The universe has good news for thelost,lonely, and heartsick.
The sugars arehere, speaking straight into yourears.
I'm SteveAlman. I'm CherylStrait.
This is DearSugar's. Oh dearsong, won't youplease?
She has some little sweet days withme.
I check my bedbugs everyday.
Oh, and thissugar, using myway.
HiSteve. HiCheryl. Youknow, we've been thinking so much about what it means to say goodbye and let go and moveon.
Yes wehave. Youknow, because we're moving on from our ownpodcast, which is a sad thing and it involves a lot of letting go to the good times wehad, the wonderful experience we had with eachother, but also with ourlisteners.
So this really kind of came into our minds when we were thinking about some of the themes and topics we wanted to explore in these final episodes as we moved toward the end of ourshow.
And we thought we'd do this two part moving onthing.
Yeah. And in the shortterm, I can say just in my own experience and most of the people Iknow, people stay inrelationships, people stay in some way in an active discourse with their grief longer than they naturally should they hold on because it is so tremendously difficult to letgo.
Yeah. I found in every relationship that wasn't going to lastforever, I think back to every friendship or romantic relationship or jobopportunity, I always stayed too long and not because I was weak or dumb or naive or anythingelse, but because I was human and we cling to what we know and what's familiar and to what feels likeequilibrium.
And then of course there's the kind of moving on where we have nochoice.
Yeah. When somebodydies, we don't get to do that clingingthing.
And we docling. My mompassed, as youknow, more than two years ago and everybody in our family has been in their own way clinging with the odd exception and I know that this is much more complicated than I'm going to make itsound.
But my dad fell in love with somebody new who is very much like my mother but her ownperson.
Andhe, I think after actively being in the state of mourning and caring for my mom for sevenyears, where she was almost entirely athome, he haddone, Ithink, I think a lot of thatgrieving.
And so he was ready to move on and find a newlove.
And the rest of us have really in our own way has been not reeling exactly butclinging.
And I know this because several monthsago, I had the most vivid dream in which my mom was aliveagain.
And what was strange about the dream was that I knew that she had died and I kept saying in myhead, my mom isdead.
Her body would not look likethis.
It's been two or three months since shedied.
Her body would bedecomposed.
And then when I woke up and thought about thedream, I realized my mom wascremated.
If you see what Imean, I was even clinging to thepossibility.
And I remember sovividly, she was during the dream saying tomyself, don't say anything to yourmom.
Don't say anything to anybody else in the dream because if I point out that my momdied, she will dieagain.
I think this is something to do with what Joan Didian is talking about in this book that I find myself returning to again andagain, the year of magicalthinking, which is the searing examination of her grief over the death of herspouse.
When death comes along and announces that you must moveon, your mind goes back to a place of childhood and magical thinking and you say toyourself,no,no,no,no.
If I don't point itout, my mom will still bealive.
If I don't point itout, her body won't have decomposed or have beencremated.
Right.Yeah. Your experience is a really commonone.
I know this because I wrote about my own dreams after my momdied.
And especially immediately after shedied.
Through now and then I'll still have one of these kinds ofdreams.
But in those first fewyears, I had dreams that are not at all so unlikeyours.
It would be that I would come upon my mom and she wasalive.
And there would be that sense ofastonishment.
Wait aminute. I thought you weredead.
Youknow, orthat,oh, you were here this whole time or the beginning dreams were the mostpainful, the ones in the early days where she would have me killher.
So she would be in the dream and she wouldsay, you have to kill me and she would hand me abat.
And I would have to beat her to death or she wouldsay, get into your truck and run meover.
And I would have to run her over and murder her in mydreams.
Imean, I would wake like weeping andsobbing.
Imean, Icould, I was afraid to go tosleep.
And your take of it is this magical thinking that in yourdreams, she still is stillalive.
My interpretation of my dream life when it came to letting go and moving on and accepting my mother's death was that bond is so deep that I couldn't believeit.
My deepest consciousness didn't believe that this primal bond of my life was severed and in some waysover.
Andyes, I know that bond continues beyond herlife, but in some significantway.
And so I had to convince myself in my dreamlife.
And what's so interesting is that you had your mother come in and order you to killher.
Wow. Imean, and it's fascinating because that's a kind of brutal iteration of this idea that we cling to those who we'velost.
They're deeply embedded in our subconscious and they're going to be thereforever.
Yeah. Their body has gone the future experiences we get to have with them aregone, but subconsciously they are stillpresent.
Yeah.Right, wecling. Thereis,however, a difference between being in a job too long or a relationship too long and finally deciding to leave and having someone we love die and being required to moveon.
