Living Dead Dad’s son dies in a car crash

Living Dead Dad’s son dies in a car crash caused by a drunk driver who runs a red light, an abrupt loss that defines the father’s life nearly four years later. Recounted in a letter to Sugar and answered by Cheryl Strayed / Sugar, the event is both a specific fatal collision and the beginning of an ongoing struggle to live with grief that cannot restore the son but does not erase the father’s love for him.

Causes and Circumstances

Living Dead Dad writes that he is fifty-eight and that, nearly four years earlier, a heavily intoxicated driver went through a red light and struck his son at full speed. His son was twenty-two, his only child, and died before paramedics arrived. The account gives the crash no larger explanation or resolution: its force lies in a preventable collision and in the fact that the young man was gone before help could reach him.

The father’s letter takes the form of a list because, he explains, the subject is too difficult for him to contain in an ordinary letter. He has no practical request that could reverse what happened; his stated wish is simply to have his son back. The list’s form registers the difficulty of telling the story while making its essential facts plain.

The Father’s Grief and Its Context

After the crash, Living Dead Dad describes himself as living on while feeling as though grief has already extinguished part of him. He says that he sometimes lies in bed and cries out in pain, and that he repeatedly imagines what his son might be doing if he were alive. Memories of their life together bring both consolation and regret: he longs to revisit the happy times and to change moments he wishes had gone differently.

He also recounts the son’s disclosure, at seventeen, that he was gay. His first response was a negatively toned question that showed he did not understand; he says he soon came to embrace his son for who he was, while still identifying that first response as something he would change. In the letter, this memory sits among the many scenes the father revisits after the death, not as an explanation for the crash but as one strand of love, recollection, and regret.

The loss also alters the father’s relationship with his former wife. They had divorced when their son was fifteen and remained emotionally distant, but became close friends again after his death. Living Dead Dad names other supports as well: friends, his brother and sister-in-law, two nieces, a rewarding job, good health, a girlfriend he loves and respects, and regular appointments with a psychologist. He says he is not clinically depressed and does not take medication. These supports coexist with, rather than cancel, the private devastation he describes.

Aftermath and Meaning

Suicide has occurred to Living Dead Dad as a thought, and he says that it first prompted him to make an appointment with his psychologist. He does not act on it because he regards doing so as a betrayal of his values and of the values he instilled in his son. His account therefore presents survival not as recovery from the loss but as a choice sustained by commitments that remain meaningful to him.

In her reply, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar does not claim to know how a parent lives through a child’s death. Instead, she recognizes that the father has continued to live and that his letter itself bears witness to his humanity. She acknowledges that words of consolation cannot undo the collision or bring his son back, and turns attention toward the love that remains untouched by the driver’s actions or by the father’s regrets. The death is irreversible; the relationship, in the form of memory and enduring love, is not simply ended by it.

The reply frames the father’s future as life made in a world transformed by loss, where what has been erased remains present in memory. It does not promise that grief will disappear: it suggests that grief may change shape and that holding small sources of meaning can help a bereaved person endure the next day. The crash thus remains the decisive rupture in the father’s story, while the exchange about it shifts the emphasis from a search for consolation that could repair the past toward a love that continues despite the loss.