Motherless Daughters

by Hope Edelman

  The letters were filled with women’s stories of loss and abandonment, and of the coping strategies they’d adopted to emotionally survive. Often, the women included words of gratitude, thankful that someone had validated the magnitude of their losses, relieved that they’d finally been given a framework within which to fit their experiences and a platform from which to discuss them. Hundreds of motherless women would show up at readings and seminars, eager to sit in a room with others who understood. “It’s like we share a secret handshake,” one woman said. Another put it even more succinctly. “I feel like the alien who just found the mother ship,” she told the group.

  When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends. This is something motherless women have always intuitively known, though in 1994 it wasn’t yet a widely accepted idea. Twelve years ago, the general public still held fast to the notion that grief had to follow a set, predictable series of stages or else it was progressing wrong. Mourning was (and sometimes still is) treated as something that had to be fixed or overcome, not as a lifelong process of accommodation and acceptance. The idea that mourning might be cyclical, sloppy, and erratic was still considered novel to those who weren’t already part of the bereavement community itself.

  When my mother died in 1981, our town offered no support services for grieving families. We didn’t yet have a local hospice, just a well-meaning hospital social worker whose officious manner I found so offputting that I ducked into the nurse’s lounge whenever I saw her coming down the hall. After the funeral, my father attended a Parents Without Partners meeting, our New York suburb’s single nod to the single parent, only to find himself the only widower, and the only man, in a room full of women left partner-less by divorce. He never went back. As for children’s bereavement programs, they were still years away from reaching our county. The Dougy Center for Grieving Children, the grandmother of children’s bereavement programs in the United States, wouldn’t open its doors in Portland, Oregon for another year, and it would take another six or seven years for its influence to reach the East Coast. Until then, families were essentially left to muddle along on their own.

  By the time Motherless Daughters was released in 1994, this situation had improved a great deal. By then, The Dougy Center had been training facilitators in other states for seven years; a number of weekend camps for children who’d lost loved ones had launched; and hospice had become an international movement. We had developed a much better sense, as a culture, of what grieving children needed, and better means for providing it.

  While all this was undeniably helpful for families in the midst of losing mothers, it was somewhat less useful for readers of Motherless Daughters, whose losses had occurred ten, twenty, and in some cases forty years in the past. These women had grown up surrounded by more rigid ideas about bereavement. Most had been discouraged from ever talking about the loss. Many years later, they were still experiencing residual effects of loss—not only as a result of the death, but also from their families’ and communities’ responses (or nonresponses) to their needs.

  As adults who’d experienced loss as children, they didn’t yet have a niche in the bereavement support field. They’d call local hospices, looking for support groups, only to be told they didn’t qualify because their loss had occurred too long ago. Or they’d join bereavement groups, to discover that everyone else was in the acute phase of a recent loss. Other group members couldn’t relate to, and became deeply troubled by, the idea that a daughter could still be mourning a mother a decade or more after she’d died.

  Fortunately, quite a lot has changed since then, too.

  Motherless Daughters groups, dedicated to bringing support and services to girls and women whose mothers have died, now exist in more than a dozen locations, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, all run by volunteers. Two nonprofit organizations have incorporated: Motherless Daughters of Orange County, in Irvine, California, and Circle of Daughters outside Buffalo, New York. The Internet has also become a significant form of support, connecting thousands of motherless women through message boards and chat rooms worldwide. Online memorials for mothers who’ve died have become so pervasive that a group of psychologists even conducted a research analysis of the phenomenon. Expansion within the children’s bereavement community over the past twelve years has been equally as exponential. The Dougy Center Web site now lists more than 370 children’s grief centers in the United States and seven other countries. There’s also a National Alliance for Grieving Children forming to help educate and provide resources for grieving children, families, and bereavement professionals throughout the United States.

  The highly publicized deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1996 and Princess Diana in 1997 also focused the country’s attention on maternal death, and on the well-being of the children left behind. As Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., a bereavement expert and the author of Never Too Young to Know, has written, the whole “death system” in the United States is changing as the culture becomes ready to hear about dying and mourning, due in large part to television and print media coverage of loss events. One need only remember the outpouring of televised, national grief after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the newspaper memorials printed for each victim, to understand the effect the media has on the culture of grief.

  The attacks of September 11, perhaps more than any event in the past thirty years, thrust grieving and parent loss into the forefront of national consciousness. At least 2,990 children and teenagers lost a parent in New York City or Washington, D.C., that day, 340 of whom lost mothers. Six years earlier, more than 200 children had lost one parent and 30 children lost both in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City.1 Due in large part to these two attacks, “traumatic bereavement” has become a distinct field within children’s grief counseling, as the particular needs of children and teens who lose parents to sudden, violent causes have become known.

