Bereavement

Bereavement in the book is both a rupture and a continuing relationship: death makes a loved one’s absence permanent, but it does not end the love or remove the dead from the survivor’s inner life. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar returns to her mother’s death as a loss that cannot be made acceptable, even decades later. Objects, words, and shared acts offer moments of connection, but not a way to retrieve the person; survival means carrying grief into a life that continues to change.

A Death That Cannot Be Revisited

Cheryl Strayed’s mother died of cancer at forty-five, after beginning college at forty and imagining herself at the start of another era. She died a couple of months before she and Cheryl Strayed / Sugar were due to graduate from different schools. At her memorial service, her favorite professor granted her an honorary PhD: an acknowledgment of the education she had pursued, arriving when she could no longer receive it in life.

Cheryl Strayed / Sugar was not with her mother when she died. No one was. For years, the knowledge that her mother had died alone in a hospital room left her feeling as if three-quarters of her insides had frozen. She repeatedly reviewed the choices and circumstances that had kept her away, but replaying them could not change the ending. The last encounter remained sharply particular: her mother could not bear the pain of being touched, so she asked Cheryl Strayed / Sugar not to kiss her; she barely nodded when told that Cheryl Strayed / Sugar would return in the morning. At the door, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar said she loved her. Her mother was silent until her daughter was nearly gone, then managed the single word love. The next morning, she was dead.

The word’s incompleteness is part of its force. Her mother was too ill and disoriented to say I or you, yet love stood alone and remained the last thing she said to her daughter. The scene holds two truths together: there was no final exchange that could make the death feel finished or right, and there was still a last word of love between them.

Objects, Memory, and the Search for Presence

Several months after her mother’s death, while clearing the house Cheryl Strayed / Sugar had thought of as home, she found a glass jar of stones in the far reaches of her mother’s bedroom closet. Holding its cold, heavy contents brought a fleeting sense of holding her mother. The stones had been gathered by Cheryl Strayed / Sugar and her siblings as children, from beaches, trails, and grassy patches beside parking lots, and given to their mother to keep. Her palms had served as a place for the children to put whatever they thought worth saving.

On the bedroom floor, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar emptied the jar and ran her fingers over the stones. Most were smooth, black, and smaller than a potato chip. Her mother called them worry stones and believed that rubbing one against the palm could soothe the mind. Their weight and texture made them intimate, tangible traces of a relationship, but they could not contain the person herself.

The search for her mother’s presence extends beyond the jar. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar recalls the peppermint Tic Tacs in the car, the fringed moccasins that still smelled of her mother’s size-six feet a year later, her large reading glasses, a gray porcelain horse, and the bank pen with a real hundred-dollar bill shredded inside. There were also the butter dish with a white marble ball in its lid and shirts her mother had sewn for herself or her daughter. None held what had been lost. The stones offered a brief sensation of closeness, not a code that could be deciphered or a way to make death reversible.

Grief Across an Adult Life

The persistence of loss becomes clearest in a conversation between two writers who had both lost their mothers young. When they spoke, one was in her fifties and Cheryl Strayed / Sugar was forty; both had children, fulfilling careers, and good relationships. The older woman’s plain acknowledgment that a mother’s death would never be okay broke through the appearance that time and good fortune should have settled the grief.

The two women were not unhappy in every part of their lives. They could be described as joyful, and each had experienced happiness and luck. But grief remained a lens through which good events were lived. There was no mother at college graduations, weddings, first-book sales, or the births of their children. The loss did not prevent those milestones; it marked them with the absence of the person who could not be there. The book distinguishes this continuing interior fact from the expectation that grief must mean daily weeping: sometimes the sorrow was overt, but it also persisted as unspoken words and a trembling at the body’s core.

For Cheryl Strayed / Sugar, more than twenty years did not reveal a hidden explanation for her mother’s death or a final solution to mourning. Instead, the search for a code ended. The stones her children give her have taken the place of the stones she once gave her mother. She keeps 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 repeated gesture echoes her mother’s use of worry stones, while reversing the direction of care: the daughter now keeps the stones her own children give her.

Losses That Take Different Forms

Other accounts widen bereavement beyond the death of a parent. A woman writing to Cheryl Strayed / Sugar is a recovering alcoholic, raising sons whose father, her ex-husband, died the previous year. She understands their grief and confusion, but also fears that they will not establish independent lives and that she will not be able to meet the household’s expenses or attain the life she hopes for as she approaches old age. Her bereavement is entangled with practical strain, care for the living, and uncertainty about whether her sons will launch. The loss does not arrive in isolation from money, housing, or the daily demands of family life.

A sixty-four-year-old man describes the end of a ten-year relationship, eight years of which had been wonderful. His former partner’s four adult children and three grandchildren had become people he liked and loved. The year after the relationship ended was, he says, the most painful of his life, despite earlier losses: his father’s death while he was in high school, a year in Vietnam, and another lover’s death from cancer. After the breakup, he sought ways to remain engaged with other people, volunteering with hospice, a domestic-violence and sexual-assault service, middle-school students, and an AIDS hotline. His account shows how loss can follow both death and the end of an intimate relationship, and how continued service does not erase a longing for conversation, companionship, and sex.

In replying to Living Dead Dad, whose son was killed by a driver who ran a red light, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar does not present consolation as a cure. She recognizes the father’s rage, suicidal thoughts, imagined futures for his son, regrets, and memories of good times, while locating beneath them a love that death cannot take away. The son remains dead; the father’s love remains his own. Grief is described as unending but capable of shifting shape, with some parts of the loss becoming understandable only over years. The survivor cannot return to the life that preceded the death, but must make a life in the altered one.

Continuing Love Without Resolution

Across these accounts, consolation does not mean declaring the loss acceptable. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar tells a bereaved partner to keep acknowledging the dead mother, to ask about her without waiting to be prompted, and to make room for her in the family’s life. Her own husband and friends have done this for her. Their care does not make her mother’s death okay; it makes the continuing burden better to bear.

Bereavement therefore has no single outward form or timetable in the book. It can inhabit a hospital-room memory, a stone in a pocket, an absent mother at a child’s birth, a household crowded by fear after a death, or a volunteer’s search for connection after heartbreak. The recurring distinction is between ending the pain and learning to live with what cannot be undone. Love does not restore the dead, but it remains a living bond through which survivors endure the next day and continue building lives shaped, but not wholly defined, by loss.