Yeah. And those are the letters we're going to discuss today on part one of our two part moving onepisodes.
How do we move on after we've lost a loved one todeath?
How do we move on without them in ourlives?
How do we carry them withus?
Well, also letting themgo.
And one of the mostinteresting, wise people I know who are writing about this today is ourguest, ClaireBidwell-Smith.
She is a licensed therapist specializing in grief and she's the author of several books about grief andloss.
She writes and speaks about grief regularly and offers online grief support in addition to her private practice in LosAngeles.
She has a forthcoming book calledAnxiety, the Missing Stage ofgrief, which will be out on September25th.
And which isamazing. It'sgreat.
And Claire and I connected several years ago when we both had memoirs coming out in which we wrote a lot about the deaths of ourmothers.
Both of her parents died within a short time span of eachother.
So Claire Bidwell-Smith is joining us from a studio inBoston.
We're inPortland,Oregon.
She's joining us rightnow.
Hi,Claire.Hi,Claire.
Hi,guys. So tell us a bit aboutyourself, your experience with loss and grief and also about this new book youhave.
I was 14 when both of my parents got cancer at the sametime.
I'm an onlychild. And mymother,dad, when I was 18 and myfather, when I was25.
So I kind of got hit with it all pretty young inlife.
And it was noteasy. And as I kind of crawled my way out ofit, I ended up going back to school becoming atherapist.
And I was always a writer beforethat.
It was my only way of making sense of all ofit, especially when I was an adolescent going through so much that my peers weren't goingthrough.
So after I became atherapist, I also started writing about grief and loss my own otherpeoples.
And it was again a way of deeper understanding for others and formyself.
And my newbook,Anxiety, the Missing Stage of grief is born out of all this work I'vedone.
It's been a decade of working in hospice and working in private practice as a grieftherapist.
And one of the predominant symptoms I've seen has been anxiety after a majorloss.
And it's something that hasn't been talked about really very much at all in any books that I couldfind.
It's something I went through after my mother died and something I've seen countless clientsthrough.
SoClaire, we would love to get your take on a letter we have from a woman who I think is feeling some of this anxiety that you justmentioned.
Steve, will you read theletter?
Iwill. Dearsugars. While my husband and I were away on a long awaitedtrip, my mother took care of our largedog.
Our dog was well behaved and welltrained, but he and my mother were not accustomed to eachother.
My dog would not do his business in theyard, so when I accepted my mom's offer to watch ourdog, I did it with the agreement that she'd take him for shortwalks.
I instructed her to let go of theleash.
Should he pull too hard onit, but I should have known she wouldn't dothat.
My mom was in her late 60s at thetime.
Before ourtrip, I'd noticed that my mom was losing weight and seemed a littlefrail.
I pointed this out toher, but neither of us took it very seriously at thetime.
On the third day of ourtrip, our dog lunged after a small dog while my mom was walkinghim, and she fell and broke herhip.
Soonafter, she had hipsurgery.
During herrecovery, my mother told me that her doctor had told her that a significant percentage of women who break their hip die within oneyear.
I told my mom that she would just have to beat thoseodds.
She was a very strongwoman, both physically andmentally.
However, my mom did die before a year wasup.
She died of small cell lung cancer that had metastasized to herliver.
I was at her side during her short battle with this aggressivecancer.
Logically, I tell myself that I'm not responsible for herdeath, butstill, four yearslater, there's now a dark cloud overme.
To alleviate myguilt, I continually analyze how long she'd beensick, reflecting back on indications that she was unwell before she broke herhip.
I constantly accuse and then excusemyself, going back and forth in my mind about whether or not I'm toblame.
It doesn't help that my father still brings it up fairlyoften, telling me that the hip surgeon told him my mother's injury is the reason he wouldn't have a largedog.
He also told me that he advised my mom not to watch our dog and says that they argued overit, though my mom had insisted on doing itanyway.
I've developed a guilt syndrome that extends beyond my feelings about mymom.
I think back to all negative acts I'vedone, going all the way back tochildhood.
To a ridiculouslevel, I reflect on the pain I may have causedothers.
My list includes not liking a schoolmate and being less than nice toher, but now realizing that she was a troubled littlesoul.
Witnessing an old woman fall but being afraid to come to her aid because I was a teenager and I didn't know what todo.
Being less empathetic when I had to fire people atwork, arguing with my mom about dumbthings, using my cool with my dad when he brings up painful aspects of my mom's illness anddeath, I could go on andon.
How do I get over the sickening feeling that I played a role in my mom'sdeath?