  The means by which children are losing mothers has changed in both predictable and unanticipated ways over the past ten years. Accidents and cancer are still the leading causes of death among women ages eighteen to fifty-four, but the U.S. cancer rate among women has slowly, yet steadily, gone down since 1990.2 The AIDS epidemic in the United States, which created 18,500 maternally bereaved children by 1991, never reached projected estimates of 80,000 by the year 2000, although it’s taken the lives of millions of mothers worldwide. And mothers are dying as military casualties of war for the first time in U.S. history. As of March 2005, seven American mothers had died serving in Iraq, leaving behind at least eight children, one of whom had made her mother pinkie-swear, before shipping out, that she wouldn’t die.

  We know a good deal more about motherless children such as these, and what they’re likely to face as they grow up, than we did twelve years ago. Results from the landmark Harvard Child Bereavement Study, a two-year study of parentally bereaved children conducted in the Boston area and directed by Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., and J. William Worden, Ph.D., were published in 1996. Among some of its findings are:1. In general, mother loss is harder on children than father loss, mainly because it results in more daily life changes for a child. In most families, the death of a mother also means the loss of the emotional caretaker, and a child has to adapt to all that this means and implies.

  2. Two years after the loss of a parent, children whose mothers have died are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems, such as anxiety, acting out, lower self-esteem, and lower feelings of competence, than those who lost fathers.

  3. Children remain more emotionally connected to mothers who have died than to fathers who have died.

  4. The degree to which a surviving parent copes is the most important indicator of the child’s long-term adaptation. Kids whose surviving parents are unable to function effectively in the parenting role show more anxiety and depression, as well as sleep and health problems, than those whose parents have a strong support netwo
rk and solid inner resources to rely on.

  5. The children who were doing best, after two years, were those in families that coped actively with the loss rather than passively, and managed to find something positive even in difficult situations.

  And yet, the more we know about children’s bereavement, it seems, the more the actual experience of losing a mother remains the same.

  I received an e-mail from a college freshman the other day. Her mother died five years ago, and throughout high school in her small town she was known as the Girl Whose Mother Died. Now she’s in college in another state, far from anyone who knows her, and she’s feeling terribly isolated and lonely. Nobody there ever knew her mother, and her new friends don’t understand the profundity of her loss. When someone asks about her parents, she tries to answer without using the words “mother” or “died.” Putting those two words together, she has learned, is a guaranteed conversation stopper. No one wants to talk about a mother dying. No one, it seems, wants to hear about it. Some even claim not to understand. “I don’t have a mother anymore,” she once mumbled to a classmate. “You don’t have one?” the classmate repeated, incredulous. “You mean, like, your parents are divorced?”

  Who can blame a peer for acting on what we all wish were true? Mothers are immortal. Mothers don’t die young. Mothers never leave the children they love. “My dad never even began to grieve my mother’s death,” says thirty-four-year-old Leigh, who was three when her mother died. “He was overwhelmed by it. It didn’t fit in with his picture of how life should be. Mothers should not die and leave five children behind. He told himself that shouldn’t happen, so it wouldn’t. And then it did.” The same false security protected Kristen until her sixteenth year, when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died the following year. Kristen, now twenty-four, still sounds slightly stunned when she talks about the loss. “If you’d asked me ten years ago if I thought my mother could die, I would have said, ‘Me? Never. My mother? No way,’” she says. “I’d never, ever, never thought about it. I knew no one in my secluded, little town whose mother had died. I thought it couldn’t happen to me because my family was so happy. My mother’s death completely rocked my world.”

  A father’s death, although often equally as traumatic, usually doesn’t inspire such indignation or surprise. It violates our assumptions about the world a little less. To some degree, we expect our fathers to die before our mothers. Females may be stereotyped as the weaker sex, but they have more physical longevity. In every racial group in America for the past hundred years, men have been expected to die younger than women. Today, the average twenty-year-old Caucasian male is expected to live to seventy-six, but a twenty-year-old Caucasian woman has a good chance of turning eighty-one. Among African Americans, the difference is even more dramatic: The average twenty-year-old man lives until only seventy, but his wife will probably see seventy-seven. American men of all races are almost twice as likely as women to die before reaching fifty-five.

  Yet this hardly means that mothers don’t die young. Quite the opposite. In 2003 alone, more than 110,000 American women died between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, one-third of them from cancer. More than 676,000 American children currently under age eighteen have lost a mother, about 330,000 of them girls. Nearly 25,000 girls have lost both parents. I calculate that there are more than 1.1 million girls and women under the age of sixty in the United States who lost mothers to death during childhood and adolescence—an extremely conservative estimate because it doesn’t include daughters who were ages eighteen to twenty-five when their mothers died, or daughters who lost mothers through abandonment, divorce, alcoholism, incarceration, or long-term mental or physical illness.3

  And yet, at some very deep level, nobody wants to believe that motherless children exist. It’s a denial that originates from the place in our psyches where mother represents comfort and security no matter what our age, and where the mother-child bond is so primal that we equate its severing with a child’s emotional demise. Everyone carries into adulthood the child’s fear of being left alone and unprovided for. The motherless child thus symbolizes a darker, less fortunate self. Her plight is everyone’s nightmare, at once impossible to imagine and impossible to ignore. Yet to accept the magnitude of her loss, or the duration of her mourning, would mean to acknowledge the same potential for one’s self. I remember a phone conversation with my best friend in high school, a few months after my mother died. I was describing some current hardship or another, and relating it directly to the fact that my mother had just died. “Hope,” she said, gently yet firmly, “you’ve got to stop thinking like this. You can’t keep blaming everything bad that happens to you on your mother’s death. How much of your life is it really going to affect, anyway?”

