Redux: Moving On, Part 1
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The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart-sick. The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears. I'm Steve Allman. I'm Cheryl Strayed. This is Dear Sugars. Oh, dear song, won't you please share some little sweet days with me? I check my bell vibes. Oh, and the sugar you send my.

Hi, Steve. Hi, Cheryl. You know, we've been thinking so much about

about what it means to say goodbye and let go and move on. Yes, we have. You know, because we're moving on from our own podcast, which is a sad thing and it involves a lot of letting go to the good times we had, the wonderful experience we had with each other, but also with our listeners. So this really kind of came into our minds when we were thinking about some of the themes and topics we wanted to explore in these final episodes as we moved toward the end of our show. Right.

And we thought we'd do this two-part moving on thing. Yeah. And in the short term, I can say just in my own experience and most of the people I know,

People stay in relationships. People stay in some way in an active discourse with their grief longer than they naturally should. They hold on because it is so tremendously difficult to let go. I found in every relationship that wasn't going to last forever, I think back to every friendship or romantic relationship or job opportunity, I always stayed too long. And not because I was weak

or dumb or naive or anything else, but because it was human. And we cling to what we know and what's familiar and to what feels like equilibrium.

And then, of course, there's the kind of moving on where we have no choice. When somebody dies, we don't get to do that clinging thing. We do cling. My mom passed, as you know, more than two years ago. And, you know, everybody in our family has been in their own way clinging with the odd exception. And I know that this is much more complicated than I'm going to make it sound, but my dad died.

fell in love with somebody new who was very much like my mother, but her own person. And he, I think after actively being in the state of mourning and caring for my mom for seven years, where she was almost entirely at home, he had done, I think, I think a lot of that grieving. And so he was ready to move on and find a new love. And the rest of us,

We have really in our own ways been not reeling exactly, but clinging. And I know this because several months ago, I had the most vivid dream in which my mom was alive again. And what was strange about the dream was that I knew that she had died. And I kept saying in my head, my mom is dead.

Her body would not look like this. It's been two or three months since she died. Her body would be decomposed. And then when I woke up and thought about the dream, I realized my mom was cremated.

If you see what I mean, I was even clinging to the possibility. And I remember so vividly, Cheryl, during the dream saying to myself, don't say anything to your mom. Don't say anything to anybody else in the dream. Because if I point out that my mom died, she will die again. Yeah. I think this has something to do with

what Joan Didion is talking about in this book that I find myself returning to again and again, the year of magical thinking, which is the searing examination of her grief over the death of her spouse. When death comes along and announces that you must move on, your mind goes back to a place of childhood and magical thinking. And you say to yourself, no, no, no, no. If I don't point it out, my mom will still be alive. If I don't point it out, her body won't have decomposed or have been cremated. Right.

Yeah, your experience is a really common one. I know this because I wrote about my own dreams after my mom died, especially immediately after she died. Every now and then, I'll still have one of these kinds of dreams. But in those first few years, I had dreams that are not at all so unlike yours. It would be that I would come upon my mom and she was alive. And there would be that sense of,

"Astonishment? Wait a minute, I thought you were dead." Or the, "Oh, you were here this whole time." Or the beginning dreams were the most painful, the ones in the early days where she would have me kill her. So she would be in the dream and she would say, "You have to kill me." And she would hand me a bat and I would have to beat her to death. Or she would say, "Get into your truck and run me over." And I would have to run her over and murder her in my dreams.

I mean, I would wake like weeping and sobbing. I mean, I could, I was afraid to go to sleep. And your take of it is this magical thinking that in your dreams, she still is still alive. My interpretation of my dream life when it came to letting go and moving on and accepting my mother's death was that bond is so deep that I couldn't believe it. My deepest consciousness didn't believe that this primal bond of my life

was severed and in some ways over. And yes, I know that mom continues beyond her life, but in some significant way. Right. And so I had to convince myself in my dream life. And what's so interesting is that you had your mother, uh,

come in and order you to kill her. Wow. I mean, and it's fascinating because that's a kind of brutal iteration of this idea that we cling to those who we've lost. They're deeply embedded in our subconscious and they're going to be there forever. Their body is gone. The future experiences we get to have with them are gone, but subconsciously they are still present. Yeah. So you're right, we cling. There is, however, a difference between

being in a job too long or a relationship too long and finally deciding to leave. And having someone we love die and being required to move on. And those are the letters we're going to discuss today on part one of our two-part Moving On episodes. How do we move on after we've lost a loved one to death? How do we move on without them in our lives? How do we carry them with us while also letting them go? And one of the most...