How is it possible for me to stop trying to place blame and simply accept thesituation?
In the rare time I've brought these questions up withothers, I've most often been met with the stony silence like nobody wants to touch theissue, which causes more recrimination andguilt.
Is there any way through thissigned, racked byguilt?
Such a sadletter. My heart goes out toyou, racked byguilt.
Claire, what do you make of thisletter?
Yeah, it's reallyheartbreaking.
I feel like I could write a whole other book calledGuilt, the Missing Stage ofGrief.
Yeah. It's so common and I don't say that to minimize anyone's particular experience of guilt after aloss, but it is incrediblycommon.
I think one of the things about guilt after we lose somebody we love is that it's a funny way of holding on tothem.
We can become really consumed with guilt as racked by guilt ishere, taking it back into deeper levels and other pieces of her life that she's dredgingup.
The way I see it so often in my clients is that it's a way to hold on to ourperson.
It's a way to hold on to ourgrief.
It's a way to feel like we're doingsomething, wishing we could dosomething, wishing we could goback.
If I just told her one more time about the dog or if I had doneA,B, orC, it makes us feel like we're doing something when really we'renot.
We're just torturingourselves.
The reason I relate to this letter so deeply is I for years in some strangeway, racked byguilt, did the same thing that you'redoing.
Even though my mom also had an aggressive small cell lung cancer that had metastasized and she died seven weeks after herdiagnosis.
There was never any question about the fact that she was going to die and diesoon.
I still tormented myself for years becauseI, at the age of22, was put in the position where I had to make medical decisions for mymom.
How much morphine should she get in her morphinedrip?
After shedied, I realized maybe I had in some ways hastened her death by saying give her enough morphine that she's not inpain.
I can't tell you how many stories I've heard likethis.
Really? It was years before I understood that it waslike,okay, this was my way of trying to bargain with thepast.
It isn't true that I killed mymom, but I felt as if Idid.
I think it's worth saying I'm just going to say this outloud.
You did not cause your mother's death and your dog didn't cause your mother's deatheither.
Your mom had an accident that involved the dog and it entered herhip, but she didn't die of a hip injury or anything related to a hipinjury.
She died of an aggressivecancer.
There was nothing that anyone could do to saveher.
It's really important that you tell yourself that story every day because the story you're telling yourself right now isn'ttrue.
When I read this letter or a rack byGilt, I thought about a similar situation a year before my mom was diagnosed withcancer.
She was walking across the street on a vacation with the family and there was a bright sun that day that I guess shown in the eyes of a truck driver who was turning left as she was walking across the crosswalk and knocked herdown.
She thought she was fine and tried to get up again and then realized that she wasn'tokay.
We thought at first it was just no bigdeal.
When she went to thehospital, it was clear she had internal injuries and then finally it was revealed that she had a brokenpelvis.
In ourmind, I think of the whole family and me inparticular, certainly mykids, thatevent, just like your mom being pulled over by thedog, is the moment that we realize something that's very painful and difficult toaccept, which is that our parents aren'tinvulnerable.
I also think in this letter that there are a few real psychic difficulties within how your family relates that might be making it more difficult because I think it's interesting when you write that you lose your cool with your dad when he brings up painful aspects of your mom's illness anddeath.
There are really two ways to readthat.
One is that you're justifiably frustrated because he's harping on this idea that somehow you're asking your mom to walk the dog that that somehow mixed up with her gettingcancer.
But it could also be that you lose your cool with yourdad, get impatient or frustrated when he simply brings up painful aspects of your mom's illness anddeath, things that are frightening and painful for you toconfront.
I would say in the firstcase, you need to be honest with your dad aboutsaying,please, when you bring thisup, it makes me feel like I'm to blame for mom'sdeath.
That's keeping me from movingon.
It's causing me to really beat myselfup.
On the other side ofit, if you find yourself getting angry and frustrated and pushing away conversations where he really needs to talk about and maybe even complain about the painful aspects of your mom's cancer and herdeath, I think it would be healthier even if he isn't couching it in the most positive terms for you to try to be present and listen to what he has to say about that and to stay in the room withhim.
Again, I don't want to say that as an invitation for you to have him dump onyou, but you're both in a lot of pain rightnow.
The thing that you need to talk about is the thing that you least want to talkabout, which is that you miss your mother and youboth, to some extent oranother, blame yourself want to hold on to her through these negativeemotions.
Underneath all of that is just a need to break the silence ofgrief.
Yeah, absolutelyagree.
There's definitely some family systems at playhere.
I think we have to make amends within ourselves first and foremost because there's so many things we can't change about the people aroundus,right?
