by Hope Edelman
And then there are the subtle triggers, the ones that sidle up to you without warning, emerging from around a corner, tapping you on the shoulder when you thought you had other things on your mind. These grief responses are often related to transitional times in a woman’s life—graduation, a wedding, childbirth, a new job. As maturational steps, these transitions involve added responsibility, which calls up fears and indecision that leave us longing for protection and searching for a safe haven. “In a general sense, these responses have to do with the danger of growing up,” says Benjamin Garber, M.D., the director of the Barr-Harris Children’s Grief Center. “If you grow up, bad things happen to you. You die.” On a more personal level, he notes, “Transitional times come with heightened expectations. More will be expected of you. Each time you move forward, there’s a wish to regress. And when you regress, you watch for the parent to be there. If you look back and there’s nobody there, it’s really scary.” Evelyn Bassoff, Ph.D., a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado, and the author of Mothering Ourselves, adds, “In those times of transition, our psychic systems are not in harmony. There’s a lot of inner conflict. We cling to protective figures or memories of protective figures. There’s a longing to be safe.”
When we reach these milestones, a mother’s absence is painfully obvious. Either consciously or subconsciously, we once imagined these occasions and expected her to be there. When she isn’t, our assumptions clash with reality in the most dissonant of ways. The daughter mourns not only what was lost, but what will never be—and, if her mother didn’t offer protection and support when alive, the daughter also grieves for what she once needed but never had.
I missed my mother, terribly, when I graduated from college and no one from my family was there. I missed her when I got my first job promotion and wanted to share the news with someone who’d be proud. I missed her when both my daughters were born, I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the obstetrician’s office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she were alive isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.
The Resolution Hoax
I wish I believed that mourning ends one day or that grief eventually disappears for good. The word resolution dangles before us like a piñata filled with promise, telling us we need only to approach it from the right angle to obtain its prize. But if grieving truly did have an attainable, ultimate goal, more of us would feel we were reaching it. Of the 154 motherless women surveyed for this book, more than 80 percent said they were still mourning their mothers, even though their losses occurred an average of twenty-four years ago.
Full resolution of mourning is a state of consciousness so difficult—if not impossible—to reach that most of our attempts will inevitably fall short and leave us feeling inept. Some losses you truly don’t get over. Instead, you get around them, and past. “Resolution? I hate that word,” Therese Rando says. “I use the term accommodate, because at different points in time you can have accommodated the loss, made room for it in your life, and have come to a relative peace with it, but then something else can bring it up again later on. Grief is something that continues to get reworked. Even if you lose a parent after childhood, in your teenage years or later in life, you’re still going to have to rework it, and rework it. The notion of ‘forever-after resolved, never going to come up again’ is one I don’t buy at all.” Says fifty-three-year-old Caroline, who was eleven when her mother died of heart disease, “I still miss my mother. If I were someone listening to me, I’d be surprised that someone can miss somebody for forty-two years. Like, Why don’t you get over it? I used to think grieving was like going through a tunnel, and after you get through it, somehow at the other end the pain and feeling of loss would be gone. When I realized that I didn’t have to get over the loss, and that if I didn’t get over it I was still okay, then it took the pressure off me. I could just sort of embrace it and say, ‘Well, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened.’”
Sigmund Freud believed that true mourning involved a slow and total psychic detachment from the loved object, with an ultimate goal of later reattachment to someone else. His theory served as the basis for decades of mourning research, but more recent scholars of bereavement have seriously questioned whether this is even possible, let alone beneficial. When Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions and the author of Never Too Young to Know, studied eighteen college-aged women who had lost parents during childhood, she found that instead of detaching from their parents completely, these women were trying to remain connected and find a place for the lost parent in their current lives. Especially for women, who are socialized to maintain relationships rather than break away and seek emotional autonomy, ongoing connections to a lost parent may be a more natural and comfortable response. Asking them to sever ties to the past, Silverman says, may only confound their bereavement.
Many of the 125 children interviewed in the Harvard Child Bereavement Study, all of whom had lost a mother or father, also found ways to remain connected to the deceased parent. In fact, children who could not construct an internal image of the dead parent, or maintain a relationship with him or her, seemed to have the most difficulty over time. It seems that a child’s memory of the missing parent, and the ability to maintain an ongoing, evolving inner relationship with that parent, is vital to the child’s healthy development. We’re finally moving, Silverman explains, to “a relational view of grief,” in which maintaining connections to our lost loved ones will be valued more than disengaging or cutting the ties to minimize pain and suffering.
When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother because she died when you were seventeen.