Interesting, wise people I know who are writing about this today is our guest, Claire Bidwell-Smith. She is a licensed therapist specializing in grief, and she's the author of several books about grief and loss. She writes and speaks about grief regularly and offers online grief support in addition to her private practice in Los Angeles.

She has a forthcoming book called Anxiety, The Missing Stage of Grief, which will be out on September 25th. And which is amazing. It's great. And Claire and I connected several years ago when we both had memoirs coming out in which we wrote a lot about the deaths of our mothers. Both of her parents died within a short time span of each other. So Claire Bidwell-Smith is joining us from a studio in Boston. We're in Portland, Oregon. She's joining us right now. Hi, Claire. Hi, Claire. Hi, guys.

So tell us a bit about yourself, your experience with loss and grief, and also about this new book you have. I was 14 when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. I'm an only child. And my mother died when I was 18 and my father when I was 25. So I kind of got hit with it all pretty young in life. And it was not easy. And as I kind of crawled my way out of it,

I ended up going back to school, becoming a therapist, and I was always a writer before that. It was my only way of making sense of all of it, especially when I was an adolescent going through so much that my peers weren't going through. So after I became a therapist, I also started writing about grief and loss, my own, other people's, and it was, again, a way of deeper understanding grief.

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for others and for myself. And my new book, Anxiety, the Missing Stage of Grief, is born out of all this work I've done. It's been a decade of working in hospice and working in private practice as a grief therapist. And one of the predominant symptoms I've seen has been anxiety after a major loss. And it's something that hasn't been talked about really very much at all in any books that I could find. It's something I went through after my mother died and something I've seen countless clients through. Hmm.

So, Claire, we would love to get your take on a letter we have from a woman who I think is feeling some of this anxiety that you just mentioned. Steve, will you read the letter? I will. Dear Sugars, while my husband and I were away on a long-awaited trip, my mother took care of our large dog. Our dog was well-behaved and well-trained, but he and my mother were not accustomed to each other.

My dog would not do his business in the yard, so when I accepted my mom's offer to watch our dog, I did it with the agreement that she'd take him for short walks. I instructed her to let go of the leash, should he pull too hard on it, but I should have known she wouldn't do that. My mom was in her late 60s at the time. Before our trip, I'd noticed that my mom was losing weight and seemed a little frail.

I pointed this out to her, but neither of us took it very seriously at the time. On the third day of our trip, our dog lunged after a small dog while my mom was walking him and she fell and broke her hip. Soon after, she had hip surgery.

During her recovery, my mother told me that her doctor had told her that a significant percentage of women who break their hip die within one year. I told my mom that she would just have to beat those odds. She was a very strong woman both physically and mentally. However, my mom did die before a year was up. She died of small cell lung cancer that had metastasized to her liver. I was at her side during her short battle with this aggressive cancer.

Logically, I tell myself that I'm not responsible for her death. But still, four years later, there's now a dark cloud over me. To alleviate my guilt, I continually analyze how long she'd been sick, reflecting back on indications that she was unwell before she broke her hip. I constantly accuse and then excuse myself, going back and forth in my mind about whether or not I'm to blame.

It doesn't help that my father still brings it up fairly often, telling me that the hip surgeon told him my mother's injury is the reason he wouldn't have a large dog. He also told me that he advised my mom not to watch our dog and says that they argued over it, though my mom had insisted on doing it anyway.

I've developed a guilt syndrome that extends beyond my feelings about my mom. I think back to all negative acts I've done going all the way back to childhood. To a ridiculous level, I reflect on the pain I may have caused others.

My list includes not liking a schoolmate and being less than nice to her, but now realizing that she was a troubled little soul. Witnessing an old woman fall but being afraid to come to her aid because I was a teenager and I didn't know what to do. Being less empathetic when I had to fire people at work, arguing with my mom about dumb things, losing my cool with my dad when he brings up painful aspects of my mom's illness and death. I could go on and on.

