Living Dead Dad and his son

Living Dead Dad and his son are portrayed through a relationship that death cannot end, though it radically changes how the father can live it. The son was his only child, and the father’s account joins deep affection to a particular regret: he did not initially understand his son’s homosexuality, and never got the chance to apologize for his first response. In Cheryl Strayed / Sugar’s reply, the relationship becomes a way to consider how grief can remain permanent while love continues to guide the living.

Identity and Background

Living Dead Dad is a fifty-eight-year-old father writing nearly four years after his twenty-two-year-old son was killed by a driver who ran a red light while under the influence. His son was his only child and died before paramedics reached him. The father describes himself as a parent whose child is gone but whose identity as a father remains; the name he gives himself expresses that contradiction. His letter is presented as a numbered list because, after many weeks of trying, he cannot compose it as an ordinary letter. The form conveys both the effort to contain his grief and the difficulty of putting that grief into a continuous account.

The father says that his sorrow can feel fatal and that at times it leaves him unable to do more than lie in bed overwhelmed by pain. He has also considered ending his life, a thought that led him to make an appointment with a psychologist. He says he cannot act on it because doing so would betray his own values and those he instilled in his son. He sees a psychologist regularly, is not clinically depressed, and takes no medication. His account thus presents his suffering alongside the supports and commitments that help keep him going, rather than reducing his life to grief alone.

Love, Regret, and Their Shared History

The father remembers his son’s disclosure at seventeen that he was gay. At first, he did not understand and responded by questioning how his son could not like girls. He says that he quickly came to embrace him, but regrets the initial reaction and the fact that he never apologized. He believes his son knew he loved him and wanted him to be happy, whatever path that happiness took; still, uncertainty about what his son understood does not erase the father’s remorse. This uncompleted apology is one of the specific memories through which grief turns the past into something the father longs to revise.

Sugar’s reply treats the father’s love as larger than this regret, without claiming that regret can simply be dismissed. She imagines his grief as layered with anger at the driver, thoughts of suicide, memories of good times, and wishes that he had acted differently. Beneath those different responses, she identifies the father’s love for his son as something that no one else can take away or alter. She also suggests that his son may have understood and forgiven the first reaction. That is Sugar’s consoling interpretation, not a reconciliation the father can verify; the son’s death makes the absence of a final conversation part of the relationship’s lasting pain.

Family Relationships After the Death

The son’s death also changes the relationship between his parents. The father and his former wife had been distant since their divorce when their son was fifteen, but after the loss they became close friends again. Their renewed connection is one of the concrete ways his death continues to shape the family left behind. The father also describes a wider circle of support, including close friends, his brother and sister-in-law, and two nieces. He has a rewarding job, good health, and a girlfriend he loves and respects, yet says these circumstances can make it look as though he is adjusting more easily than he is. The contrast underscores that functioning in daily life does not mean the bond or the grief has ended.

The son’s former boyfriend has stayed in touch with both parents, and they care for him. When he invited them to a party and said they would meet his new boyfriend, they declined, saying they had other engagements. The father explains that the real reason was that neither parent could bear to meet the new partner. The moment shows how the son remains present in later relationships: an ordinary social invitation becomes difficult because it makes visible a future in which the son is absent. Sugar’s response urges the father to consider welcoming this new partner in time, presenting that possibility as consistent with what his son might have wanted, rather than as a demand that grief be over.

Grief, Memory, and a Continuing Bond

Sugar answers from the experience of losing her own mother, not from the loss of a child. She acknowledges that the father’s son cannot be brought back and that consolation cannot undo the circumstances of his death. Her parallel is more limited and more intimate: she recalls that her mother died at forty-five, and that the love she still carries for her mother has helped her survive. In a separate account of bereavement, she describes finding a jar of stones her mother had kept—stones that she and her siblings had given her as children—and later keeping stones her own children give her. The objects do not make the loss acceptable or restore the dead; they show how a relationship can continue to inhabit ordinary life through memory and inheritance.

For Living Dead Dad, Sugar distinguishes the son’s actual life from the imagined years and experiences that death has taken away. His son’s life lasted twenty-two years. She asks him to release expectations about the person his son might have become and to remember the man he was: the young adult who loved him, who had come out to him, and whose future ended at the red light. In this framing, honoring the son means neither denying the unfairness of his death nor replacing him with an imagined future. It means allowing the relationship to be grounded in the real person the father knew.

Change and Significance

Sugar does not promise that the father will reach a point at which his loss feels acceptable. She tells him that the death will remain wrong, while also arguing that his grief will change shape and that different things may become understandable with time. The father’s task, as she presents it, is to go on without pretending to return to his former life: to allow painful days and pleasurable ones, to find ways to direct both love and anger, and to offer comfort to others. His bond with his son is therefore not a stage he must outgrow but a lasting part of the life he must make after the loss.

The relationship’s central tension is between the father’s desire to undo what cannot be undone and Sugar’s insistence that love remains available even when the child does not. She reads the father’s letter itself as evidence that he is still reaching for connection, and answers his fear that he cannot become human again by recognizing the humanity already present in his grief, care, and regret. The son’s life is not made less important by its brevity, and the father’s love does not depend on correcting every past mistake. The reply ultimately recasts the continuing bond as both sorrow and inheritance: the son remains part of the father’s inner life, while the father is asked to carry that love into choices and relationships still possible.