Sugar and her mother

Sugar and her mother are bound by a close, materially expressed love that survives the mother’s death without making that loss feel resolved. The relationship moves from a childhood shaped by financial hardship and the mother’s generosity, through shared educational ambitions and a painful final separation, into an enduring bond carried by memory, heirlooms, and Sugar’s own children.

A bond made through care and shared beginnings

Sugar’s mother could not provide money for her daughter’s undergraduate education, but the absence of financial support was not an absence of care. She and Sugar’s stepfather shared what they had: they housed and fed their children and worked to make Christmases special, even when the family’s finances were so strained that Sugar’s mother sometimes had to obtain groceries from a local food bank. Sugar began working at fourteen, kept jobs through high school, and paid for many personal expenses herself. The family’s circumstances made self-reliance necessary early, while the mother’s generosity remained visible in the care the household offered.

Education linked their lives even as their paths differed. Sugar’s mother began college at forty and spent the last years of her life as a student, believing she was entering a new era. She died at forty-five, a couple of months before she and Sugar were due to graduate from different schools. At her memorial, her favorite professor awarded her an honorary PhD. Years later, after Sugar had left the state where they had attended college, that professor came to a bookstore to hear Sugar read from her first novel. The reunion joined the mother’s unfinished educational future to the daughter’s later literary life: the professor had honored the mother at her memorial and now witnessed the daughter’s achievement.

Death and the final exchange

When Sugar learned that her mother would die of cancer at forty-five, she felt anger and betrayal even though she did not believe in God. She later described expecting mercy, as if the protection she had generally experienced ought to continue. Her mother’s death made that expectation impossible to sustain, and it became one of the experiences through which Sugar understood that suffering is part of human life.

Sugar was not at her mother’s bedside when she died. Her mother was alone in a hospital room. In the final visit, Sugar bent to kiss her, but her mother asked her not to because touch had become physically painful. Sugar said she would return in the morning, gathered her coat, and told her mother she loved her. Her mother remained silent until Sugar was almost out the door, then managed one word: “love.” She was still in the bed when Sugar returned the next morning, but she had died. Sugar repeatedly revisited the choices that kept her away during those last hours, while recognizing that replaying them could not change what had happened. The final word endured not as an answer to that absence, but as a small, complete expression of love between them.

Objects that carry the relationship forward

Several months after the death, while clearing the house Sugar had considered home, she found a glass jar of stones in the far reaches of her mother’s bedroom closet. The stones had been gathered by Sugar and her brother and sister as children and pressed into their mother’s hands. As she held the jar, its cold weight briefly made her feel as though she were holding her mother. She emptied it onto the bedroom floor and touched the stones, most of them smooth, black, and smaller than a potato chip. Her mother had called them worry stones, pleasing to rub in the palm and, she said, soothing to the mind.

The jar could not restore the person Sugar hoped to find in her mother’s belongings. She searched among familiar objects, from the peppermint Tic Tacs in her mother’s car to her reading glasses, moccasins, and sewn shirts, but found no place where her mother remained physically present. A friend who had lost her own mother put the limit plainly: “It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.” Sugar recognized that this could be true alongside a life that was happy and full. The mothers’ absence persisted at graduations, weddings, book publications, and the births of children; grief remained part of those occasions even when it did not eliminate joy.

A red velvet toddler dress became another material record of the bond. A month before Sugar turned nineteen, she noticed it at a yard sale while looking through another person’s discarded belongings with her mother. Sugar thought she did not have a dollar, and her mother bought the dress. At the time, Sugar was fairly sure she would never have children. She later kept the dress in a box inside a cedar chest that had belonged to her mother, carrying it through her twenties and thirties. After she had a son and a daughter, she found it again. Its meaning came from the conjunction of her mother’s death and her daughter’s birth: it testified both to the loss of a grandmother who would never know the child and to the love that had carried forward beyond the mother’s lifetime. Seeing her daughter wear the dress on the child’s second Christmas made an ordinary family gesture extraordinary to Sugar: the child wore something her grandmother had bought for her at a yard sale.

A warm coat was the last gift Sugar’s mother gave her. At Christmas near the beginning of Sugar’s twenties, the mother had saved for months to buy it and thought it was perfect for her daughter. Sugar responded skeptically, objecting that it was longer, puffier, and perhaps warmer than she wanted. Her mother died by spring. The coat consequently remained attached not only to the care behind the gift but to Sugar’s regret over the response she had given. The relationship’s tenderness and pain meet in that small exchange: a gift offered with attention, an ungracious reaction, and a moment that could not be repeated.

Grief, inheritance, and continuing connection

More than twenty years after her mother’s death, Sugar no longer believed there was a code she could crack by revisiting the past. The stones once given to her mother had been replaced by stones her own children gave to her. She kept the best ones in her pockets, sometimes carrying a particularly perfect stone for weeks and finding it with her hand, rubbing its black curve for comfort. The gesture echoes her mother’s worry stones, but reverses the direction of care: objects once offered by children to their mother now arrive from Sugar’s children to her.

Sugar describes her mother as continuing to live within her, not as a substitute for the dead or a reason that grief disappears, but as an influence carried into the life Sugar leads. In reflecting on another bereaved parent’s loss, she says that becoming the woman her mother raised her to be is the most important way she has honored her. She connects her writing and her capacity to reach others with what her mother’s presence has made possible in her, while also acknowledging that she would give back the gains of grief if she could. Her account holds those truths together: her mother’s death was painful and formative, and love remains larger than the bitterness of the loss.

The bond also continues through the way other people make room for the dead mother in Sugar’s life. Sugar credits Mr. Sugar, friends, and even acquaintances with remembering her mother and honoring that absence. Such acts do not make the death acceptable, but they make life better. The relationship therefore persists in private rituals—the stone carried in a pocket, the dress brought out for a daughter—and in shared recognition that Sugar’s mother belongs in the life of the woman her daughter became.