How do I get over the sickening feeling that I played a role in my mom's death? How is it possible for me to stop trying to place blame and simply accept the situation? In the rare time I've brought these questions up with others, I've most often been met with a stony silence like nobody wants to touch the issue, which causes more recrimination and guilt. Is there any way through this? Signed, Racked by Guilt. Oh, God.

Such a sad letter. My heart goes out to you, Wrecked by Guilt. Claire, what do you make of this letter? Yeah, it's really heartbreaking. I feel like I could write a whole other book called Guilt, The Missing Stage of Grief. It's so common. And I don't say that to minimize anyone's particular experience of guilt after loss, but it is incredibly common. And

I think one of the things about guilt after we lose somebody we love is that it's a funny way of holding on to them. Right. We can become really consumed with guilt as, as racked by guilt is here, you know, taking it back into deeper levels and other pieces of her life that she's, she's dredging up. And I, the way I see it so often in my clients is that it's a way to hold on to our person. It's a way to hold on to our grief. It's a way to feel like we're doing something that,

wishing we could do something, wishing we could go back. If I just told her one more time about the dog or if I had done A, B, or C, it makes us feel like we're doing something when really we're not. We're just torturing ourselves. So the reason I relate to this letter so deeply is I, for years, in some strange way, rocked by guilt, did the same thing that you're doing. Even though my mom also had an aggressive small cell lung cancer that had metastasized and she died seven weeks after her diagnosis, I

And there was never any question about the fact that she was going to die and die soon. I still tormented myself for years because I, at the age of 22, was put in the position where I had to make medical decisions for my mom. How much morphine should she get in her morphine drip? And after she died, I realized maybe I had in some ways hastened her death by

By saying, give her enough morphine that she's not in pain. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard like this. Really? Yeah. Right. It was years before I understood that it was like, okay, this was my way of trying to bargain with the past. And it isn't true that I killed my mom, but I felt as if I did.

You know, I think it's worth saying, I'm just going to say this out loud. You did not cause your mother's death and your dog didn't cause your mother's death either. Your mom had an accident that involved the dog and it injured her hip, but she didn't die of a hip injury or anything related to a hip injury. She died of an aggressive cancer. And there was nothing that anyone could do to save her. And it's really important that you tell yourself that story every day because the story you're telling yourself right now isn't true.

Yeah. Well, when I read this letter, Racked by Guild, I thought about a similar situation a year before

My mom was diagnosed with cancer. She was walking across the street on a vacation with the family. And there was a bright sun that day that I guess shone in the eyes of a truck driver who was turning left as she was walking across the crosswalk and knocked her down. And she thought she was fine and tried to get up again and then realized that she wasn't okay. And

We thought at first it was just no big deal. And then when she went to the hospital, it was clear she had internal injuries. And then finally it was revealed that she had a broken pelvis. And in our mind, I think of the whole family and me in particular, certainly my kids, that event, just like your mom being pulled over by the dog is incredible.

kind of the moment that we realize something that's very painful and difficult to accept, which is that our parents aren't invulnerable. But I also think in this letter that there are a few real psychic difficulties within how your family relates that might be making it more difficult. Because I think it's interesting when you write that you lose your cool with your dad when he brings up painful aspects of your mom's illness and death.

there are really two ways to read that. One is that you're justifiably frustrated because he's harping on this idea that somehow, you know, you're asking your mom to walk the dog, that that's somehow mixed up with her getting cancer.

But it could also be that you mean that you lose your cool with your dad, get impatient or frustrated when he simply brings up painful aspects of your mom's illness and death, things that are frightening and painful for you to confront. And I would say in the first case, you need to be honest with your dad about saying, please, when you bring this up, it makes me feel like I'm to blame for mom's death. And that's

keeping me from moving on. It's causing me to really beat myself up. And on the other side of it, if you find yourself getting angry and frustrated and pushing away conversations where he really needs to talk about and maybe even complain about the painful aspects of your mom's cancer and her death,

I think it would be healthier, even if he isn't couching it in the most positive terms, for you to try to be present and listen to what he has to say about that and to stay in the room with him. Again, I don't want to say that as an invitation for you to have him dump on you, but you're both in a lot of pain right now.

And the thing that you need to talk about is the thing that you least want to talk about, which is that you missed your mother and you both, to some extent or another, blame yourself, want to hold on to her through these negative emotions. And underneath all of that is just a need to break the silence of grief. Yeah, I absolutely agree. There's definitely some family systems at play here. And I think we have to make amends within ourselves, first and foremost, because there's so many things we can't change about the people around us, right? Yeah.