Chapter Two
Times of Change Developmental Stages of a Daughter’s Life
MY FATHER BOUGHT the raccoon jacket for my mother in 1973. It was mid-thigh length with a sturdy brown zipper, and she wore it through the suburban New York winters of my childhood. She didn’t really need a fur coat, of course—wool would have served her just fine—but in the mid-1970s in Spring Valley, New York, a fur fell somewhere between the Cuisinart and the Cadillac. A few years after my mother started wearing the raccoon jacket, my parents put a swimming pool in the backyard. That was the order of things.
A raccoon jacket didn’t make quite the same statement as a full-length mink, but it was a fur coat nonetheless, and my mother wore it during the day and to informal social events at night. She was a tall woman, with wide, square shoulders, and she carried the jacket well. Its fur was the color of a graying brunette, almost exactly the color of her short, frosted hair, and against this monochrome, her splash of red lipstick always looked like a surprise. When she drove, I liked to sit in the passenger seat and rest my hand against the soft fur on her arm. Late at night when my parents came in from the movies or their bowling league or dinner parties at the neighbors’, my father drove the babysitter home and my mother came into my bedroom to say goodnight. I stood on the bed and pressed my face into her neck. The cold still clung to the fur collar, and I could smell the last traces of Chanel No. 5 on her skin. Chanel was her night perfume. She wore Charlie during the day.
A few of my classmates wore rabbit jackets to school, but all other furs were reserved for adults. Some of the women in our subdivision wore ankle-length coats of fox and mink that their husbands had given them as anniversary gifts. These we
re usually the women who drove four-door Mercedes sedans. My mother drove an Oldsmobile station wagon. It was big enough to transport six of my friends at once, and I thought it was just fine, until everyone started wearing designer clothes in the ninth grade. I didn’t have any, and these things started to matter. My mother took me shopping one afternoon and bought me two pairs of Gloria Vanderbilt corduroys and a pair of Jordache jeans. She knew how badly I wanted to fit in, she said.
I was fourteen then and not yet embarrassed to be seen in public with my mother, but by the end of that year I had traded her company almost exclusively for that of my friends. I spent my hours in parking lots and other people’s rec rooms, willing to acknowledge my parents’ existence only when I needed a ride home. Yet somehow I still felt a sense of security and relief in knowing that although I had rejected my mother, she had not, in turn, abandoned me. One winter when I was in the tenth grade, I got sick in Spanish class and had to phone her to pick me up from school. I was lying on a couch in the nurse’s office when she arrived, wearing the raccoon jacket. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, and a designer handbag dangled from the crook of her elbow. I thought she was the picture of vibrancy and competence, as she hurried across the room to press her palm against my forehead and quickly signed the release form before taking me home. As we walked together through the wide halls toward the parking lot, I wanted to fling open the doors to all the classrooms and shout, Look, everyone. Look at my young, pretty mother. She’s come to rescue me.
That was before she got sick. Later that year, after she had surgery and lost her hair and gained forty pounds from the white pills she swallowed every morning, she would cry when she looked in the mirror, and she started to spend more time inside the house alone. When I drove her home from chemotherapy treatments in the late afternoon, she would grip my arm to help her fight the nausea. She only had one more winter after that, and I don’t remember her wearing the raccoon jacket. In fact, I can’t remember her wearing anything during those sixteen months except nightgowns and bathing suits, although I know she had a closet filled with other clothes. In my imagination, I dress her in stylish outfits as if I’m pressing two-dimensional dresses onto a paper doll. When memory slides into uncertainty, fantasy is often the result. It’s been more than two decades now, and every year I remember less.
And yet there are some things I would rather forget. I suspect I was not a particularly easy adolescent to raise. Caught up in the full-time job of declaring my independence, I had little interest left in family matters by the time I turned fifteen. I was occupied in other ways. When my mother was doing lunch and a manicure with her friends, I was trying drugs with mine. When her mah jongg group traded gossip and ivory tiles across the card table downstairs, my boyfriend and I were on the floor in the next room with his hand up my shirt. Typical adolescent fare for 1980, perhaps. But then, one day, it all stopped.
“The lump is cancer,” my mother said one afternoon in the middle of the March before I turned sixteen. She had just returned from the surgeon’s office, and I rushed to meet her at the top of the stairs.
“What does that mean?” I asked, already stepping back.
“Oh, God,” she said, gripping the banister for support. “It means the surgeon has to remove my breast.”
She said more, I think, but that was all I heard. “No!” I shouted, pushing past her and down the steps, hurrying to my room. When, right behind me, she knocked on the closed door, I screamed, “Go away! Leave me alone!” I knew even then, as I lay on my bedroom floor, that this event would mark the end of my childhood more definitively than menstruation or my first kiss ever could. I called a friend from the telephone in my room—“My mother has cancer. Can I come over?”—and then ran a mile to meet her at the halfway point, where she was already waiting with two other friends. I ran toward them without restraint, leaping over the low tombstones in the cemetery I had to cross, pushing myself through space as if the sheer force of my motion could catapult me into another place and time.
