Letters from Motherless Daughters Words of Courage, Grief,
and Healing
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How Does a Daughter Survive the Loss of a Mother’s Love?
“More than a decade after my mother’s death, I still converse with her.”
“As my mother told me one day before she went into the hospital for the
first time, ‘You may not always hear me, but you’ll always feel my
answer.’”
“I’d learned to express my love for her whenever I felt it. I didn’t need to
see my mother’s body for closure. . . . I chose instead to live with the
memories of my mother full of life, and not without it.”
“The closer I get to her age [at death], the clearer it becomes to me that we
each were given our own paths to walk in life. Believing in this gives me
huge amounts of freedom and joy.”
OTHER BOOKS BY HOPE EDELMAN
Motherless Daughters
Motherless Mothers
Mother of My Mother
The Possibility of Everything
Boys Like That
Copyright © 2014 by Hope Edelman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
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First Da Capo Press edition 2014
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my Aunt Rosalie, who is deeply missed
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Adjustment and Acceptance: The First Year
CHAPTER TWO
Searching for Meaning: One to Five Years
CHAPTER THREE
Pain Turns to Longing: Five to Ten Years
CHAPTER FOUR
Experience Turns to Insight: Ten to Twenty Years
CHAPTER FIVE
Lives Shaped by Loss: Twenty Years and Beyond
EPILOGUE
A Web of Support
Appendix: Starting a Motherless Daughters Support Group
Sources and Resources
Index
Acknowledgments
To Elizabeth Kaplan, my agent, for twenty years of excellent advice and
support; my editor Renée Sedliar and the team at Perseus, for believing in
the enduring power of this book; Wendy Hudson, for invaluable assistance
in all matters Internet and editorial; Belen Ricoy, for loving my daughters
almost as much as I do; Hedgebrook women’s writing retreat, for time and
space and radical hospitality; Maya and Eden, for making every day a new
adventure; and Uzi, for everything else and more: thank you. So much.
Preface
In the letters, e-mails, and phone calls I received after the publication of
Motherless Daughters, many of the women who’d read the book asked for
more. They wanted more stories from other women who’d lost their
mothers, more information about the grieving process, and further
assurance that their experiences were neither isolated nor unique. Hundreds
of women sent me their personal stories of mother loss, and many of them
generously agreed to participate in a subsequent book.
Letters from Motherless Daughters was compiled in 1995 to fulfill these
requests. Even after its publication, the letters kept coming in, first via
regular mail and then over the Internet. Nearly twenty years later, I still
receive e-mails and Facebook messages every day from readers all over the
world, many from teenage girls whose losses are recent and raw. This
twentieth anniversary edition includes thirty-four of the original letters and
nineteen new ones. That it is impossible to distinguish between past letters
and new ones is testimony to the universal and timeless nature of grief.
The women whose letters appear in this book come from all over the
United States as well as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. They
range in age from thirteen to seventy-eight, with an average age of thirty
three. The letters have been edited for reasons of space, but I have retained
their original language and syntax as often as possible. In exchange for the
use of these letters, I have promised anonymity to their writers. All of the
names that appear in this book are pseudonyms.
Introduction
I will tell you about a girl.
Eighteen years old, and she was on a quest. Late at night in her
university’s main library, she searched up and down the stacks. In the
psychology aisles, the women’s studies aisles, the sociology aisles, night
after night. What was the title of the book she sought? She did not know.
She knew only that it would be a book about girls without mothers and that
it would help her understand herself. It would help explain why, more than
a year after her mother had died of breast cancer, she couldn’t talk about her
mother or even hear her name without starting to weep.
Each night that winter she stepped back out of the library into the inky,
freezing wind, wrapped her scarf around her face, and walked back to her
dorm room. She was no more informed than she’d been that afternoon. But
she’d made it through another day without a mother. That was something.
Some days were harder than others. Like Sundays, when the other girls
lay on their beds, talking on their telephones to mothers back at home. And
one particular Monday in May, when a group of her friends invited her to
join them on a walk downtown to buy Mother’s Day cards. The request felt
like a knife in her gut. She made up a hasty excuse: she had a prior
commitment. It wasn’t a lie. She had important things to do. Places to go. A
person she needed to become, and quickly, just in case everything was
taken away too soon.
But other days were uneventful. Normal, even. She went to class. She
joined a sorority. She rode the El train to a part-time job, learned to make
pesto, met a boy who used the word “love” and meant it. Some days, she
could almost believe she was just like the other girls, the ones with intact
families, whose mothers called every Sunday.
