Dear Sugar,
I’m a thirty-eight-year-old guy and engaged to be married this summer. My fiancé is thirty-five. I don’t need romantic advice. I’m writing to you about my fiancé’s mother, who passed away from cancer several years before I met her, when my fiancé was twenty-three.
She and her mother were very close. Her death was an awful blow to my fiancé 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 her sister and her 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, clearing way for the woman with whom my stepfather had suddenly fallen in love. 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, I met a woman who’d been attacked by a man as she walked home from a party. By the time I met her she lived in a group home for those with brain injuries. Her own injury was the result of the attack, her head having hit the sidewalk so hard in the course of it 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 stunk 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 fiancé, 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 the kindest most loving thing you can do for her is to bear witness to that, to muster the strength and 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 cliché 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, sweet pea. 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.
Next week it will be twenty years since my mother died. So long I squint every time the thought comes to me. So long that I’ve finally convinced myself there isn’t a code to crack. The search is over. The stones I once gave my mother have scattered, replaced by the stones my children give to me.
I keep the best ones in my pockets. Sometimes there is one so perfect I carry it around for weeks, my hand finding it and finding it, soothing itself along the black arc of it.
Yours,
Sugar
***
Sugar will take next week off. She’ll be back with a column on March 24.
73 responses
Always wise compassion in your answers. My mother is still alive and I know that when she’s not it will never be okay that she is gone. But I’ll clean out her house and know that there’s no code to crack. Just love to remember.
a salve for grief, some times: my friend S. gets together a couple of people she is close to and asks them to hang out with her on the anniversary of her mother’s birth (or maybe it’s death, I don’t recall). this year it was me and our friend R. we celebrated her mother. we celebrated being alive. she told me stories. we ate good food, drank good beer, laughed lots. and…for a little bit, it’s like her mother is alive, in the room with us. S. shows us pictures. her mom’s death is fairly recent (in the last few years) and very sudden, but it’s a really beautiful thing to participate in and S. seems to find it really healing. i love it, and i’m already looking forwards to next year.
-N*
Another winner, Sugar. Thank you for addressing the squirmy lameness we feel when offering consolation to others–I think you’re right about why we feel that way–and the importance of doing so anyway. I’m sorry for your loss.
I want to say something that gets at how moving your column is today but I don’t know how but I will say that it is important to say, “It will never be okay,” when talking about grief because, indeed, there are some losses where it will never be okay even as life goes on and there is joy. It is nice to see that acknowledged.
“And the kindest most loving thing you can do for her is to bear witness to that, to muster the strength and 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.”
Truer words were never spoken, Sugar. When people ask me what they can do for grieving loved ones, “bear witness” is the term I always use.
Bless you for being so, well, you.
Love and prayers for you and Bewildered’s fiancee’. I truly am sorry for your respective losses.
Maybe someday I will read a Dear Sugar column without tears appearing somewhere along the way. (But I’m not sure I’d really want that.)
May I add to your wonderful advice to Bewildered that in my experience, one of the best ways to deal with the grief of others is to just simply be okay with it? We are often so ill at ease with the uncomfortable emotions that we tend to rush to soothe and push them away. But it is a gift indeed to simply acknowledge: “I know you miss your mother terribly.”
I miss mine too…
I just lost my mom 3 months ago and am deeply comforted by your post. Thank you.
This is so timely. One day and four years after my mom died. Thanks so much. Bottomless compassion is priceless.
oh sugar. as the partner of someone who lost her dad too early, thank you. thank you for the reminder that even though we can’t fix it, being present and lovinglovingloving still helps. i’m sitting at work with a lump in my throat that feels like it might be the size of the stone in your pocket.
@Bewildered = keep pace with her. Your silence is worth more than anything to say,
your shoulder is close by when she needs it, and you will learn from the little reflections
that skitter across the surface as the topic continues to bubble up.
Great work, by the way. Looking for perspective is healthy, we always tend to underestimate
the value of subtle intimations, posturing, gestures of sympathy. You are compassionate.
The presence of compassion attracts the djinni, the deep, low demons that convert pain
into companionship, transmute solitude of lead into the shiny golden ball, the “force field”
of empathy. You have brought every help to your fiancé.
@ Bewildered & Dear, dear Sugar:
We don’t get much better than you. Take some heart back, you over give:)
*Goosebumps*
Thank you.
Thanks for this, Sugar. I suddenly lost my dad at Christmas in 2005. It’s true, it never becomes okay, and yes, you’re right that it’s nice just have your grief heard, however small (or all consuming) the moment of grief is, even years later.