And so I think bringing this up, bringing up these issues and these different dynamics is really helpful and important. And maybe explaining to your father the different ways that you're seeing this or the ways that you're experiencing this or how it's making you feel when he says these things.

But deeper than that is just getting really clear with yourself about your guilt. I think the thing that I see often is that when people think about letting go of the guilt, it makes them feel like they're being callous and they're just moving on. Oh, I don't care anymore that my mom died. I don't feel guilty anymore. And that's not really the truth at all, of course. And...

One of the ways I really work with clients on this is to find new ways to hold on to our people. Instead of holding on to the guilt and ruminating over and over on these pieces is finding a new sense of connection to our loved ones. I think that that's a very powerful shift in the way that we think about moving on. For me, moving on wasn't, it turns out, about releasing my mother. It was about learning how to carry her, learning how to bear my grief,

And instead of deny it or let it go or, you know, leave it in the past, what I realized it was always going to be with me. And that was actually strangely a comfort because what I realized was going to be with me was the love for my mother. So I'm curious about how do we make those connections while also moving on from the people we've lost?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that moving on is a real misconception because it doesn't mean letting go of the people that we lost. And that's the biggest mark of confusion in the grief process, I think, is that people think that this idea of moving on or acceptance means that you've let go and you're over it. You know, I kept trying to let go of my mother and it felt so wrong. I didn't want to let go of my mom. Right. I mean, to this day, I could think of any kind of question or dilemma that

And what my mother would say about it. You know, I could even think of an outfit. Would she like this shirt? You know, like yes or no. And I know the answer. And I think that so many of us who have had a close loved one, we know those answers. And so we can still rely on them. We can continue these conversations, these dialogues with inside of us.

So finding these new ways to have the conversations and finding new ways to honor them and doing that can look like talking to people about them, writing about them, writing letters to them. I write a letter to my mother every single year on her death anniversary. And every year I think it's not going to be a big deal. And then every year I just weep and I tell her all the things like I got married this year, mom, or this happened or I wrote another book. And it feels so good to talk to her. So good. Yeah.

Another way of honoring them is doing things that were important to them, continuing some kind of legacy of theirs. Yeah. It can feel really good. And I think that so often we don't let ourselves do that because we think it's supposed to be over, right? We're supposed to have let go. Yeah.

I also want to propose really putting to rest this question about the hip injury being related to the cancer. Those things aren't true. I understand that this doctor told her this thing, and that seems very cruel, but that also could be a kind of misinterpretation of what

he was intending to say. And it might be worth going back to that doctor and saying, hey, I'm tormented by this thing you said to my mom because she did die within the year. And this was really actually very helpful to me. I didn't go back to my mom's doctor, but I did share my agony with my dear friend, Dr. Dorothy Novick. She's a pediatrician and one of my best friends. And we

we took a long walk several years ago and I told her that I felt so guilty about this aspect of my mom's death. And she wrote me this incredible email that basically exonerated me. She explained to me that

the process, the death process, the medication process. And it released me in some ways from this guilt by just giving me information. And I think that that's maybe what you need to act by guilt is, you know, to lean into rationality and reason. And I think on a deeper level, as psychiatrists,

so often we talk about on the show that there are bad stories about a lot of things. You know, the bad stories about moving on are, A, as Steve pointed out, it's a betrayal to do so, which isn't true. Or B, as I pointed out and Claire and I have both said, there's also this other counter-narrative that says you should be able to move on. And so, you know, you're in this double bind, essentially, where you're, you know, we don't really have a path or a model. What does...

healthy moving on look like when we do want to carry someone we love with us into our lives? And how do we bring our loss into our lives in a way that doesn't make us feel wracked by guilt or anxiety or sorrow? Yeah, and this quote might be helpful. It's from this book, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. And she writes this that I hope wracked by guilt maybe might make you feel like, wait a second, all of this thinking about all these things that I haven't thought about for years is

that is not abnormal, that is not something strange, that's actually a part of the process. She writes, "The death of a parent, despite our preparation, indeed despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call morning, be in a submarine,

silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges now near and now far buffeting us with recollections. And I thought of that partly because racked by guilt, you're being buffeted by all these recollections, not just of the thing you perceive you did. You killed your mother somehow. You played a role in her death, but also everything that's on the ledger that counts against you. You're everything with the kitchen sink. Well, and I think too, gosh,

