Dear Sugar and the Sister Ship

Sometimes, I consider some choices in my life, and what my days would look like if, for instance, I had not felt led to go to the US for my fourth year when I was a student at the Faculté Protestante de théologie in Paris, or if, a few years before, I had remained a lawyer at the Bar of Pontoise, or at the Council of Medical doctors of the Val d’Oise area…

The lines written by Dear Sugar went straight to my heart. Sugar (writer Cheryl Strayed) writes an advices column in the online magazine Rumpus. A selection was recently published. Those columns are like no others: luminous words, sharing of intimate experiences often described with provocative language, and ultimately pertinent and wise responses.

Answering to a reader wondering if he was ready to be a father, Sugar mentioned a poem written by Swedish Tomas Tranströmer:  “I think of it every time I consider questions about the irrevocable choices we make… Every life, Tranströmer writes, has a sister ship, one that follows quite another route than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.”

Sugar mentioned her own choices and concluded “I will never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important, and beautiful, and not ours. It was the ghost ship that did not carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore”.