The girl finished college, got a job, returned to graduate school. But at
every new transition and at every setback, her mother was not there for her
to call. Not there to say, Good job! or Don’t worry, sweetie. It’ll be okay.
Sometimes this made her sadder than she ever thought possible. And
sometimes it gave her the motivation she needed to work harder, do better,
become that cheerleader and source of comfort for herself.
She never found the book she needed, not even after eight years of
searching. So she started writing it herself. Other motherless women
clamored to be interviewed. No one had ever asked them to share their
stories before. Sure, they had books they could read about grief and
mourning, psychology books about early parent loss, and memoirs by sons
and daughters who told stories of loss, pain, and recovery. But most of these
“grief” texts were about crisis management, not about long-term effects.
None of them explained how you should feel four, seven, twelve years later.
They didn’t explain the impulse to stay connected to a dead mother or that it
was all right to still have moments of sadness and hopelessness in between
moments of joy.
The girl knew that people in pain hope for a quick fix. She was no
exception. When she began writing the book, she hoped it would give her
an intense, self-contained period of grief she could eventually exit and
finally (finally!) feel that she didn’t miss her mother—or having a mother—
anymore.
But she soon discovered how unrealistic this was. The daughters she
met, some whose mothers had died thirty years in the past, missed their
mothers (and, yes, cried for them) still. And so she had no choice but to put
this in the book and tell readers the truth: that a daughter’s mourning for a
mother who died young never completely goes away. A daughter doesn’t
“get over” the loss, but she eventually does graduate to an emotional state
where she holds close the memory of her mother and their time together as
an insignia, a talisman, and a guide.
As you’ve probably realized, the girl in this story is me. Or, to be more
accurate, the younger version of myself. When I wrote the first editions of
Motherless Daughters and Letters from Motherless Daughters in the 1990s,
I was on a quest to break the silence surrounding early parent loss. At the
time we’d all been led to believe that mourning was a linear process and
those who didn’t ascend to a perpetual state of “acceptance” had somehow
failed. Fortunately, over the past twenty years Western culture has become
much more aware and more fluent about the ongoing nature of grief. The
“stages of grief” made so popular by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and
Dying have been forgone in favor of other models.
Psychologist J. William Worden’s “four tasks of mourning” is the one
now used by most children’s bereavement programs. His four tasks include
1) accepting the reality of the loss,
2) experiencing the pain of the loss,
3) adjusting to an environment without the loved one in it, and
4) finding a new and appropriate place for the lost loved one within the mourner’s emotional
life.
This fourth task is critically important. As the landmark Harvard Childhood
Bereavement Study of the 1990s, of which Worden was a primary author,
revealed, children who lose parents don’t care about stages of grief. They
adapt in ways that feel most natural and necessary to them. Maintaining an
emotional connection to a parent who died is just part of what children do.
As Worden explains in his book Children and Grief,
Through a process we call “constructing” the deceased, the child develops an inner
representation of the dead parent that allows him or her to maintain a relationship with the
deceased, a relationship that changes as the child matures and the intensity of grief lessens.
The child negotiates and renegotiates the meaning of the loss, and in time, relocates the
dead person in his or her life and memorializes that person in a way that allows life to move
on.
Daughters are enormously creative when finding ways for memories of
their mothers to remain vibrant, meaningful, and inspirational in their
current lives. When I was writing Motherless Daughters in the early 1990s,
and revising it for a second edition in the mid-2000s and again this past
year, I was repeatedly struck by how many daughters who could easily have
been felled by early tragedy instead came to see adversity as a springboard
for inner growth. A relatively new field in psychology called “posttraumatic
growth”—which was being developed when I was first writing Motherless
Daughters—maintains that, in our struggles to create meaning out of
tragedy, positive changes often arise. It’s an oversimplification to say that
whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but it may be true that tragedies
that don’t crush our spirit can teach us a lot about gratitude, resilience, and
survival. These are the badges of a warrior who has passed through fire and
emerged transformed.
Losing my mother when I was seventeen was a terrible, confusing, and
devastating experience, yes. But it also made me more resourceful, more
ambitious, more empathetic, and more grateful than I might have otherwise
become. I’m a devoted, hands-on mother because I know now how much a
mother matters to a child. I know what a real crisis is, and, believe me, it’s
not a bad haircut or a crushed fender. And passing the age of forty-two, the
age my mother was when she died, truly helped me understand how
precious life is. Every day after turning forty-two has felt like a gift. I’m
deeply grateful for them all.
Am I the same person I would have been if my mother had lived?