Certainly with any parent, right? You're going to feel bad about some ways that you were a brat to them in the past. I think this is amplified, like in my case, in Claire's case, when we lost our moms, you know, really at the height of our youth when we were just not yet adults.

in that time of life when most of us can look back and be more forgiving to our parents and grateful for them. There were so many things that I regretted having said after my mom died, when I think about my teen years and my arrogance and my brattiness. Me too. Claire, you relate to that? One of my favorite parts of Wild, Cheryl, is when you, what is it you say to your mom in the car? Yeah, I say, I know, to this day, and it kills me. I said to my mom,

I was like 21 or something. I said, isn't it shocking to you how much more sophisticated I am at this age than you were at this age? But so if you hadn't lost your mom shortly thereafter, you would have had many more years to repair that, right? To have that moment where you realize how silly and immature that was and how hurtful that was and then apologize and come back. But when you lose somebody, all of a sudden everything gets cut off.

Your relationship has an end and you now look back on everything you ever did or said and there are no reparations now, right? No amends. It's so terrible. But that's one of the things that I think has to be talked about in grief is that we still can make amends. And I think that wracked by guilt, you need to make amends.

with yourself and with your mother and maybe with your father as well. I say with their father, yeah. However he can take that or accept it. But I think we can still make amends with our lost loved ones. We have to because otherwise we're eating ourselves up with this guilt. We're arguing with ourselves in our heads. We're having these conversations internally. And if we're already doing that, we may as well have them in an amend-making way. That's what will give us release and peace. Right.

The other thing that might be important to seek some grief counseling that might sound silly to you since it's been four years, but you're in that submarine now and you are buffeted by these recollections. And those are the symptoms that tell you I'm actually still in an active state of mourning.

I think four years out is actually a really wonderful time to do grief counseling. Yeah, me too. In the beginning, when we lose somebody, it's kind of like you get your arm cut off and it's just triage. You're just trying to stop the bleeding and you're trying to deal with the pain. And then four years later, you're living in a world without an arm. And what have been the bigger ramifications of that? And how has it affected you in life?

Yeah, I had that same thought, Claire. I mean, I think that, again, one of our cultural misinterpretations of grief is that it's happening in that time immediately after the death. One of the most striking things for me when I went back and read my journals, a couple of months after my mom had died, I was in a state of shock.

I was already lambasting myself on the pages of my journal. Like, why am I still so sad? And like, I look at that now and I just, I can't believe I wrote that. But clearly I didn't come out of nowhere that I was feeling like, well, it's time to move on. Right. I have moved on and I have healed in so many deep and important ways. But grief, I think it's an ongoing process and it comes up in different ways at different points in our lives. Right.

And wracked by guilt, you are going to experience that. One thing that's interesting about this letter, and I thought about it in relation to how I felt and thought and behaved after my mom's death, is in a way we focus on what we did wrong, what we could have done differently, how we're on the hook for it.

Because it is a way of keeping at bay how much we love the person. Yeah. And what's not present in this letter wracked by guilt because it might be too painful to set it down is how much you loved your mom, the memories you have of her that made her precious to you, that makes you feel so deeply her loss that you become, you know, the murderer in a sense. Yeah.

Oftentimes guilt and anxiety, and this is what I think your book explores so precisely, Claire, those lesser defenses are a way of really masking the deep grief of how much that person meant to you and all the positive. You just miss them. Right.

Yeah, sometimes it's just that simple. But that's so painful sometimes that we cover it up with all kinds of things, you know, anger and guilt and anxiety. It's much easier to sometimes feel those and to ruminate on those things than just to feel the deep searing pain of missing that person.

At Sierra, you'll always find apparel, footwear, and gear for 20 to 60% less than department and specialty store prices. But right now it's clearance time, so you can save even more on everything you need to get active and outside. Visit your local Sierra store today. Dear Sugars, from the time that I was five years old until we set off for college, I was attached to the hip with Alejandra.

We spent every day together. We made spy kits and peeped in on our neighbors. We taught each other our parents' native languages. We had our own secret language. And we even got our first tiny tattoos together. We were known to everyone as a unit. 30 years later, I can still remember the matching outfits we wore to school and our inside jokes.