We all lose so many things along the way. It’s like thee’s a manufacturer’s defect in the backpacks we get at birth, so that losing stuff is just part of how it works.
I’m losing my Mom now, slowly, to ALZ. Every week, it seems, there’s a bit more missing. That’s hard, but it’s even harder to see her missing those bits too. I hear it in her voice when she’s lonely and calls, see it in her eyes every week – that little fear that’s lurking behind the long moments of indescribably courageous Zen-ness that she’s trying to dwell in. She’s not even gone yet, and it’s already not alright. I haven’t got a clue how I’m going to deal when she is gone, but I will. She taught me that.
Thanks for this. It helps.
You are right, it will never be okay. I miss my dad so much. I didn’t even realize I was trying to crack the code that would make it be okay for him to be gone.
My dad would gave a rock to my daughter when she was 4. He told her that if she was worried she could hold it and rub it and it would take her worries and fears away. I still have rocks in my purse that I want to show him.
I sent this to my sister, Sugar. *hugs*
Aw, Sugar, you just get it.
I lost my father when I’d just turned a teenager, and in some ways I feel that loss more acutely with time. It’s like the loss of the relationship I feel I SHOULD have had with him, the relationship that was, in some absurd sense, owed to me, happens all over again all the time. Oh, here’s another thing, and he’s not here. Oh, I would have loved him in this way at this time, but he can’t feel that. My mother and aunt, who lost their mother as adults, told me that no matter how old you are when a parent dies, you feel like an orphan. Given enough time, we’re all made orphans.
I don’t know how my boyfriend could possibly attempt to make that better, so I don’t expect that of him. I’d wager that Bewildered’s fiance probably doesn’t expect that of him either. All I want is for my boyfriend to listen when little stories about my father bubble to the surface. I want him to rub my back or kiss my face and just acknowledge what was stolen from me. To be angry at the injustice of the loss with me, to be sad with me, to like the man he never met, and to feel sorry for the orphan he’s with, as self-pitying as that may sound. Bewildered, you’ll just have to have the painful humility to know you can never make this better.
Not to minimize the experience of losing a person by comparing it to the loss of a pet, but this may help illustrate my point. When my dog was dying, I was a thousand miles away, sitting next to my boyfriend. I was on speakerphone with my dog, telling her through sobs that I loved her and thanking her over and over for being my best friend for nearly 20 years of my life. I looked over, and saw my steadfast, manly boyfriend shaking, choking back emotion, and trying to hide the tears that were forcing their way out. I’ve never felt more perfectly supported or acknowledged in grief as I did at that moment. Maybe you can take something from that story as you search for a way to be less Bewildered?
Wow, you just broke my heart and put it all back together again with that piece. I’ve never known the pain of losing a close loved one, but your words gave me a little bit of insight into what that must feel like. I will hold the wisdom of this with me! I’m sorry I can’t say thank you eloquently enough for sharing this.
dear sugar –
i’m so sorry for your loss
Thank you, Bewildered, for writing in, and thank you, Sugar, for your wise words. My husband just lost his father less than a month ago, and while they had a seriously complex and often acrimonious relationship, his dad was still his dad, and they were very close. I have been doing my best to just be there for my husband and listen to him when he needs to talk, vent his anger, anything. Bewildered, I know it’s not an easy job, but I can tell from your letter that it’s one you take seriously and that you always come to it from a place of love. That’s the most important part, and I am impressed with your depth of caring.
I think the hardest thing for me sometimes is the fact that my husband is hurting, and I cannot take away the pain — and in fact, it’s the kind of pain that needs to be felt. So all I can do is be with him and let him feel his hurt and grief. I am a witness, a support, an ear, and I hope a comfort.
Again, one of your columns leaves me sobbing, this one more than usual. Thank you so much, Sugar, for this tender, eloquent reminder that there is nothing you can say that will make it better, you have to keep saying it. And thank you too, readers, for your touching comments.
