Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR Boston.

The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick.

The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.

I'm Steve Almond.

I'm Cheryl Strait.

This is Dear Sugar's.

Oh dear song, won't you please?

She has some little sweet days with me.

I check my bedbub every day.

Oh, and this sugar, you see in my way.

Hi Steve.

Hi Cheryl.

So we are going to do one of our two part episodes.

We're calling it the empty chair.

And what it's about really is the experience of living in the shadow of grief.

And particularly the kind of grief that happens when a child in a family dies.

And of course the parents are grieving that death.

And sometimes there are siblings that were either alive when the child died or who will be born after the death of that older sibling they never knew.

And really that experience is a very particular one.

It's one in which there's joy, you know, there's still a family that exists around that dead child.

There's also a lot of sorrow and grief.

And there's always the presence of that absence.

...