So I think bringing thisup, bringing up these issues and these different dynamics is really helpful and important and maybe explaining to your father the different ways that you're seeing this or the ways that you're experiencing this or how it's making you feel when he says thesethings.
But deeper than that is just getting really clear with yourself about yourguilt.
I think the thing that I see often is that when people think about letting go of theguilt, it makes them feel like they're being callous and they're just movingon.
Oh, I don't care anymore that my momdied.
I don't feel guiltyanymore.
And that's not really the truth atall, ofcourse.
And one of the ways I really work with clients on this is to find new ways to hold on to our people instead of holding on to the guilt and ruminating over and over on these pieces is finding a new sense of connection to our lovedones.
I think that that's a very powerful shift and the way that we think about movingon.
Forme, moving onwasn't, it turnsout, about releasing mymother.
It was about learning how to carryher, learning how to bear my grief and instead of deny it or let it go or leave it in thepast.
What Irealized, it was always going to be withme.
And that was actually strangely a comfort because what I realized was going to be with me was the love for mymother.
So I'm curious about how do we make those connections while also moving on from the people we'velost?
Yeah,absolutely. I think that you're moving on is a real misconception because it doesn't mean letting go of the people that welost.
And that's the biggest mark of confusion in the griefprocess, Ithink, is that people think that this idea of moving on or acceptance means that you've let go and you're overit.
I kept trying to let go of my mother and it felt sowrong.
I didn't want to let go of mymom.
Right. I could think of any kind of question or dilemma and what my mother would say aboutit.
Youknow, I could even think of an outfit which she liked thisshirt, youknow, like the ex orno.
And I know theanswer. And I think that so many of us who have had a close lovedone, we know thoseanswers.
And so we can still rely onthem.
We can continue theseconversations, these dialogues within side ofus.
So finding these new ways to have the conversations and finding new ways to honor them and doing that can look like talking to people aboutthem, writing aboutthem, writing letters tothem.
I write a letter to my mother every single year on her deathanniversary.
And everyyear, I think it's not going to be a bigdeal.
And then everyyear, I just weep and I tell her all the things like I got married thisyear, mom or youknow, this happened or I wrote another book and it feels so good to talk toher.
Sogood. Another way of honoring them is doing things that were important tothem, continuing some kind of legacy oftheirs.
Can feel reallygood. And I think that so often we know that ourselves do that because we think it's supposed to beover,right?
We're supposed to have letgo.
Yeah. I also want to propose really putting to rest this question about the hip injury being related to thecancer.
Those things aren'ttrue.
I understand that this doctor told her this thing and that seems verycruel, but that also could be a kind of misinterpretation of what he was intending tosay.
And it might be worth going back to that doctor andsaying,Hey, I'm tormented by this thing you said to my mom because she did die within theyear.
And this was really actually very helpful tome.
I didn't go back to my mom'sdoctor, but I did share my agony with my dearfriend,Dr.
DorothyNovick. She's a pediatrician and at one of my bestfriends.
And we took a long walk several years ago and I told her that I felt so guilty about this aspect of my mom'sdeath.
And she wrote me this incredible email that basically exoneratedme.
She explained to me theprocess, the deathprocess, the medicationprocess.
And it released me in some ways from this guilt by just giving meinformation.
And I think that that's maybe what you need to rack by guiltis, youknow, to lean into rationality andreason.
And I think on a deeperlevel, as so often we talk about on the show that there are bad stories about a lot ofthings, youknow, the bad stories about moving on area, as Steve pointedout, it's a betrayal to doso, which isn'ttrue.
Orb, as I pointed out and Claire and I have bothsaid, there's also this other counter narrative that says you should be able to moveon.
Andso, youknow, you're in this double bind essentially whereyou're, youknow, we don't really have a path or amodel, what does healthy moving on look like whenwe, when we do want to carry someone we love with us into ourlives.
And how do we bring our loss into our lives in a way that doesn't make us feel racked by guilt or anxiety orsorrow?
Yeah. And this quote might behelpful.
It's from thisbook, The Year of Magical Thinking by JoanDidian.
And she writes this that I hope racked byguilt.
Maybe might make you feellike, wait asecond, all of this thinking about all these things that I haven't thought about for years that is notabnormal.
That is not somethingstrange.
That's actually a part of theprocess.
Shewrites, the death of aparent, despite ourpreparation,indeed, despite our age dislodges things deep inus, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground longago.
We might in that indeterminate period they callmorning, be in asubmarine, silent on the ocean'sbed, aware of the depthcharges, now near and now far buffeting us withrecollections.