My partner of 12 years lost both his parents before we met. His dad died on his 17th birthday. In thee earrly part of our life together, his birthdays were miserable. Eventually I realized I needed to plan a day full of distractions so he wouldn’t have the time to settle into the unhappiness of that day so many years before. He will cry sometimes when he thinks of his mom or hears a song she liked. But he knows that I’m okay with his sadness and will never try to rush him through it. I like to use those moments to honor her and offer respect and gratitude for the wonderful job she did in raising the perfect partner for me. He seems comforted by my genuine feelings and loves to tell me how much she would have loved me. After 12 years, I feel his parents *are* in our lives. It’s easy to talk of them and it’s not uncomfortable when we grieve for them together. He once told me that they are gone everyday–it doesn’t hurt the same everyday, but the fact is that he is without parents every single day and that will never change regardless of how many days pass. I found an old craft project of his mom’s that included her high school picture. I framed it and gave it to him to put up in the house. He was so moved and it offered him a chance to tell me the story of the piece and share more of her with me. I think more than letting him safely express his grief, or empathizing with him, he most appreciates when I bring them up. It lets him know I’m not afraid to go there with him, but it also provides him with the chance to celebrate them instead of only talking about them when he’s sad. Good luck, it sounds like you are a very caring man your fiance will be lucky to spend her life with. Which reminds me, I’ve always told my bf that I firmly believe his mom had a hand in bringing us together because she knew he needed a special woman that could give him the love and care he would be missing getting from her. We both are comforted by the idea that his mom *did* get to participate in our union. <3!
it has gotten to the point where I have a Pavlovian response to clicking on the link to Sugar’s column. The tickle in the inside corner of my eye like a warning that I’m about to cry, maybe just a little, probably silently… and then I fought it and then it came back, this time for a reason.
Sugar, you’re wonderful and talented and I adore your column. But please can you write something funny and fun? Fun and poignant…it can be done. It can!
It will never be OK. No truer words have been said. This made me think of a few things- cheryl strayed’s essay “the love of my life” and a review of books on grief over at the Millions that really rubbed me the wrong way. As you say, Sugar, witness grief, that is all there is to do. No one can take it away. But being loved helps from going straight into the abyss.
My mother is dying as I write this. Stage 4 breast cancer; now spread to her bones. I agree totally – “It will never be okay.” I’m a writer, I just landed an agent and my first novel is about to go on submission. This is my mother’s influence. She taught me to read before I’d started kindergarten. My love of books is part of her, something we have shared all these years. I want so badly to jump start the publication process along at warp speed just as badly as I want to freeze time so I never have to let go of her.
I can’t do either.
I took 2 days off this week to take her to doctor’s appointments. She looked up at me over the stack of forms she was completing and said, “Your niece (9 years old) asked me to make her a pillow that says “I love you”. That way, she’ll always have something of mine to hug after I die.”
Fuck.
How do you make THAT better? How do you console that? I can’t allow myself to be sad or angry because right now, I have to manage her fears and a monumental list of regrets.
I have no answers for you or Bewildered but I can offer my opinion: it helps to just be acknowledged. Don’t change the subject, don’t try to lift anyone out of a depression – for me, it makes light of the situation. “Oh, it happened, now deal with it.”
Acknowledge the pain, the fear, the regrets. Mothers are part of us and always will be, whether here physically or not. There is no getting over it. No putting it behind you. The loss is always going to hurt. Acknowledging that means you don’t compound the situation, if that makes sense. “I’m sorry” is wonderful but I understand why it makes you feel lame.
Because it doesn’t fix anything.
And that’s ok. You can’t fix this. I agree with Sugar and with some of the comments here… find things that honor her mother, let her share the things she misses with you and see if you can find ways to bring those things into her daily life so she’ll miss them less. My mother is an AWESOME cook. I’m collecting her recipes now. And of course, every book I read makes me think of her.
Sugar, my father died 24 years ago. I was 19 when he died. It will never be OK. I went on – wrote books, went to grad school, have a great career, a husband, lots of love, good health – a wonderful life. But although I don’t cry every day, every day I feel his absence — the things in my life he’ll never know. The woman I became. Thank you for speaking about the importance of bearing witness to grief. No one can fix it. No one can take it away, and no one can walk that path for anyone else. Love stands steady in the presence of grief. Thank you.
Dear Sugar
Thank you for your words. I lost my Dad twice. Once when I was very young when he left the family, and then again when he died in 2005. Although I wasn’t very close to him it still hurt like hell when he died. It was after that I realised I’d been mourning him for many years, or mourning the relationship we never had. It will never be ok that I didn’t have the relationship with him that I deserved and it will never be ok that he died before I had the strength to try and rectify that. Knowing there are people out there who understand that really helps.
My Grandma died recently and me and my siblings had to organise the funeral as my Dad isn’t around. I didn’t have an excellent relationship with my Grandma either, but it brought back all the feelings about my Dad again. It’s not always about getting over something but about learning to live with things and trying to make even the darkest thing in your life a positive if you can.
Bewildered, don’t try and make it better for you fiance, just hold her, or make her a cup of tea, or do the little things for her that you know make her happy. And don’t be afraid to just sit in silence with her as she does what she needs to do. The fact that she is willing to share her grief with you shows how much she loves and trusts you. Trust yourself.