  She had a point, I knew. I was looking for relationships that didn’t always exist, connecting dots that might not legitimately warrant connections, in an effort to explain and excuse any untoward behaviors. Sometimes the act felt inauthentic even as I was doing it. Yet at the same time, I knew without doubt that my mother’s death had irrevocably altered who I was and who I would become. When a parent dies young, says Maxine Harris, Ph.D., in The Loss That Is Forever, children have a personal encounter with death that influences the way they see the world for the rest of their lives. “Some events are so big and so powerful that they cannot help but change everything they touch,” she writes. How could all I thought and felt, then, not trace its path back to the event that had created such a jagged fault line through my history, dividing it into a permanent Before and After?

  I was fifteen when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, barely seventeen when she died. Unlike the adult, who experiences parent loss with a relatively intact personality, a girl who loses her mother during childhood or adolescence co-opts the loss into her emerging personality, where it becomes a dominant, defining characteristic of her identity. From learning at an early age that dependent relationships can be impermanent, security ephemeral, and family capable of being redefined, the motherless daughter develops an adult insight while she is still a child, with only juvenile resources to help her cope.

  Early loss is a maturing experience, forcing a daughter to age faster than her peers—both cognitively and behaviorally. As Maxine Harris points out, more than any other event, the death of a parent marks the end of one’s childhood. A teenage daughter may have to plan a funeral, take on responsibility for younger siblings or the home, and care for an ailing grandparent—all before graduating from high school. When a mother’s death also means the loss of the consistent, supportive family system that once supplied her with a secure home base, she then has to develop her self-confidence and self-esteem through alternate means. Without a mother or mother-figure to guide her, a daughter also has to piece together a female self-image on her own.

  While most girls separate from their mothers during the teen years to create an individual identity and then spend the later years trying to return as an autonomous adult, the motherless daughter moves forward alone. Adulthood, marriage, and motherhood are significantly different adult experiences for the woman who travels through them with a maternal void and the memory of a dramatic loss. “You have to learn how to be a mother for yourself,” says Karen, a twenty-nine-year-old woman whose alcoholic mother died nine years ago. “You have to become that person who says, ‘Don’t worry, you’re doing fine. You’re doing the best you can.’ Sure, you can call friends who’ll say that to you. And maybe you can call other relatives you’re close to, and they’ll say it, too. But hearing it from the person who taped up all your scraped knees, and consoled you through all the Cs you brought home from school, and helped you with your first lemonade stand, that person who watched you take every step and really knows you, or at least the one you perceive as really knowing you, that’s the one you count on. That’s the one you keep looking for.”

  How often is one able to revisit and revise the past? Motherhood gives me that opportunity, as the dail
y minutiae of life with two daughters repeatedly kicks me back in memory to moments when I was the child, and my mother stood in the place I occupy today. I see her so differently now. How resourceful, and patient, and devoted she was, I have come to realize. Yet also how inexperienced and frustrated. And how very, very young. I turned forty-one this year, the same age she was when her cancer was first found. Next year, I’ll turn the age she was when she died. And the year after that, I’ll pass her by. How strange that will be, to be older than my mother, and to reach that personal tipping point so young.

  This issue is one, among many, that motherless women of all backgrounds talk about in great detail. No matter how many years this book remains on the shelf, no matter how many motherless women I meet in my travels, I never stop being surprised by how much we have in common, despite our obvious differences. This is true regardless of the ages we were when our mothers died; the exact causes of loss; our families’ racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic makeup; and the ages we are now. Mother loss is a great equalizer among women, as if the core identity issues it creates cut straight through the superficial variables that might otherwise define us. As motherless women, we share characteristics we don’t usually find in other female friends, including a keen sense of isolation from family; a sharp awareness of our own mortality; the overall feeling of being “stuck” in our emotional development, as if never having matured beyond the age we were when our mothers died; the tendency to look for nurturing in relationships with partners who can’t possibly meet our needs; the strong desire to give our children the kind of mothering we lost, or never had; an intense anxiety about losing other loved ones; a gratitude for the “small moments” in each day; and the awareness that early loss has shaped, toughened, and even freed us so that we can make changes and decisions we might not have otherwise made.