And I thought of that partly because racked byguilt, you're being buffeted by all theserecollections, not just of the thing you perceive youdid.
You killed your mothersomehow.
You played a role in herdeath, but also everything that's on the ledger that counts againstyou.
You're everything with the kitchensink.
And I thinktoo,gosh, certainly with anyparent,right, you are going to feel bad about some ways that you were a brat to them in thepast.
I think this isamplified, like in mycase, in Claire'scase, when we lost ourmoms, youknow, really at the height of ouryouth, when we were just not yet in that time oflife, when most of us can look back and be more forgiving to our parents and grateful forthem, there were so many things that I regretted havingsaid.
And after my momdied, when I think about my teen years and my arrogance and my bratiness, metoo.
Claire, you relate tothat?
One of my favorite parts of your wild share is whenyou, what does it you say to your mom in thecar?
Yeah, Isay,oh,god, to thisday, and it killsme, I said to mymom, youknow, I was like 21 orsomething.
And Isaid, isn't it shocking to you how much more sophisticated I am as is age than you were at thisage?
Yeah. So if you hadn't lost your mom shortlythereafter, you would have had many more years to repairthat,right?
To have that moment where you realized how silly and immature that was and how hurtful that was and then apologize and comeback.
But when you losesomebody, all of asudden, everything gets cutoff.
Your relationship has an end and you now look back on everything you ever did orsaid.
And there are no reparationsnow,right?
No,amen. It's soterrible.
But that's one of the things that I think has to be talked about in grief is that we still can makeamends.
You need to make amends with yourself and with your mother and maybe with your father aswell.
However, you can take that or acceptit.
But I think we can still make amends with our lost lovedones.
We have to because otherwise we're eating ourselves up with thisguilt.
We're arguing with ourselves in ourheads.
We're having these conversationsinternally.
And if we're already doingthat, we may as well have them in an amend makingway.
Youknow, that's what will give us release andpeace.
Right. The other thing that might be important to seek some griefcounseling, that might sound silly to you since it's been fouryears, but you're in that submarine now and you are buffeted by theserecollections.
And those are the symptoms that tell you I'm actually still in an active state ofmourning.
Youknow, I think four years out is actually a really wonderful time to do griefcounseling.
Yeah, metoo. In thebeginning, when we losesomebody, it's kind of like you get your arm cut off and it's justtriage.
You're just trying to stop the bleeding and you're trying to deal with thepain.
And then four yearslater, you're living in a world without anarm.
And what have been the bigger ramifications of that and how has it affected you in all aspects of yourlife?
And so then you can really go in and start to work withit.
Yeah, I had that samethought,Claire.
Imean, I think thatagain, one of our cultural misinterpretations of grief is that it's happening in that time immediately after thedeath.
Well, one of the most striking things for me when I went back and read myjournals, a couple of months after my mom haddied, I was already lambasting myself on the pages of myjournal.
I waslike, why am I still sosad?
And like I look at that now and Ijust, I can't believe I wrotethat.
Butclearly, I didn't come out of nowhere that I was feelinglike,well, it's time to moveon,right?
I have moved on and I have healed in so many deep and importantways.
Butgrief, Ithink, is an ongoing process and it comes up in different ways at different points in ourlives.
And racked byguilt, you are going to experiencethat.
And one thing that's interesting about this letter and I thought about it in relation to how I felt and thought and behaved after my mom's death is in a way we focus on what we didwrong, what we could have donedifferently, how we're on the hook forit.
Because it is a way of keeping itbay, how much we love theperson.
Yeah. And what's not present in this letter rack by guilt because it might be too painful to set it down is how much you loved yourmom, the memories you have of her that made her precious to you that makes you feel so deeply her lost that you become the murderer in asense.
Oftentimes guilt andanxiety, and this is what I think your book explores so preciselyclear, those lesser defenses are a way of really masking the deep grief of how much that person meant to you and all thepositive.
You just missthem.Right.
Yeah, sometimes it's just thatsimple.
But that's so painful sometimes that we cover it up with all kinds ofthings, youknow, anger and guilt andanxiety.
It's much easier to sometimes feel those and to ruminate on those things than just to feel the deep searing pain of missing thatperson.
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Do itanyway. Ithink. Dearsugars, from the time that I was five years old until we set off forcollege, I was attached to the hip withAlejandra.
We spent every daytogether.
We made spy kids and peeped in on ourneighbors.
We taught each other ourparents' nativelanguages.
We had our own secretlanguage.
And we even got our first tiny tattoostogether.
We were known to everyone as aunit.