[weeping]
My mom died January 10, and although she was there for my wedding and for my college graduations and for the birth of my son and for my first book and for my last book and for every minute of every mundane day in between until January 10, 2011, the feelings I have fit exactly your descriptions. Thank you yet again for giving shape and texture and sound to those emotions I otherwise leave inchoate.
This is pitch-perfect, thank you.
I’m so moved. Thank you for this.
Another beautiful column.
So often people feel their job is to make people who are hurting feel better. It’s not. Bear witness is a great term for it. To be with them, share their pain with them, and, most all, *allow* them their feelings, every single one of them no matter how ugly–that is a true gift that is more priceless than words can say.
Perfect advice, Sugar, especially the part about trying to fix it. Our culture is one that believes there is a self-help book or program or medical cure for every ill, and sometimes, there isn’t.
I lost my mother at 16, and wondered if I looked different, because I felt so shattered. Wondered why the world still went on, didn’t they KNOW? Although I had the gift of a wonderful step-mother even before I lost my mother, I still missed my mother. I ‘lost’ her all over again at various milestones of my life, and as I grew older, the loss was keener, not dulled by time.
Five years ago this month, at age 47, I lost my gorgeous, exuberant, laughter-filled 23-year-old daughter in a car accident. And became somewhat of an expert in what NOT to say to someone. We do not get precise and rote lessons in etiquette anymore, and for most of modern life, this works, but not for grief. We try to get creative with the soothing, and that just gets us tangled up around the axle.
As Sugar says above, don’t try to brush it off, shush the tears, make it go away to ease your own discomfort. It isn’t helpful to try to bring psychiatry or religion into the picture too soon. How soon is too soon? Probably much longer than you’d imagine. Take whatever amount of time you like, and triple it. And then wait some more, before broaching the subject. There is a period of time when ‘moving on’ feels like pressure to forget the person. There’s no amount of external pressure that can speed past that.
I’ve tried to describe the feelings and the process of learning to live with loss, and the best thing I can come up with is that my sea level is a little lower. I still experience joy, humor, anger, but it is all a little muted, and large events will carry the shadow of that missing loved one. My need for those missing spirits to be there at big family events, happy times, and holidays will color events large and small.
Not long after I started seeing the man I’m with, my daughter’s birthday came up. I gave him warning that it was coming up, and while 5 years after the fact it is no longer a big dramatic, emotional event, I do sometimes get a little blue, and there might be some tears shed. He got a funny card for her, saying to me, “There are still birthdays in heaven”. It hit the perfect note of acceptance – of my need to acknowledge her existence, and not keep up a facade of cheerfulness when I might not feel it. It also made me feel like he cared about *her*, which was immensely soothing. It made me feel like I’d never need to be defensive about missing her around him.
Goodspeed, Bewildered. That you asked for help on this speaks volumes of your feelings for your fiancee.
Julesagain
Yeah, I’m crying. I know I’m lucky that my mother is still with me. I’m sorry for those of you who have lost a parent. 🙁
one word. LOVE. My mom is my rock and the thought of losing her is mind boggling. I know i will not be right when the day comes, i know i will not be consolable, i know so many people around me will feel helpless and reaching this point in my life is inevitable and horrifying. But reading your response lets me know that even though i will one day fall into that canyon, i will eventually crawl out and as long as i keep it moving, i can take my time crawling out.
Thanks Sugar
T
This is the first Sugar column that has ever made me cry. Thank you so much.
Let me join the crowd and bear witness with you all. A coworker just lost her beautiful vibrant daughter to cancer. She and her husband wrote a beautiful, gracious and peaceful email to us the coworkers who witnessed their hurt for so long. It will never be ok.
My own dad died 23 or 24 years ago. I’ve blocked out when. ’87, I guess. Long before I was able to fully appreciate the gift of him. I measure my life now in terms of where he was at this age. I carry touchstones of his life too, only they are power tools. A table saw, a drill press, a band saw, a lathe, that I have carried and stored for 23 years. Moved them from one house to the next and the next and the next. I took them with me when I got divorced and moved into a 400 square foot studio apartment. The table saw sat next to my bed, the drill and band saw were in my closet. Now I’m back in a house and they are safe in my garage. It will never be ok.
I am writing this, tears streaming freely. It’s so true: “It will never be okay, it will never be okay that our mothers are dead.” I lost my mother in 1998 – partly from scleroderma, partly from, well, crime. One of my coworkers mentioned, about the loss of his mother, that it’s not something you ever really get over, you just figure out how to go on, but the loss is still there. And it’s true – it’s not okay, but yet, we somehow manage to keep going on.