Her home was the only one that my strict immigrant parents allowed me to spend time in. She also came from an immigrant family, and we had a connection that many first-generation kids like us couldn't find elsewhere. She was a brilliant writer, and she also had a deep sadness, which emerged in our teenage years. We lost touch after marriage and kids, with occasional emails updating each other on the major milestones of our lives.

Last year, my husband came home from work looking pale and warning me that he had terrible news. A colleague who'd once worked with Alejandra's father had told him that Alejandra had died by suicide five years ago. During those five years, I'd been thinking she was happily married and teaching creative writing, but she wasn't. She was dead.

After the devastating news sunk in, I desperately searched for more information online, but found none. Her family had erased anything about her from the internet. Being from a culture that values honor and personal secrecy, I wasn't surprised that they did this, but it left me no closure. I've lived with the knowledge of Alejandra's suicide for a year now and haven't moved on. I think about her every day, and I'm often moved to tears.

I've driven past her childhood home in hopes of seeing her mom, whom I cared for and who cared for me. But it's clear she's moved away. I also feel like much of my childhood is gone. Because we had such an intimate, rich, and exclusive friendship, her death has erased those memories. I'm the only living witness to our experiences. I keep ruminating on how Alejandra might have killed herself, where she was when she did it, how she was found, and whether she ever thought of me after we lost touch.

I've spent hours reading over our childhood letters. It was so clear that she was crying out for help as a teenager. She even alluded to dying young in one letter, like she knew suicide was her fate. In my reflections, I've realized something happened to her when she was 12. She went from being a model student to finishing her father's beers after dinner and showing up to school with bruises. She became sexually promiscuous. Our closeness suffered because of this change.

At the time, I thought she was just trying to get attention. I was young and naive and didn't intervene. In retrospect, her behavior was obviously a cry for help. I feel so much guilt for my complacency. So my question, Sugars, is this. How do I move on?

I don't want to bring up this most painful memory to the people who were closest to her, but I also feel desperate to connect with someone who loved her too. I met her husband once, years ago, but I learned online that he has since remarried. I'm certain that her parents want nothing more than to bury this deep within, and I wouldn't even know how to find them anyway. And finally, what should I learn from this experience, and how do I use those lessons as I parent my two beautiful children? Signed, Young at Broken Heart.

One thing I thought young at Broken Heart as I read your letter, it dawned on me, this was a twinship. And I say that as a twin. When you're young and you have an intense bond with somebody else and you spy on people together and you learn the native languages of your families and you have your own secret language, that's a twinship. That's exactly how I felt towards my twin.

And so that friendship, even though it hadn't been active in the last few years, was in the crucible of your childhood as a very intense sense of connection. And that's why her death hit you so hard, even though in the recent past you hadn't been in touch with her. I had the same thought about the twins. Yeah, you've lost this keeper of memories, you know, this person who experienced things that only the two of you did together. Yeah.

And also going on in this letter is the whole secrecy of grief, you know, the shroud that goes around loss. And in this particular case, so much so with the family and the culture and just being really alone in processing this loss. There's not really anybody for you to talk to. You're right that you could go to her husband and her family, but they may not be very receptive. And I'm sure there's fear of bringing up more pain for them. And so kind of facing this on your own is really difficult.

And when that happens, I think that always turning to others who've experienced something similar is helpful. You know, finding a group or, you know, reading. When I was 18 and my mom died, I felt like there was nobody else in the world who had lost a mom at my age. And I just read every book I could get my hands on of anything that somebody went through that was hard, particularly grief, but really anything. And there's so many beautiful books out there about loss and about twinship even and about...

grief that you can feel a little less alone with. Well, young at broken heart, this is particularly isolating because the other layer of this is, of course, that she found out after her friend's death five years after it happened. You know, the people around her aren't saying, oh, I'm so sorry you lost your friend. They're saying, wait, you didn't even know your friend was dead for the last five years. It doesn't, on the surface, to others, look like

Right. It doesn't look as if she's among the bereaved. And yet...