30 yearslater, I can still remember the matching outfits we wore to school and our insidejokes.
Her home was the only one that my strict immigrant parents allowed me to spend timein.
She also came from an immigrantfamily.
And we had a connection that many first generation kids like us couldn't findelsewhere.
She was a brilliant writer and she also had a deep sadness which emerged in our teenageyears.
We lost touch after marriage in kids with occasional emails updating each other on the major milestones of ourlives.
Lastyear, my husband came home from work looking pale and warning me that he had terriblenews.
A colleague who'd once worked with Alejandra's father had told him that Alejandra had died by suicide five yearsago.
During those fiveyears, I'd been thinking she was happily married and teaching creativewriting, but shewasn't.
She wasdead. After the devastating news sunkin, I desperately searched for more information online but foundnone.
Her family had erased anything about her from theinternet.
Being from a culture that values honor and personalsecrecy, I wasn't surprised that they didthis, but it left me noclosure.
I've lived with the knowledge of Alejandra's suicide for a year now and haven't movedon.
I think about her every day and I'm often moved totears.
I've driven past her childhood home in hopes of seeing hermom, whom I cared for and who cared forme, but as clear as she's movedaway.
I also feel like much of my childhood isgone.
Because we had such an intimate reach and exclusivefriendship, her death has erased thosememories.
I'm the only living witness to ourexperiences.
I keep ruminating on how Alejandra might have killedherself, where she was when she didit, how she wasfound, and whether she ever thought of me after we losttouch.
I've spent hours reading over our childhoodletters.
It was so clear that she was crying out for help as ateenager.
She even alluded to dying young in oneletter, like she knew suicide was herfate.
In myreflections, I've realized something happened to her when she was12.
She went from being a model student to finishing her father's beers after dinner and showing up to school withbruises.
She became sexuallypromiscuous.
Our closeness suffered because of thischange.
At the time I thought she was just trying to getattention.
I was young and naive and didn'tintervene.
Inretrospect, her behavior was obviously a cry forhelp.
I feel so much guilt for mycomplacency.
So myquestions,sugars, isthis, how do I moveon?
I don't want to bring up this most painful memory to the people who were closest toher, but I also feel desperate to connect with someone who loved hertoo.
I met her husbandonce, yearsago, but I learned online that he has sinceremarried.
I'm certain that her parents went nothing more than to bury this deepwithin, and I wouldn't even know how to find themanyway.
Andfinally, what should I learn from this experience and how do I use those lessons as I parent my two beautifulchildren?
Signed, young at brokenheart.
One thing Ithought, young at brokenheart, as I read yourletter, it dawned onme.
This was a twinship, and I say that as atwin.
When you're young and you have an intense bond with somebody else and you spy on people together and you learn the native languages of your families and you have your own secretlanguage, that's a twinship.
That's exactly how I felt towards mytwin.
And so thatfriendship, even though it hadn't been active in the last fewyears, was in the crucible of your childhood as a very intense sense ofconnection.
And that's why her death hit you sohard, even though in the recent past you hadn't been in touch withher.
I had the same thought about thetwins.
Yeah, you've lost this keeper ofmemories, youknow, this person who experienced things that only the two of you didtogether.
And also going on in this letter is the whole secrecy ofgrief, youknow, the shroud that goes aroundloss.
And in this particularcase, so much so with the family and the culture and just being really alone in processing thisloss, there's not really anybody for you to talkto.
You're right that you could go to her husband and herfamily, but they may not be very receptive and I'm sure there's fear of bringing up more pain forthem.
And so the kind of facing this on your own is reallydifficult.
And when thathappens, I think that always turning to others who've experienced something similar ishelpful, youknow, finding a groupor, youknow,reading, when I was 18 and my momdied, I felt like there was nobody else in the world who would lost a mom at myage.
And I just read every book I could get my hands on of anything that somebody went through that washard, particularlygrief, but reallyanything.
And there's so many beautiful books out there about loss and about twin ship even and about grief that you can feel a little less alonewith.
Well, young at brokenheart, this is particularly isolating because the other layer of this is of course that she found out after her friend'sdeath, five years after ithappened.
Youknow, the people around her aren'tsaying,oh, I'm so sorry you lost yourfriend.
They'resaying,wait, you didn't even know your friend was dead for the last fiveyears.
It doesn't on the surface to others look likeloss.
It doesn't look as if she's among thebereaved.
And yet clearly young at brokenheart, youare.
I recognize that sorrow that's present in your letter when you say during those fiveyears, I'd been thinking she was happily married and teaching creative writing thatyou, even though you weren't in touch withher, she still had a place in your psyche and you imagined her out in the world alive and that has been corrected by thisnews.
