be okay—entirely unzipped me.
It will never be okay, and yet there we were, the two of us more than okay, both of us happier and luckier than anyone has a right to be. You could describe either one of us as “joy on wheels,” though there isn’t one good thing that has happened to either of us that we haven’t experienced through the lens of our grief. I’m not talking about weeping and wailing every day (though sometimes we both did that). I’m talking about what goes on inside, the words unspoken, the shaky quake at the body’s core. There was no mother at our college graduations. There was no mother at our weddings. There was no mother when we sold our first books. There was no mother when our children were born. There was no mother, ever, at any turn for either one of us in our entire adult lives and there never will be.
The same is true for your fiancée, Bewildered. She is your joy on wheels whose every experience is informed and altered by the fact that she lost the most essential, elemental, primal, and central person in her life too soon. I know this without knowing her. It will never be okay that she lost her mother. And t
he kindest, most loving thing you can do for her is to bear witness to that, to muster the strength, courage, and humility it takes to accept the enormous reality of its not okayness and be okay with it the same way she has to be. Get comfortable being the man who says Oh honey, I’m so sorry for your loss over and over again.
That’s what the people who’ve consoled me the most deeply in my sorrow have done. They’ve spoken those words or something like them every time I needed to hear it; they’ve plainly acknowledged what is invisible to them, but so very real to me. I know saying those clichéd and ordinary things makes you feel squirmy and lame. I feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what’s horribly true.
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
So give it. It’s clear that you’ve done it already. Your kind letter is proof. But I encourage you to stop being bewildered. Have the guts to feel lame. Say that you’re sorry for your lover’s loss about three thousand times over the coming years. Ask about her mother sometimes without her prompting. Console her before she asks to be consoled. Honor her mother on your wedding day and in other ways as occasions arise. Your mother-in-law is dead, but she lives like a shadow mother in the woman you love. Make a place for her in your life too.
That’s what Mr. Sugar has done for me. That’s what some of my friends and even acquaintances have done. It doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it better.