I just read Rosanne Cash’s memoir, COMPOSED, and there’s much about her own losses – her father, her mother, her stepmother. She expresses very much the same thing, that these losses are Not Okay, but we continue nonetheless. Here is one of my favorite passages:
“In the months since my father’s passing I had come to understand that the loss of a parent expands you- or shrinks you, as the case may be- according to your own nature. If too much business is left unfinished, and guilt and regret take hold deep in the soul, mourning begins to diminish you, to constrict the heart, to truncate the vision of your own future and to narrow the creative potential of the mind and spirit. If enough has been resolved- not everything, for everything will never be done, but just enough- the deep grief begins to transform the inner landscape, and space opens inside. You begin to realize that everyone has a tragedy, and that if he doesn’t, he will. You recognize how much is hidden behind the the small courtesies and civilities of everyday existence. Deep sorrow and traces of great loss run through everyone’s lives, and yet they let others step into the elevator first, wave them ahead in a line of traffic, smile and greet their children and inquire about their lives, and never let on for a second that they, too, have lain awake at night in longing and regret, that they, too, have cried until it seemed impossible that one person could hold so many tears, that they, too, keep a picture of someone locked in their heart and bring it out in quiet, solitary moments to caress and remember. Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.â€
Sugar, Bewildered, thank you for this. My grandmother passed away last week, and it has been tremendously difficult on my mother (and understandably so). I plan to share this with her in hopes she will find some solace in your words.
I have a dear friend who lost her beautiful 11 year old daughter in a tragic accident. For years I gave her a free pass: I had no expectations of her, I kept my door open when she wanted/needed me for any reason. She says that there is a hole that will never go away: you can stuff it with other things or tread around it and pretend it’s not there, but that does not diminish the empty space. The only thing to do is learn to live with it. Some days are more comfortable than others. My friend is better now in many ways and I believe that is because she sits with her grief each and every day. Thanks for another wonderful column, Sugar.
PS: I must say that losing a mother and her love must be dreadful, but I never had a decent one to mourn. This is a different thing to grieve.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. It was grief that taught me to honour the grief of others. Thank you, once again, for this incredible response. I will carry it forward, in the way I will continue to hold and honour the grieving.
So much beauty and truth from Sugar again…
I would like to add: My father died when I was a child, and my mother and I have been estranged since I was 22 (not my choice, and nothing can be done about it–she might as well have been dead). The time leading up to my wedding was filled with a whole different level of grief that I had not expected. We tend to miss those we’ve lost especially acutely at the milestones of our lives, and a woman’s wedding day…well, that’s filled with all kinds of expectations that Bewildered’s fiance, like I, will never have fulfilled. The planning, choosing the dress, a veil, how should she do her hair…there’s no mother there to help, to be excited, to add her guest list, to do any of the things with her daughter that are supposed to be fun and exciting and all…milestone-y.
I am sure she’s excited to marry you, Bewildered, but planning for a wedding, and the wedding day itself, does throw into stark relief who is NOT there. It’s bittersweet, causing grief and resentment that can be difficult to articulate when it’s supposed to be such a happy time. I was married 15 years ago and I’m still just a little pissed and sad that my father wasn’t there to walk me down the aisle, that I made my veil by myself rather than with my mother, and that we skipped the whole little candle-lighting thing because I didn’t have anyone on my side to do it as he did.
So, you won’t always have to walk on eggshells around it, but this is likely an especially delicate time for her. Hang in there–it gets better.
Dear Sugar, What you’ve written in response to Bewildered is so perfect and gorgeous and significant. It’s what all human beings need to hear, know and understand simply because we all are mortal and we all love and at some point we grieve or love someone who grieves. I read this on the 15th anniversary of my younger brother’s totally unexpected, sudden death from a heart attack at the age of 29, when my own baby son was 9 months old. You are right, it will never be okay. My son will be learning to drive this spring and my awesome brother, who would have made the perfect behind-the-wheel instructor and would have loved every minute of it, is not here. That’s just one of hundreds of things that come to mind. Anyway, thank you, Bewildered, for sensing and loving enough to ask, and thank you, Sugar, for your amazing heart and words.
Sweet sweet sugar,
From a previous column I know that you and I are the same age (42) and it sounds like our mothers died around the same time. Math is not my strong suit, but I think I had maybe one extra year with mine. I am so grateful for that year, because it was the year I finally left a man who was so awful to/for me, a man my family and friends always knew was wrong for me. That last year I was able to return to her as her daughter again, and we did a little healing for which I will always be grateful.
