Sugar’s mother

Sugar’s mother is a loving, resourceful presence whose early death becomes a lasting absence in Sugar’s adult life. Remembered in a swimming pool, a warm coat, a red velvet dress, and a jar of small stones, she is not reduced to a collection of keepsakes: these memories show how her care shaped Sugar, and how grief made that care continue to matter after she was gone.

Identity and circumstances

Sugar’s mother was generous despite having little to spare. Her family could not fund Sugar’s undergraduate education, and the household sometimes faced winters so lean that her mother went to a local food bank for groceries. Sugar recalls receiving government-distributed cheese and powdered milk and having Medicaid coverage as a child. Her mother and stepfather shared what they had, housed and fed the children, and worked to make Christmases joyful. The contrast between material scarcity and the warmth of what the family gave one another is central to Sugar’s portrait of her mother.

Her own education began later in life. At forty, she went to college and spent the last years of her life as a student, believing she was at the beginning of 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 service, her favorite professor granted her an honorary PhD: a public recognition of the academic life she had begun so late and would not live to complete.

A mother who teaches through care and release

One of Sugar’s earliest vivid memories takes place when she is three, in a swimming class at the local YMCA. Her mother repeatedly reassures her that the flotation device buckled around her shoulders and waist will keep her afloat. Sugar remains terrified, clinging to the pool’s edge while the other children swim. Her mother’s patient encouragement does not persuade her to let go.

Eventually, her mother takes her into the water and first holds only her hands, promising not to release her. Then she swirls Sugar around and flings her away. The sudden separation brings shock and fear, but also the startling discovery that she can move freely and stay afloat: the bubble works. Sugar swims around the pool, laughing with her mother, and then travels from one side to the other, calling out that she has made it across. The memory holds both the sting of being let go and the joy of discovering an ability she could not have discovered while clinging to the wall. Sugar later uses it to describe how a parent can help adult children become independent, but the scene also preserves her mother’s practical, sometimes startling way of turning reassurance into experience.

Gifts that outlast their giver

When Sugar is eighteen, she and her mother stop at a yard sale on a rural country road. The old woman who owns the house does not come out, but waves from a window. Among the things for sale is a red velvet dress. Sugar says she has no money; her mother says she does and reaches for the dress. Years later, after having a son and then a daughter, Sugar finds the dress again in a cedar chest that belonged to her mother. She had kept it secret among her mother’s best things, carrying it through her twenties and thirties. The dress makes the future and the loss converge: her mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she would never meet.

Another final gift is a warm coat, bought with money her mother had saved for months. At Christmas, near the beginning of Sugar’s twenties, Sugar reacts skeptically, telling her mother that the coat is longer, puffier, and possibly warmer than she likes. Her mother will be dead by spring. Sugar later understands that this was her last gift from her and regrets not simply thanking her. The smallness of the exchange does not make the regret small; its ordinary, recoverable-seeming moment becomes irreversible in retrospect.

Several months after her mother’s death, while clearing the house Sugar had thought of as home, Sugar finds a glass jar of stones at the back of her mother’s bedroom closet. The rocks were gifts from Sugar and her siblings, collected as children from beaches, trails, and patches of grass beside parking lots. Her mother had kept them all. Sugar empties the jar on the bedroom floor and runs her fingers over the smooth, mostly black stones, which her mother called worry stones and said could soothe the mind when rubbed. For a brief moment, their cold weight feels to Sugar like holding her mother. The stones cannot restore her, but they make tangible the years of attention in which children pressed small treasures into their mother’s hands and she saved them.

Death, grief, and continuing influence

Sugar’s mother died of cancer at forty-five. Sugar remembers feeling angry at God despite not believing in God, as if mercy were something owed to her and her mother’s death had broken an unspoken expectation. Her mother’s absence also marks adult milestones: there was no mother at Sugar’s graduation, wedding, first book sale, or the births of her children. These absences do not cancel the happiness of those occasions; they become part of the way Sugar experiences them.

The final exchange between mother and daughter is especially painful. Sugar was not present when her mother died alone in a hospital room. On her last visit, she bent to kiss her, but her mother asked her not to because touch had become too painful. Sugar said she would return in the morning, received a faint nod, and said, “I love you,” as she left. Her mother remained silent until Sugar was nearly out the door, then called, “love.” When Sugar returned the next morning, her mother was dead. For years, Sugar repeatedly revisited the choices that kept her from being there at the end. The sequence cannot be changed, and the word her mother managed to give her becomes both a lasting expression of love and a reminder of the finality of their separation.

Sugar finds no substitute for her mother in the objects she leaves behind—not the stones, nor the coat, dress, glasses, moccasins, or other household things. A friend who also lost her mother young gives Sugar a stark formulation: it will never be okay that their mothers are dead. Sugar recognizes that this remains true even though both women have children, fulfilling work, good relationships, and lives full of happiness. Grief is not only the visible act of weeping; it is also the bodily tremor and the knowledge that a mother will be absent at every future turn. More than twenty years after the death, Sugar no longer believes there is a code to crack or a way to make the loss acceptable.

What remains

The jar’s stones do not stay the same: the childhood stones Sugar and her siblings gave their mother have scattered, while stones Sugar’s own children give her take their place. She keeps the best in her pockets, sometimes carrying one for weeks and rubbing its black curve. The gesture recalls her mother’s worry stones, but the inheritance is not a promise that grief can be cured. It is a small practice of comfort passed between generations, with the giver and recipient changed.

Sugar’s mother also remains in Sugar’s understanding of who she has become. Sugar describes becoming the woman her mother raised her to be as a way of honoring her, and says that her mother’s presence within her has helped shape her writing and her response to others’ suffering. The portrait holds two truths without forcing them into reconciliation: Sugar would give back what grief taught her if she could, and the grief has nevertheless deepened her capacity to see and reach for other people. Her mother’s legacy is therefore neither a recovered past nor a lesson that makes death worthwhile. It is a continuing relationship carried in memory, habits of care, and the stones Sugar now keeps in her own pockets.