Sugar’s mother’s sudden death, when Sugar was twenty-two, is the defining loss around which her later reflections on grief, family, and survival gather. Sugar is not beside her mother when she dies, and the unfinished goodbye becomes inseparable from the continuing love Sugar carries for her. Over the years, the loss returns through ordinary objects and absent milestones, while its meaning shifts from a search for what might have been to an acceptance of the life her mother actually lived.

The Last Goodbye

At the end of her life, Sugar’s mother is gravely ill, weak, and confused. Sugar bends to kiss her, but her mother says, “Please, no,” because physical contact has become too painful. Sugar explains that she will return in the morning, and her mother gives only the faintest nod. At the door, Sugar says, “I love you”; her mother remains silent until Sugar is almost gone, then manages the single word “love.” Too sick to say either “I” or “you,” she nevertheless leaves Sugar with a final word that stands on its own.

Sugar is not there when her mother dies. Her mother dies alone in a hospital room, and Sugar returns the next morning to find her still in bed, now dead. For years, Sugar repeatedly turns over the choices and circumstances that kept her from being present in those last hours. The replay offers no remedy: her mother will not come back, and the last exchange between them cannot be changed. The memory holds both tenderness and pain—the attempted kiss, the promise to return, the final word, and the morning when return came too late.

The Loss Afterward

Several months later, while clearing the house Sugar had thought of as home, she finds a glass jar of stones in the far reaches of her mother’s bedroom closet. The weight of it briefly makes her feel as if she is holding her mother. The stones are not keepsakes her mother collected alone: Sugar and her siblings had found them as children on beaches, trails, and grassy strips beside parking lots, then pressed them into their mother’s hands. Their mother had called the smooth, mostly black stones “worry stones,” saying that rubbing them could soothe the mind.

Sugar empties the jar onto the bedroom floor and runs her fingers over the stones, hoping to find her mother in them. She does not. Nor does she find her in the half-empty peppermint Tic Tacs from the car, the moccasins that still carry the shape of her mother’s size-six feet, her reading glasses, or the many other household objects left behind. The jar can summon a momentary sense of closeness, but no object can restore the person. That distinction gives the keepsakes their double force: they offer contact with memory while making absence unmistakable.

Grief and the Life That Continues

More than twenty years after the death, Sugar describes having stopped searching for a code that might explain it or make it feel right. Her mother’s life lasted forty-five years; the other ages Sugar once imagined for her mother—sixty-three or eighty-nine—were expectations, not lives that ever existed. Accepting the life that did occur does not make the death fair or painless. It loosens the hold of an imagined future without requiring Sugar to stop loving the person who is gone.

A conversation with another woman who lost her mother young sharpens this understanding. The woman tells Sugar that it will never be okay that their mothers are dead. By then both women are adults with children, fulfilling work, and good relationships, yet the truth of the loss undoes Sugar. Their grief is not constant public weeping; it is also the unspoken absence at college graduations, weddings, first-book publications, and the births of their children. They can be happy and fortunate while still carrying the fact that their mothers were not there and never will be. Sugar’s account refuses to treat those conditions as contradictions: a life can become good without making the loss acceptable.

A Continuing Bond

The stones return in a changed form as Sugar grows older. The stones she once gave her mother have scattered, but Sugar’s children now give stones to her. She keeps the best ones in her pockets; sometimes she carries one for weeks, finding it with her hand and rubbing its black curve. The object that once let Sugar imagine holding her mother becomes part of a practice through which her children’s gifts accompany her in daily life. The bond persists, not as proof that grief has ended, but as a changed rhythm of touch, memory, and care.

The death also shapes Sugar’s efforts to reckon with her father. After her mother dies, Sugar writes to him that the loss has occurred and that she has always hoped they might someday have a relationship; she asks him to explain his past actions before they can try. Rather than respond with care, he gets drunk and calls her a liar, accusing her mother of turning the children against him. Much later, Sugar writes again in a generous attempt to make contact. His angry reply tells her never to contact him and says he is glad to be rid of her. The bereavement does not resolve this family history, but it exposes the possibility Sugar once hoped her father might take—and the rejection she must face instead.

Memory, Inheritance, and Acceptance

The loss also returns through a small gift from the last Christmas Sugar’s mother was alive. In the early part of Sugar’s twenties, her mother gives her a warm coat she had saved for months to buy. Sugar responds skeptically, pointing out that it is longer, puffier, and possibly warmer than she likes. Her mother dies by spring, and the coat remains the last gift she gave Sugar. Sugar later recognizes how the small response she wishes she had offered—gratitude—has become a lasting regret. The scene makes the scale of bereavement intimate: a life-altering death can lodge itself in a single exchange about an ordinary coat.

In later reflections, Sugar finds some consolation in the thought that her mother would be proud of the person she has become. Her grief remains tremendous, but she describes her love as bigger; carrying her mother within her becomes part of how she lives and how she understands her own work. The death is therefore neither redeemed nor made acceptable by what follows. It remains wrong and irreversible, while the relationship continues in memory, in the stones Sugar carries, and in the values she seeks to embody.