And I'm curious about this Claire and yourwork.
Have you ever worked with people who have had this kind of grief where they don't even know the person's dieduntil, youknow, long time later and then they're having to reckon withit?
Yeah,absolutely. And I think you're spot on in sayingthat, youknow, young atheart, you are among the newly bereaved withthis.
It's thesame. But how long ago was that she actually died foryou?
It's justhappened. And so you are grieving just as anyone would if it had happened lastweek.
So I think honoring thatprocess, even though the people around you aren't necessarily seeing it is really importanthere.
Yeah. It's alsoimportant, young at broken heart to recognize the way in which your guys relationship changed as you gotolder.
And I think you're putting yourself on the hook for not having been her socialworker, having been herrescuer.
The truth is you did recognize and now inretrospect, you recognize even more powerfully that she went from being a model student to being somebody who started to drink beer showing up at school with bruises and becoming promiscuous and soforth.
You now as an adult can see that that was a younggirl, a friend who was inpain.
And so you're applying adult logic to how you should havebehaved.
You saw it and you could have savedher, but youdidn't.
I think deep down that's how it feels toyou.
And the reality is that you were young and naive and you didn't intervene because you were herfriends, not her parent or her social worker or herrescuer.
And I think it's important to recognize that this is the kind of friendship or twin friendship even where you felt that your friend was going adrift and you're now connecting that to the idea that her death was the result of you're not intervening when you were bothwhatever, 13 or 14 yearsold.
And that may sound crazy to the outsideworld, but Claire and Cheryl will both tellyou, that's notcrazy.
That's the way that grief's logicworks.
If you can be the person who is responsible for death and maybe you can bring her back to life and what's bringing her back to life right now is the guilt that youfeel.
If you release thatguilt, you fear that she will slipaway.
Very wellsaid,Steve. I think thatyeah, just making amendsagain, I keep going back tothat, but I think it's never too late to dothat.
Like Cheryl and I were talking about with our moms and the stupid teenage things we did and then suddenly the relationship was over and we didn't get a chance to kind of move throughthose.
It's the samething. If your friend hadn'tdied,young, it broke inheart, then maybe in a few years fromnow, you would have gotten back in touch and developed a longer relationship and had the chance to go back and talk about those teenage years and talk about maybe what happened when she was12.
But because that's been cut off and the box seems like it's beenclosed, now it's this thing that feels really painful and that you want to try to fix butcan't.
It's going to keep coming up for you over and over in so many ways like a Rubik's Cube trying to make it line up until you make some kind of amends within yourself or with her on a spirituallevel, whatever that looks like foryou.
And I thinkthat,again, writing letters can be so helpful withthat.
It's verypowerful.Yeah.
At the end of yourletter,young, it broke inheart, youasked, how do I use these lessons as I parent my two beautiful children and it's such a beautifulquestion.
And I think there are a couple of things you might thinkabout.
The first is that this is partly a lesson in the fact that you can't controldeath, but you can control yourlife.
And as you think about whether you want to share this experience with your kids or talk to them about it in anyway, one thing you might think about is to maybe particularly as they get to be towards teenage years that part of this experience is teaching you that you're not responsible for the pain of those aroundyou, but you can try to help mostly by talking tothem, by listening tothem, by asking if they're allright, if they seemtroubled.
It's important that you don't say to yourkids,gee, always check in on your friends because years later you're going to feel guilty if they end updying,yeah.
That's not a healthymodel, but it is healthy tosay,look, part of the way we control life is by being compassionate and aware and paying attention to the people welove.
Because the central thing that you wantto, Ithink, teach you two beautiful children is not to bury feelings deepwithin.
So I want to say one other thing on a very practicallevel, young at BrokenHeart, you say I feel desperate to connect with someone who loved hertoo.
And I want to encourage you to dothat.
Yeah, I'm worried aboutthat.
You say a couple of times that you feel sure that her parents want nothing more than to burythis, that they erased her from the internet and all ofthis.
And I don't question any ofthat, but that doesn't mean that you can't reach out tothem, that you can't track them down and send them a letter or ask if you can come visit them to talk about theirdaughter.
You knew them a long time ago and they are also grievingAlejandra.
There might be an opening where you can't imagine onenow.
Now ofcourse, you also could be exactlyright.
You could send them a letter and they could say we don't want to discuss this or they could not respond atall.
But I think it's worth atry.
On thisshow, we're always talking about taking emotional risks and beingvulnerable.
And I do think that there is a chance that you could have a really healing conversation with herparents.
