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?

Comments

[synecdochic]

I've been reading Sugar for a bit, and I've found that she has a tendency to take the actual letter as a jumping-off point for a ... I'd call it a 'homily' or a 'sermon' if those words didn't have a bad/pejoritive connotation outside of actual church services, but maybe you know what I mean? She uses her column to teach lessons about (her view of) what being a human being is, and sometimes they're really applicable to the actual letter and sometimes they stray a little further afield. I thought that one was half and half, for the most part: it had a lot of really powerful things to say to the letter writer, and it had a lot to say about grief and healing, but some of it was more essayish than adviceish.

Which is not to say that I don't think Sugar is an incredibly powerful writer, and the perspectives she offers are usually the most compassionate, most heartfelt responses I've ever seen in an advice column! I think she almost always succeeds in doing what a lot of advice columnists fail in doing: she doesn't judge, she just offers a different perspective and a way of recontextualizing the problems the letter writer brings to her. I jut don't know that she's always talking to the letter writer directly; I think sometimes she's talking to a wider audience, about things that the letter made her think, instead of giving advice to the letter writer. It's a pronounced enough pattern (and I think anyone who reads her column regularly would pick up on it quickly enough) that I'm tempted to call her more of a spiritual counselor or non-religious-priest-figure than an advice columnist. I think it's partially a reflection of the length she has to work with, and partially her nature shining through.

(Also, FWIW, Sugar is pseudonymous, but the details of her life she's given in the past all point to her not being middle-class for most of her life. She's gone through some seriously hard shit, and she's definitely living in the middle class now, but it was a long hard crawl for her to get there. I don't know if that changes your perspective on the story of her time as a youth advocate.)

In this case, yeah, I think she could've mentioned more about the body issues the letter writer talked about, but Sugar tends to focus on one aspect of a letter and use that as the focus for her response.

(BTW, for those who like Sugar's style, I syndicated the column onto DW as sugar_therumpus_feed, because I find she speaks to me an awful lot. She writes a lot about grief and abuse and addiction and recovery, but she also writes about spirituality and self-discovery and being true to oneself. I reread Write Like A Motherfucker often.)

[the_shoshanna]

Ooh, thank you for the syndication link; I went looking for a way to do that a while ago when I first found Sugar's column, but didn't see one, and then lost track of the column.

And yeah, I agree with what you say here about her. I too wish she had addressed the eating disorder stuff, though; that's a place where the letter-writer seems to be not merely stuck but in immediate crisis, actively doing damage to herself, and some immediate attention to that seems to be warranted.

But what she says about grief is awesome and wrenching and brilliant, and I'm bookmarking it.

[liv]

Thanks very much for giving some of the context. I don't normally read The Rumpus so I didn't know it was standard for Sugar to talk about whatever ideas are sparked off by the correspondence rather than answering the seeker directly. I do think there's a tremendous power and spirituality in her writing, yes.

I think the thing she did with the teenagers was great, no matter what her background is. My discomfort is with the way she tells the story, which reminds me of a skeevy trope. (I'm a huge sucker for teacher saving the kids after everyone else gives up on them thing, so being aware of my emotional bias towards that I do tend to be careful to look out for it.) The thing is that the story here is about Sugar and how wonderful she is with her "unconditional positive regard", whereas I think it should be about Desire. Desire should get the credit for turning her life around and escaping her abusive childhood, and yes, what Sugar did was admirable, but it still feels patronizing to make her the hero of the story (even if she has in fact had her own struggles).

Also the lack of any direct connection between Desire and Stuck bothers me. I don't like the implication that Desire's whole life with all her misery and all her courage was just there to teach Stuck a lesson. And I'm not sure that such a lesson would be helpful to Stuck, because the scale and nature of Desire's problems is so vastly different to her own.

[synecdochic]

Yeah, I totally hear you! And I think you're right that the framing of the story could be a bit problematic (I have another reading of it, and specifically of why Sugar mentioned it in the column, but I don't want to go reading things into the column and possibly projecting/apologizing for someone else, etc).

Still, I'm willing to overlook a few cases where Sugar misses, because some of her hits are enough to leave me utterly breathless. She's pretty much amazing.