Clearly, young at Broken Heart, you are. I recognize that sorrow that's present in your letter when you say, during those five years, I'd been thinking she was happily married and teaching creative writing. That you, even though you weren't in touch with her, she still had a place in your psyche, and you imagined her out in the world alive, and that has been corrected by this news. And I'm curious about this, Claire, in your work,

Have you ever worked with people who have had this kind of grief where they don't even know the person's died until a long time later and then they're having to reckon with it? Yeah, absolutely. And I think you're spot on in saying that, you know, young at heart, you are among the newly bereaved with this. It's the same. It doesn't matter how long ago it was that she actually died for you. It's just happened. And so you are grieving just as anyone would if it had happened last week.

So I think honoring that process, even though the people around you aren't necessarily seeing it, is really important here. Yeah.

It's also important, young at broken heart, to recognize the way in which your guy's relationship changed as you got older. And I think you're putting yourself on the hook for not having been her social worker, having been her rescuer. The truth is you did recognize, and now in retrospect, you recognize even more powerfully that she went from being a model student to

to being somebody who's started to drink beer, showing up at school with bruises and becoming promiscuous and so forth. You now as an adult can see that that was a young girl, a friend who was in pain. And so you're applying adult logic to how you should have behaved.

You saw it and you could have saved her, but you didn't. I think deep down that's how it feels to you. And the reality is that you were young and naive and you didn't intervene because you were her friend, not her parent or her social worker or her rescuer.

And I think it's important to recognize that this is the kind of friendship or twinship even where you felt that your friend was going adrift and you're now connecting that to the idea that her death was the result of your not intervening when you were both whatever, 13 or 14 years old.

That may sound crazy to the outside world, but Claire and Cheryl will both tell you that's not crazy. That's the way that grief's logic works. If you can be the person who is responsible for her death, then maybe you can bring her back to life. And what's bringing her back to life right now is the guilt that you feel. If you release that guilt, you fear that she will slip away. Very well said, Steve.

I think that, yeah, just making amends again. I keep going back to that, but I think it's never too late to do that. Like Cheryl and I were talking about with our moms and the stupid teenage things we did, and then suddenly the relationship was over and we didn't get a chance to kind of move through those. It's the same thing. If your friend hadn't died young at broken heart, then maybe in a few years from now you would have gotten back in touch and developed a longer relationship and had the chance to go back and talk about those teenage years and talk about maybe what happened when she was 12 or

But because that's been cut off and the box seems like it's been closed, now it's this thing that feels really painful and that you want to try to fix but can't. It's going to keep coming up for you over and over in so many ways, like a Rubik's Cube, trying to make it line up until you make some kind of amends within yourself or with her on a spiritual level, you know, whatever that looks like for you. And I think that, again, writing letters can be so helpful with that. It's very powerful. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, at the end of your letter, Young at Broken Heart, you ask, how do I use these lessons as I parent my two beautiful children? And it's such a beautiful question. And I think there are a couple of things you might think about. The first is that this is partly a lesson in the fact that you can't control death.

But you can control your life. And as you think about whether you want to share this experience with your kids or talk to them about it in any way, one thing you might think about is to maybe particularly as they get to be towards teenage years that maybe

Part of this experience is teaching you that you're not responsible for the pain of those around you, but you can try to help, mostly by talking to them, by listening to them, by asking if they're all right, if they seem troubled.

It's important that you don't say to your kids, gee, you know, always check in on your friends because years later you're going to feel guilty if they end up dying young. You know, that's not a healthy model. But it is healthy to say, look, part of the way we control life is by being compassionate and aware and paying attention to the people we love. Because the central thing that you want to, I think, teach your two beautiful children is not to bury feelings deep within. So...

I want to say one other thing on a very practical level, young at broken heart. You say, I feel desperate to connect with someone who loved her too. And I want to encourage you to do that. Yeah. You say a couple of times that you feel sure that her parents want nothing more than to bury this, that they erased her from the internet and all of this. And I don't

question any of that. But that doesn't mean that you can't reach out to them, that you can't track them down and send them a letter or ask if you can come visit them to talk about their daughter. You knew them a long time ago, and they are also grieving, Alejandra. There might be an opening where you can't imagine one now. Now, of course, you also could be exactly right.

You could send them a letter and they could say, we don't want to discuss this, or they could not respond at all. But I think it's worth a try.

