“There is no twenty-three”

“There is no twenty-three” is Sugar’s stark formulation of a grief that cannot be repaired by imagining the future that should have followed. Addressing a father whose son died at twenty-two, she turns the age the young man did not reach into a boundary: healing begins by accepting the life that was, rather than continuing to measure it against years that never existed.

The phrase as an exercise

The expression arrives in a numbered sequence of instructions. Sugar asks the father to think of his son’s life as twenty-two years long, then to breathe in and breathe out with that fact. The next numbered statement, “There is no twenty-three,” makes the sequence’s conclusion spare and absolute. Its force comes partly from its placement: after a bodily exercise in naming and breathing, the sentence refuses the imagined next year in just five words.

That refusal is not a denial of the father’s love or of the wrongness of his son’s death. Sugar explicitly tells him that it was wrong for his son to die and that it will always be wrong. The phrase instead distinguishes the reality of the loss from the future the bereaved parent had expected. The young man made it only as far as the red light where he died; an imagined twenty-third year cannot be added to the life that actually unfolded.

Releasing the imagined future

Sugar sets the father’s task against the ordinary structure of parental love. Parents create, foster, and nurture their children partly in the hope that they will outlive them, and they often see their children not only as they are but as the people they may become. Letting go of that expectation is therefore close to impossible. In her counsel, however, the father’s healing depends on doing precisely that: recognizing his son as the twenty-two-year-old he was, rather than holding him to a future that grief keeps projecting forward.

This acceptance makes room for specific memories and relationships, rather than an idealized continuation. The son loved his father deeply and had long ago forgiven him for asking why he did not like girls. Sugar says the son would want his father to welcome his boyfriend’s new boyfriend into his life, find joy and peace, and become the man his son did not get to be. The phrase’s boundary does not close the son’s meaning; it redirects attention toward what he actually gave and what the living can still do in response. To make him into someone other than the person he was, Sugar warns, would dishonor him.

Grief, memory, and continuation

The sequence also draws on Sugar’s own experience of loss. She reflects that her mother’s life lasted forty-five years, and that the alternative futures she once pictured for her mother—at sixty-three or eighty-nine—never existed. This personal comparison gives the father a way to understand the discipline she is asking of him without suggesting that the losses are identical: in each case, grief must confront the difference between an actual life and the years a survivor expected to share with the person who died.

After naming that difference, Sugar describes continuation as a practice rather than a return to what came before. A person goes on by being generous and true, comforting others, allowing unbearable days to pass, and finding channels for love and rage. The phrase thus marks both a limit and a starting point: there is no next year to recover for the dead son, but his father can live in ways that honor the son’s actual life. Sugar’s final counsel is to receive what the son taught him and create something of him, making it beautiful.