After the mastectomy, when my mother sat in the kitchen squeezing rubber balls to strengthen the muscles the surgeon left behind, I learned to reshape anger into silence. The message Do not upset your mother was unspoken, but it was clear. So I played my music low, spoke at the dinner table only when spoken to, snuck boyfriends in and out after dark through the window of my sub-basement-level room. I vacillated between resentment and fear, suspended in developmental limbo, afraid to stay separate from my mother (because what would happen to her if I did?), yet angry at her cancerous cells for trying to hold me back (because what would happen to me if I didn’t go?). Every time I felt confident enough to take another step toward autonomy, the scene at home firmly pulled me back. Oh God, it was a mess.
On July 4, two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I came home from a concert and stuck my head into my parents’ bedroom to announce my return.
I’m home.
My mother was sprawled in a reclining chair, idly flipping through TV channels, but when she saw me, she sat up straight and smiled. “How was the concert?” she asked.
Fine.
Who was it that played?
James Taylor. And someone else.
That’s nice. For how long?
Two hours.
Two hours? That’s a long time. Was there an intermission?
No.
Tell me—what was the audience like?
Big.
Her questions continued, and my irritation grew, until after five or six more I exploded—“What is this? The goddamned third degree?” —and stormed down the stairs to my room. My mother had been a classical pianist; she’d never cared about pop music before. Why the sudden interest in the concert? My father strode into my room without knocking a few minutes later. “Why the hell did you have to do that?” he said. “You’ve made your mother cry. She can’t go out herself. All she’s asking is for you to share a little of your day with her. Can’t you do even that?”
I forced myself to look at him, my cheeks warm with shame. He was so angry he was trembling, but he didn’t yell. That’s when I first suspected she was dying.
After the funeral, I packed up her clothing in boxes destined for Goodwill. “I can’t do it,” my father had said, calling from his office one morning in late July. “Can you, please?” I did it that afternoon, with my best friend sitting silently on my parents’ bed for support, and I did it deliberately and mechanically, carefully unfolding and refolding each sweater, waiting for the goodbye note she never wrote to flutter to the floor. I tried not to pause long enough to think about individual pieces of clothing. How could I? Each one had its own narrative: the green-and-white housedress she had worn while cooking dinners in the Crock-Pot, the red postmastectomy bathing suit we’d selected together, the purple velour sweater I’d worn in my tenth-grade school photo. I went through her drawers one by one, methodically from left to right, filling the large cardboard boxes that covered the bedroom floor.
When I had finished, I dragged the boxes down the hall to the coat closet, and then something happened—the phone rang, or I went to get a drink—and I never did empty that last closet. And so the raccoon jacket stayed in the back, behind my father’s old sheepskin coat and my sister’s ski overalls, until I left for college the following year.
Why did I take it with me? Surely, I didn’t think I could sneak it away without notice, but that’s what I tried to do, stuffing it into a trunk I shipped to Chicago. No one in the family ever mentioned that the jacket was gone. Maybe they didn’t notice. Maybe they just didn’t mind. I don’t know. In the Midwest, I hung it in the back of my own closet, first in a dormitory room and then in an off-campus apartment, where I lived for the next three years. I had no clear plans to wear it, but I suspected I would, someday.
It was curious, the response I got from roommates who saw that I had my mother’s fur coat. The morning she had died, I’d gone into her jewelry box before dawn and removed her wedding ring, which I wore on m
y right hand for years. “How beautiful,” people sighed when I told them what it was. The raccoon jacket provoked a different reaction, usually of surprise or disgust. A friend tried to explain this to me once. “A wedding ring represents your future,” she said. “But dead raccoons? That’s like wrapping yourself in the past.”
I never tried to explain that the dusty old jacket gave off a warmth that was timeless to me—who would understand? And I never told anyone that sometimes during those first few years I would lean into the closet and stick my face into the fur, trying to find the patches that retained the faint scent of Charlie perfume.
In the four years I kept the raccoon jacket at school, I wore it only once. My college friends were hardcore campus liberals, and before long I joined them as they gave up meat, signed petitions, and attended rallies for animal rights. Indignation and resistance were impulses I knew well. In an odd way, they kept me feeling close to my mother, or at least to the last days we’d shared, and I continued rebelling for far longer than I needed to, after she died. I moved through college tallying grievances the way my sorority sisters collected add-a-beads, defining my personal politics only by the dramatic contrast between black and white. It didn’t even matter whether the facts I pointed to were true, as long as I could identify and side with an obvious victim—preferably myself—every time.
When I was a junior, I heard that in downtown Chicago people like me were throwing red paint at fur coats, or maybe that was just a rumor. Either way, whatever material attraction I’d once had to fur had long since faded by then. One day, I was reorganizing my closet for the winter and sprang back in horror when I saw a pile of dead animals in the back. Then I realized what it was.