When Bad Things Happen
Dear Sugars
WBUR
4.5 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2017
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, the Sugars grapple with a difficult question — how do we make sense of the fact that very bad things can happen to people who have done nothing wrong? They discuss a letter from a visual artist who has just learned he is losing his sight, and another from a woman whose life has been transformed by her daughter's life-threatening condition.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick. |
| 0:09.9 | Sugar is here, the both of us, speaking straight into your ears. |
| 0:15.0 | I'm Cheryl Strayed. |
| 0:16.4 | I'm Steve Almond. |
| 0:17.7 | This is Dear Sugar Radio. |
| 0:19.9 | Oh, dear song, won't you please? |
| 0:27.6 | Share some little sweet days with me. |
| 0:34.6 | I check my bellbytes every day. |
| 0:43.3 | Oh, and the sugar you see in my way. |
| 0:49.3 | Hi, Steve. |
| 0:50.3 | Hi, Cheryl. |
| 0:51.3 | How are you? |
| 0:52.3 | Well, I'm good, but I have to say that I went into a bit of a spiral |
| 0:55.7 | reading the letters that we're going to talk about this week. Yeah. A lot of the letters, I mean, |
| 1:01.5 | we get letters about all kinds of subjects from all kinds of people, and the sort of the common thing is |
| 1:07.0 | everybody's in some state of struggle, but often, I would say, the vast majority of the time, |
| 1:12.1 | it's a self-inflicted wound, or at least partially self-inflicted. That is people suffering from |
| 1:17.6 | decisions that they've made or want to make or can't make that somehow reside within their |
| 1:23.5 | locus of control. And there's something about that that's, of course, maddening, but there's also |
| 1:28.6 | the fact that you have some control over that. And the letters that we consider this week are really |
| 1:33.1 | chilling because they are about people who suffer misfortune. And those misfortunes are more |
| 1:39.7 | long-term and maybe even permanent. Yeah. But then the other part of it that really haunted me |
... |
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