Your columns blow my mind every time, Sugar.
Also @Ken — I love what you wrote and the excerpt you posted. Thank you!
In spite of the pain, I think it would be far worse to go through life without anyone loved enough to grieve for. My mother suicided and I had a kind of un-grief because I had loathed her through childhood and only later learned to have pity/compassion. Still, I was crazy for years after finding her body. It took me well into my fifties to build a family system of relationships that will give me that blessed kind of pain that follows inevitably from deep love and loss. The alternative is worse.
Thank you, Sugar. You described exactly what it feels like for me.
When my mother was dying, I sat by her bed but I took time out every so often to go for a walk down the country lane across the road. One time, I called my best friend back in Edinburgh. I was crying and I wasn’t used to sharing grief with him quite so much, but it turned out he had just attended bereavement training for a volunteer post. He said that the chaplain had told him (I paraphrase, of course) “It’s not that you get rid of the grief. It doesn’t go away. It’s just that you grow over time so that the loss gets smaller within you.”
Which I guess is how come I get to get out of bed in the mornings and get on with my life and even manage to talk about my mother, these days, without crying, usually.
I’m sorry for your loss too, Sugar, especially as that twenty-year mark approaches. I’ll be thinking of you next week.
Sugar, this is amazing. I know very deeply about worry stones. I have the one in my camera bag that I picked up at a beach while thinking of my Grandma. She taught me about worry stones. I was thinking of her so much because I felt her getting far away. I knew in my heart she would die soon and wasn’t sure if she had died when I found that very rock (she died 4months later with one single breath, in-between words shared with my Mom and worrying about my Grandpa getting fed on time and getting his shots. This woman was and is the most important woman in my life. I was one of those kids raised in a village and I am grateful for it. She was so much more then a Grandma. She was my best friend, my Mom, my sister, my everything. It has been a little over a year since she left this walking life (my Grandpa died 2months later. They were married for over 70years) and I miss her terribly. Thank you for this writing. She was my Mom and I miss her terribly. It is difficult for friends and family to understand my grief because she was “just my Grandma”. But she wasn’t. She was and is so much more.
As little girls my sister and I would give our mother stones as well. When we are on the Cape in the dead of winter, we find mermaid’s toenails and give them to her, or we don’t. It has come to the point where we don’t collect them anymore. For some reason this seems profound.
Beautifully done, Sugar, you always know all the right switches to flick.
No one’s ever put it so precisely, so beautifully.
I had to wait a day and until I was home to read this. I knew I would cry through the whole thing.
I was right.
Take care of you Sugar. 20 years doesn’t make it any easier.
It’s been 12 for me.
Your friend is right. It will never be ok that we’ve lost our mothers.
“But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.”
this is something for me to remember in my day-to-day life. it will likely come as a relief each time i realize i am not being called to solve the problem, whether it’s loving someone who’s grieving or who’s going through a bad patch or just griping about something trivial. and that if i have love behind it, i don’t have to worry about being dismissive or dispassionate because the love will be there. thanks.
Sugar,
I am overwhelmed — not only by your post, but by the outpouring of raw emotions from all of the adult orphans who have commented. It seems I belong to a tribe that I never realized was quite so tangible.
I am a person who rarely cries (well, until my mom got cancer, and since then I cry at the drop of a hat, but at game show winners and other innocuous stuff). This letter, your response and the comments had me sobbing at my desk at work. It finally clicked…I’ve been trying frantically, without realizing it, to crack the code that will set my life right again. My mother died September 11, 2006 and my father on June 1, 2008. I had always prided myself on my ability to successfully grow up and be an independent person, not relying on my parents but still having a good relationship with them. Now that they’re gone I’ve discovered that the only reason I was successfully “independent” was that they were there as a quietly supportive foundation for my life. Without them I find myself adrift — seemingly needy and helpless beyond my own understanding of who I am/was. I’ve been struggling without being able to put a finger on why, but now I get it…I’ve been trying to crack the code so that it’ll all be okay again. What a crushing blow, yet amazing relief (along with a recognition of truth), to realize that it will never be okay. I’m going to have to ruminate on this, but I now have hope that I can break the cycle I’ve been in and make steps to find myself in this new reality.
Thank you.
What a moving and true article. I know that it has to do with *anyone* tremendously dear to one, and how to go on without them.
I just have to record: you who love your mothers that way are SO LUCKY! Even in the loss you are lucky.