Probably not. As motherless daughters, we are who we are because of what
our mothers gave us and also because they left too soon. No matter how
hard we try, we can’t go back to that state we occupied before. The novelist
and columnist Anna Quindlen, who was nineteen when she lost her mother
to cancer, describes the death as “the dividing line between the self I am and
the self I became.” Thirty-four-year-old Caitlin, who also was nineteen
when her mother died, describes an even more dramatic watershed: “I feel
that my life is kind of divided into ‘Mom’ and ‘post-Mom’ sections,” she
explains. “The change started with her illness, but on the day of her death
life shifted for me.”
But does this have to be a bad thing? Psychologists sometimes use the
image of a shattered vase to make this point. Think of one’s early life as
resembling a beautiful, smooth vase. Then something happens—like the
early death of a mother—to shatter that flawless image into shards. Trying
to fit the pieces back together into their original state won’t work. Even the
best glue job will have hairline cracks. But if we think of reassembling
those pieces into a different configuration, we can accept that something
new and unique can emerge.
One of our biggest challenges as adult daughters without mothers is to
see our losses as points of departure rather than as a set of lead weights. In
this book, you will read the words of fifty-four motherless women who,
over the years, have discovered how to reframe their losses as catalysts for
change. You will also read the stories of women still struggling to accept
and understand their altered situations. In their own words, they describe
their mourning processes and the lingering effects of early mother loss in
their lives: how it continues to replay itself through later losses; inspires a
fear of subsequent loss; leads to idealization of a less-than-perfect mother;
affects long-term relationships with fathers, siblings, and other relatives;
influences decisions about job, home, and friends; and impacts a woman’s
roles as a partner, wife, and mother.
Mourning is a highly individual process, its characteristics and intensity
determined by a daughter’s age when her mother died, the cause of her loss,
the quality of the mother-daughter relationship, and the support system
available both at the time of loss and in subsequent years. Instead of
offering a step-by-step process for resolving one’s grief, this book is meant
to illustrate the varied experiences motherless daughters have and to shed
some light on how the mourning process of a motherless daughter changes
over time.
The motherless women whose letters appear in this book clearly
constitute a sisterhood. The details of loss and adaptation vary greatly, yet
common threads weave in and out of their stories. Reading them, I can hear
my younger self speaking in the words of the teen-aged girls; locate myself
in the letters from adult women who’ve come further in understanding and
integrating their early losses; and, from the stories of much older women,
imagine how I might still be renegotiating my relationship with my mother
ten years from now. Their stories all reveal how daughters can move
forward without leaving their mothers behind.
It’s true that some of the letters detail the intense pain and struggles that
girls experience after losing their mothers and that some writers have
achieved a deeper degree of healing and insight than others. But it’s also
true that each daughter in the book is on her own personal path from a place
of vulnerability and deprivation to a place of reflection and acceptance. The
youngest girls have just begun their journeys and are uncertain of the future
twists and turns. The most senior women can reflect on how early mother
loss influences the rest of a daughter’s life. All of their letters tell stories of
courage and hope and determination, stories that can stand as inspirations to
us all.
Letters from Motherless Daughters
CHAPTER ONE
Adjustment and Acceptance: The First Year
At a public lecture I once gave about early mother loss, an audience
member in the back of the room (we’ll call her Allison) raised her hand.
“Unlike most of you in this room, I just lost my mother four months ago,”
she explained, struggling to keep her voice steady. “I’m not yet at a point
where I can even talk about it much. What I really want to know tonight is,
When am I going to start feeling better? When does the pain finally go
away?”
Another woman (we’ll call her Rosa) stood up and told the group, “I
think the fact that we’re all here tonight is proof that the hurt never stops.
But I also think the fact that we’re here tonight proves that you can get
through this and that even though the pain never goes away, you eventually
can get on with your life.” She turned toward Allison. “Let us be examples
for you of women who’ve suffered this loss and survived.”
Although Allison and Rosa have lived through similar losses, today
they’re viewing motherlessness from opposite ends of a continuum. Rosa,
whose mother died twenty years ago, has accumulated years of experience
with mourning, giving her the authority to act as a guide and a reference
point for the newly motherless daughter. But Allison, only four months past
the loss, is still in what psychologists call the “acute grief” phase, which
begins upon the death of a loved one and ends only as we accept and start
integrating the loss into our daily lives.
This acute, or crisis, phase is often characterized by several of the
following responses: heightened anxiety; anger; depression; helplessness;
irritability; restlessness; pining; persistent wishes to reverse the loss;