The other thing is you don't say whether or not Alejandra has children or how old her kids are if she did havethem.
And I think that one of the things that has been powerful in my own life is those times where I have made contact with somebody who knew my mom a long timeago.
A few yearsago, I wasn't doing an event in Colorado where my mother went to highschool.
And I got an email a few months before I made this appearance from somebody who was my mom's goodfriend.
And it wasamazing. She showed up to myevent.
She gave me all of these photos that she had taken of my mom when my mom was like16.
I could see my mom's writing in her high schoolyearbook.
It was just an unexpected gift from theuniverse.
And I didn't get my momback, but I gotsomething.
I connected with somebody who had once also loved mymom.
And so if Alejandra does havekids, young at BrokenHeart, I really encourage you to connect withthem.
Maybe they're not old enough to connect withyou, but just keep that inmind.
Maybe 10 years down theline, you makecontact.
Totally. I lovethat. And I've those have been very meaningful moments in my life too when people have reached out with letters about my father and my mother stories or picturesunexpectedly.
But I also think that you can alsoshare, young at BrokenHeart, you can share that your memories of Alejandra with your ownchildren.
You can tell them abouther.
You can tell them about the games you guysplayed.
You're the language you madeup.
But the adventures you hadtogether, what it was like to be best friends at thatage, or whatever age your kidsare, you can relate to the times that you hadtogether.
I think that's one of the loveliest way to keep people in ourlives.
It's such a better way than holding onto guilt or anxiety is really honoring those people and talking about them and bringing them back to life in the lives of people aroundus.
Right. So onething, young at BrokenHeart, that we should also acknowledge that might make it a little bit more difficult to reach out to hermom, forinstance, who you say you cared for and who cared foryou.
And even to talk about Alejandra with your kids is that she died bysuicide.
Yeah. And that's really loss plusshame,really.
Youknow, there's a real culture of silence aroundsuicide.
It's a distinct form of mourning that is complicated in ways that I think a death by natural causes or by illness or calamity ornot.
Yeah. And all the morereason, Ithink, if Alejandra does have kids to reach out to themsomeday, because I think likeyou, young at BrokenHeart, her children will also be having some of thatguilt.
And I think that there's a really powerful story to be told in your witness of Alejandra's struggles as ateen.
If in some ways you can be a player in the healing of the other people who loved Alejandra by sharing thosestories.
I think that is a powerful form of medicine foryourself.
Claire, any final thoughts for young at Broken Heart or racked byguilt,too?
Youknow, justagain, this sentiment that neither of you are alone and letting yourself be changed bythis, youknow, death and loss really changeus.
They break us open in often pretty beautifulways.
We kind of go about our lives thinking that everything is just going to go as it's going to go and then all of a sudden something like this happens and it really causes us to stop and take a look at not just ourpast, but also ourfuture.
Youknow, what is the life that we'reliving?
If the rules are that there are no rules and that we can't control our environment and we can't control when we lose somebody and we can't control what we're going toregret, then how do we live the best life that wecan?
Youknow, what are changes that we need to make rightnow?
What are things we could be doingdifferently?
Yeah. And I think for both ofyou, I think that's the most important thing todo.
I do a kind ofritual. It's a very simplething.
The anniversary of my mom'sdeath.
I'll almost always walk to a beautifulplace, ariver, astream, a lake and pick some flowers and cast them into the water while thinking about the beauty that my mother has not onlywas, but has brought into my lifeyears, decades beyondher.
And I think that that will always be true all the days of mylife.
The beauty that was my mother will live inme.
And that is agift. That is notgrief.
That is agift. And I think that the deepest place in grief for me has been recognizing the gift of mygrief, turning that ugliness intobeauty, turning that sorrow intolife.
And that's what I wish for both ofyou.
Mmm. Wish you'renew. That'sbeautiful.
Hilisteners. You can hear the second part of our moving on series nextweek.
Our guestDr. Harriet Lerner will help us answer questions about how to move on from ourregrets.
We hope you joinus. Dear sugars is produced by the New York Times in partnership withWBUR.
Our producer is Alexandra LeeYoung.
Our managing producer is LarissaAnderson.
Our editor is PaigeCowatt.
Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin and our editorial director is SamanthaHenning.
Special thanks to StellaTan.
We recorded this show at Talkback Sound and Visual inPortland, Oregon with our engineer JoshMillman.
Our mixed engineer is EddieCooper.
Our same music is byWonderly, with vocals by LizWeiss.
Please find us at nytimes.com slash dearsugars.
You can send us your letters at dear sugars atnytimes.com.