Me, I have NEVER had a loving relationship with my mother. She has been a dark, black, NEGATIVE presence throughout her long life. The kind of person who says, “oh, he’s your favorite author? He’s dead, you know. You’ll never read anything new from him.” And on and on and on… until any connection at all is crushed into numb deflection.
I wish I had a mother to love.
So I have adopted a mother, a wonderful smart woman who is human and loving and connected. I started to say ‘a woman who is alive’ — but she recently died, and I have bought an expensive ticket to her memorial service. Her love lights me up… and helps heal the black hole of the person who birthed me.
This letter could have been about me (minus the coming wedding). Thanks for the reminder about how it is okay to know that it never is okay. Grief isn’t something you get over, it is something you get through. It changes over the years. I lost my mom when I was 21, a senior in college. It will be 14 years this year. She missed so much and I miss her so much some days, even if I go days without thinking about her. Lovely column!
I’m losing my mother by inches to MS. Some days she is my mother; other days she is like my mother, but not.
Thank you for this.
Sugar,
It is like you read my heart. I feel like I should send this to every person who loves me, or has ever tried. Past, present and future.
I lost my mother a little more than 17 years ago, my father nearly 12 years ago. There’s a part of me that can’t seem to recover, that I don’t think is supposed to recover. For you, Sugar, for Bewildered’s fiancée, for all of the people who commented above and will comment below, for my 16-year-old daughter’s dear 16-year-old friend who just clawed her way through the second anniversary of her mother’s death, I feel like I simply want to say, “There, there.” I’ve been saying this to myself a lot lately. You’re a wonderful writer.
My mom died when I was 19 years old, I never got to say goodbye. I am 58 now and still miss her and have never read anything that was so true about how I feel. Thank you for writing this, I will save this and give it to my daughter to read. Her boyfriend has lost his mom and dad in the last two years and she often feels inadequate in how to comfort him, I know this will help them both…
Sugar, I wish my mother were still alive so she and I could talk about your columns together. I think she would have appreciated them greatly, as she loved good writing. She died when I was 10, 22 years ago. I’ve had a long time to try to pretend that it’s okay, but I’m surprised at how powerful it is read that it will never be okay. You made me cry, but I think it’s ultimately a good cry. By having someone else say that it will never be okay that my mother is dead, I can stop beating myself up for carrying that loss with me, making me feel weak to not be over it already. It will always be with me, some days more muted than others, and that’s okay.
Beautiful. Thank you.
I lost my mother in college, and it will never be okay. Thank you for helping me to understand that it’s okay that it will never be okay. I sent your article to my significant other, I hope you don’t mind.
Thank you. That was beautiful, I sent it to my Mom, who just lost her Mom. Can’t tell you what this meant to us. It makes me appreciate my mother even more.
I was in college when my mother died, and shortly thereafter I ran into someone who had just lost an important person in his own life. I was so baffled as to what to say to him; everything I could think of sounded so empty and cliche. So it really is a struggle for *all* of us to find the right words, or at least ones we’re comfortable saying. (Unless you’re Sugar, of course.)
I lost my mom this fall from cancer. She was 55. I’m 30. And you’re right, I can’t ever imagine it being ok that I lost her this soon. She was my best friend, and I will just never get over it. That being said, I’m forwarding this to my husband – as he spends much of his time right now trying to come up with the right words…and you’ve summed it up perfectly in this column. Time marches on with or without us. I just wish I still had her.
Just for a little perspective…
I can well imagine the sadness of “…no mother at our college graduations, …no mother at our weddings, …no mother when we sold our first books, …no mother when our children were born, …no mother, ever, at any turn for either one of us in our entire adult lives and there never will be.”, and the empty place in your hearts. However, what I find even sadder is those of us that have living mothers and still experience a void due to our mother’s being absent mentally, emotionally, or by choice. I think I’d rather have your sense of loss than the latter.
When I read Hope’s book many years ago, I cried for all of you who lost your Mothers “too” soon. But, as Michele Linder just wrote, the void is worse; the vague sense of abandonment that shadows your life and the constant yearning to repair what is impossible, the underlying knowing that you have missed the greatest journey…to have your Mother emotionally present and mentally healthy so you could feel safe and whole. I envy all of you.
“Have the guts to feel lame.” Thanks Sugar, for naming this basic reality – that in the face of grief, we all are inadequate to respond and comprehend the horrible and inevitable fragility of life. In light of the recent massive losses in Japan, and in my local community, you have reminded me that tears, anger, confusion are all part of the process.