You know, on this show, we're always talking about taking emotional risks and being vulnerable. And I do think that there is a chance that you could have a really healing conversation with her parents. The other thing is you don't say whether or not Alejandra has children or how old her kids are if she did have them. And, you know, I think that one of the things that has been powerful in my own life is those times where I have children.

made contact with somebody who knew my mom a long time ago. A few years ago, I was doing an event in Colorado where my mother went to high school. And I got an email a few months before I made this appearance from somebody who was my mom's good friend.

And it was amazing. She showed up to my event. She gave me all of these photos that she had taken of my mom when my mom was like 16, that I could see my mom's writing in her high school yearbook. It was just an unexpected gift from the universe. And I didn't get my mom back, but I got something. I connected with somebody who had once also loved my mom. And so if Alejandra does have kids, young at broken heart,

I really encourage you to connect with them. And now maybe they're not old enough to connect with yet, but just keep that in mind. Maybe 10 years down the line, you make contact. Totally. I love that. And those have been very meaningful moments in my life too, when people have reached out with letters about my father and my mother, stories or pictures unexpectedly. But I also think that

You can also share, young at broken heart, you can share your memories of Alejandra with your own children. You can tell them about her. You can tell them about the games you guys played, the language you made up, the adventures you had together, what it was like to be best friends at that age or whatever age your kids are. You can relate to the times that you had together. Yeah.

I think that's one of the loveliest way to keep people in our lives. It's such a better way than holding on to guilt or anxiety is really honoring those people and talking about them and bringing them back to life in the lives of people around us. Right.

So one thing, young and broken heart, that we should also acknowledge that might make it a little bit more difficult to reach out to her mom, for instance, who you say you cared for and who cared for you, and even to talk about Alejandra with your kids, is that she died by suicide. Yeah. And that's really loss plus shame, really. You know, there's a real culture of silence around suicide. It's a distinct form of mourning that is...

complicated in ways that I think a death by natural causes or by illness or calamity are not. Yeah, and all the more reason, I think, if

Alejandra does have kids to reach out to them someday. Because I think like you, young at Broken Heart, her children will also be having some of that guilt. And I think that there's a really powerful story to be told in your witness of Alejandra's struggles as a teen. If in some ways you can be a player in the healing of the other people who loved Alejandra by sharing those stories, I think that is a powerful form of medicine for yourself.

Claire, any final thoughts for Young at Broken Heart? Or Wrecked by Guilt, too? You know, just again, this sentiment that neither of you are alone. And letting yourself be changed by this. You know, death and loss really change us. They break us open in often pretty beautiful ways. We kind of go about our lives thinking that everything is just going to go as it's going to go. And then all of a sudden, something like this happens. And it really causes us to stop and take a look at

Not just our past, but also our future. You know, what is the life that we're living? If the rules are that there are no rules and that we can't control our environment and we can't control when we lose somebody and we can't control what we're going to regret, then how do we live the best life that we can? You know, what are changes that we need to make right now? What are things we could be doing differently? Yeah. And I think for both of you,

I do a kind of ritual. It's a very simple thing. On the anniversary of my mom's death, I'll almost always walk to a beautiful place, a river, a stream, a lake, and pick some flowers and cast them into the water while thinking about the beauty that my mother has not only was, but has brought into my life years, decades beyond her.

And I think that that will always be true. All the days of my life, the beauty that was my mother will live in me. And that is a gift. That is not grief. That is a gift. And I think that the deepest place in grief for me has been recognizing the gift of my grief, turning that ugliness into beauty, turning that sorrow into life. And that's what I wish for both of you. We sure do. That's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah.

Hi, listeners. You can hear the second part of our Moving On series next week. Our guest, Dr. Harriet Lerner, will help us answer questions about how to move on from our regrets. We hope you join us.

Dear Sugars is produced by The New York Times in partnership with WBUR. Our producer is Alexandra Lee Young. Our managing producer is Larissa Anderson. Our editor is Paige Cowett. Our executive producer is Lisa Tobin. And our editorial director is Samantha Hennig. Special thanks to Stella Tan. We recorded this show at Talkback Sound and Visual in Portland, Oregon, with our engineer Josh Millman.

Our mix engineer is Eddie Cooper. Our theme music is by Wonderly with vocals by Liz Weiss. Please find us at nytimes.com slash dearshugars. You can send us your letters at dearshugars at nytimes.com. And please check out our column, The Sweet Spot, at nytimes.com slash thesweetspot.