Dear Sugar: dealing with grief

[liv]

moominmuppet linked to this advice column at Rumpus. I know the community guidelines say to post the whole thing here, but it's seriously long (approx four thousand words), so I hope you will be willing to click through. It is also triggering as hell: it contains miscarriage, eating disorders, child abuse, and rape (alluded to, but not graphically described).

Things I like about it: Sugar is very clear that grief is grief. If a bad thing has happened, there's nothing anyone can do to unhappen it, and while yes, the grieving advice-seeker should get therapy, Sugar doesn't put pressure on her to put on a cheerful face in order to make everybody else around her feel more comfortable. The opening of her answer is marvellous:

I’m so sorry that your baby girl died, sweet pea. So terribly sorry. I can feel your suffering vibrating right through my computer screen. This is to be expected. It is as it should be. Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over any thing. Or at least not any thing that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they’re being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter’s death.

Things I don't like about it: Sugar does not in any way address the body hatred and eating disorder side of the question, even though unlike a lot of advice columnists, she's writing a several thousand word essay in response to the letter. The writer says:

In the hospital, my doctor said he wasn’t surprised I lost the baby because my pregnancy was high risk because I was overweight. It was not an easy thing to hear that the miscarriage was my fault. Part of me thinks the doctor was a real asshole but another part of me thinks, “Maybe he was right.” It kills me to think that this was my fault, that I brought the miscarriage on myself. I can’t even breathe sometimes, I feel so guilty. When I got out of the hospital, I got a personal trainer and went on a diet and started losing weight but I’m totally out of control now. Sometimes, I don’t eat for days and then sometimes, I eat everything in sight and throw it all up. I spend hours at the gym, walking on the treadmill until I can’t lift my legs.

That sounds pretty serious to me, and it worries me that Sugar doesn't even acknowledge it in passing. I would like her to at least say: when you seek therapy, look for someone with a knowledge of eating disorders and make sure you get support dealing with that. Ideally, I'd like her to explicitly say: I'm sorry the doctor said such awful things to you, please don't hate yourself because your body doesn't match some fashion ideal.

Things I'm ambivalent about: the whole apparently random segue into a story of how Sugar once worked as a youth advocate with a group of high risk teenagers. Partly because it smacks too much of the trope where the nice middle class teacher "saves" the poor deprived teenagers by showing them love. Mainly because it just seems utterly irrelevant to Stuck's problem. I'm sorry you're having such a hard time, let me talk about a meaningful life experience I once had. I mean, it's a powerfully written story, and it does illustrate how Sugar came to her understanding of suffering and grief. You never hear this sort of thing from standard advice columnists:

Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you.

I really like that, because it's just so rare to see that level of acknowledgement that some problems, especially women's problems, won't just magically go away if you think enough positive thoughts.

Still, the context in which Sugar presents this wisdom seems a bit off to me. The long stories about the terrible things the teenagers suffered, which I haven't quoted here, make me wonder whether these girls' lives are just there to teach a philosophical lesson to nice middle-class people like Sugar which she is now passing on to Stuck. There just seems no connection between the devastation of a miscarriage, and the experiences of teenage girls who have experienced nothing but neglect and abuse their whole lives and have very limited future horizons even if they can escape from their abusive backgrounds. So, I'm conflicted. What do you make of it?