As teens, my mother and father both lost their mother and father, respectively, and the shadows were ever present through my childhood being raised by grieving parents. At times, my brothers and I felt haunted by the missing grandparent, yet now I see a path to understanding. I am going to ask my parents to tell me about their lost parents. May we all carry more compassion for each other.
So beautiful, heartfelt, and true.
My husband had a chance to know my mother before she died (back when he was just a boyfriend). It helps me when he says, “I can’t believe how strong you are,” when he knows I’m hurting, even after all these years. It helps me to remember that it hurts so much _because_ I love her so much– and always will.
Oh, Sugar. I just found ths and I am so glad I did. My Mom died when I was 2 & you are right, it will never be okay…but I AM ok. I don’t sit around & think about it (unless I need a good cry) but it is always there, in every thing that I do. And on those days when I miss her, it is a familiar soft, warm, fuzzy coat tucked away in my closet that I throw on my shoulders….for a little while. I allow myself “mini” pity parties, but I try not to wallow in the loss. Doing so only keeps me from seeing all of the wonderful things right in front of me, my family & I KNOW my Mama wouldn’t want me missing out on any of it. ~hugs~ to you, so much, sweet lady. We speak the same language. I am so glad I found you.
I am overwhelmed by your words.
I am 25 and in two weeks it will be the 11 year anniversary of my mother’s suicide. To echo the choir, the profundity of ‘it will never be ok’ is perhaps the best consolation I have ever been offered. My mother had MS and while I am thankful for not having to witness a slow decline in health and mental capacity, the darkness of suicide (and its respective guilt-inducing ways) is sometimes too much to bear. As others have mentioned, it does sometimes feel more difficult as each year passes.
I needed to hear this.
Thank you for verbalizing the truth that we all felt but couldn’t decipher through the haze of loss. The weight you have lifted is immense.
I needed to read this, and now I need to share this with the people I love.
My father died 4 years ago from cancer, when I was 19. I still am struck from time to time from reoccurring moments of grief–and exactly at times like what you describe–the times when I simply wish he was here. My biggest aches come when I wish I could tell him what I’ve been up to. Writing this makes me choked up right now!
One thing that hurts me hard is when someone who I love says the wrong thing, unintentionally, to me during my blue moments. I want to scream: hug me! don’t say anything at all! But instead I cry, compounding grief with a crushing feeling of “stuck”.
I think communicating this will help. Thank you.
“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 lost my oldest brother in a helicopter wreck five years ago and this has been the single hardest thing for me to deal with: the knowledge that my life, my perspective has been forever altered by this loss. Must I forever see through that lens? Must I? I wasn’t even 18 yet. I didn’t get to live a single year of my adult life without this shadow on me.
It’s so desperately unfair. The closest I ever get to healing is that I forget exactly what this means. The fact of what happened becomes another item on my list of Important Life Events, but words like “never coming back” are locked in a dusty old chest in the attic of my mind and I refuse to consider them until I read something like this and realize there are more words than that to haunt me.
I don’t even know why I’m writing this except that I need someone to hear me. I need some part of the world to bear witness to the tears I’ve shed in the shelter of locked doors and shuttered windows. And I guess that’s the point. That’s all we need. We know you can’t see the Thestrals, but if you just promise not to pretend they don’t exist, it’ll make us feel less broken and alone.
So glad for this question and answer. My husband lost his Mom before I met him and it was devastating for him. He couldn’t even tell me what happened until after we were married, and even then, it was when we were laying in the dark and he cried and cried. I so want to fill the hole, I feel so sad for him. I can’t imagine what I’ll do when I lose my Mom. Also, my best friend lost her Mom when we were teens. Years and years later, she still (understandably) misses her dearly. I feel like I can be a better friend now that I know “it will never be okay.”
Dear Sugar,
What happened to all the old comments? I thought they were beautiful.
Dear Sugar,
I was referred to this article by the sweetest friend of mine. I am 24 years old, and I just lost my mother in an accident. I too, am currently clearing the way for the woman who my stepfather has fallen in love with. And only two months after her death. It’s like a knife in my heart every time I think about it. I am an only child, and I feel like I am the one who loved her most. And sometimes I feel like I am the only one still misses her, who is still lost in grief. You probably don’t even read these comments because who could? There are so many. But I just wanted to say, that it feels good knowing that I am truly not alone. Knowing that there are so many people out there going through the same grief. I think the hardest part is knowing that I will not know my mother possibly the majority of my life. I always pictured her here. I always dreamed of big life events with her by my side. She was my biggest fan. And it’s true, every good thing that has happened since her accident has been seen through the lens of grief. Thank you Sugar for showing me that I am not alone, and that joy is possible past sorrow.
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