by Hope Edelman
He lived for another twenty years. As sad and tragic as his dying was, it contained a small element of relief, the knowledge that the worst had finally come to pass. Like my mother, he died of liver failure; but his death took place while he was under hospice care at home, in a setting of full disclosure, surrounded by family until the end. His was an entirely different departure from that of my mother in 1981, and it was healing for that reason. Yet at the same time, I hadn’t fully anticipated what a large hole his death would leave behind, how much I would miss him as a father and grandfather.
I’d lost a parent before, yes, but this was something else. “You’ve been through this,” friends reminded me, trying to help me find perspective. Well, yes. And no. My role as daughter, had narrowed when my mother died. Now it had been taken away completely. With my father’s death, there was no longer any space in the world for me to be a child. For weeks, I sleepwalked through my daily activities, stunned that I was no longer anyone’s daughter.
Losing one parent teaches us about just that—how to lose one parent. It doesn’t prepare us for the loss of the second. “The death of the last parent is a whole other dimension,” says Therese Rando, who lost both of her parents by the age of eighteen. “When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you’re an adult, it’s weird to be orphaned.”
A daughter’s identity changes dramatically when both her parents die. The roof above her is stripped away. When she’s a young adult, capable of making her own decisions, this second loss pushes her into a phase of individuality where she’s accountable only to herself. “I lost both of my parents by the time I was twenty-six,” says Christine, now thirty-five. “And suddenly I didn’t have anybody telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted. That’s a scary feeling, when you’re suddenly let loose and realize there’s nobody to check in with. Nobody to ask, ‘What are you doing?’ or say, ‘Maybe you should think about this.’ All of a sudden you have all this responsibility for yourself, and you think, What do I do?”
Losing both parents so young, Christine says, helped turn her into a more mature, independent woman than she believes she would have been otherwise. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, orphans both lose and gain. “They’re highly intuitive, because they’ve suffered so much,” she says. “They learned to develop radar to know where the next kick or hit was coming from. So as adults, they’re very, very alert, and often uncannily so. They not only can tell bad things but also good things about people. The only problem is, they often override their intuition, especially if they think they’ll get love. It’s almost like a currency exchange that they do.”
For the daughter who loses one parent young, the death of the second parent may trigger a new mourning cycle for the first. Thirty-two-year-old Mariana was sixteen when her mother died, and after an initial two-month period of shock and denial, she began to mourn intensely.
It took me five years to get over the grief. Every year around her birthday, around my parents’ anniversary, around the time she died, I was totally miserable. And then, after about five years, it just went away. It wasn’t that I stopped missing her, but the hurt wasn’t always there anymore. But when Daddy died, I really lost it. He died last November, fifteen years after Mommy. And then it was like, there’s nobody. I felt like I was losing two instead of one. So his death brought back all the memories of her, as well as the grief for him.
Though her second loss reactivated additional mourning for her mother and introduced the new pain of being left parentless, Mariana approached her father’s death as a thirty-one-year-old adult, more self-reliant and emotionally mature than she’d been at sixteen. Her acute grief phase for him began immediately and lasted for less than a year. As she prepares for the first anniversary of his death, Mariana says she feels stronger and more prepared to face the day than she did as an adolescent after her mother died.
Eva, who lost her mother when she was eight and her father when she was thirty-five, attached a different meaning to parent loss as an adult. Her peers were beginning to experience the same, and she perceived the death as a traumatic but timely event. As a result, she could mourn and accommodate the loss without long-term, ongoing distress. “A child really has a different perception of death than an adult does,” she says. “I just didn’t have a clue when I was eight. As tragic and as sad as my dad’s death was, it wasn’t confusing. It made sense to me. I hadn’t known how confusing my mother’s death was until my father died twenty-five years later.”
The loss of one parent during childhood or adolescence is traumatic enough, but for some unfortunate young daughters the death of a mother either follows or is closely followed by the loss of a father. Every month I receive several e-mails from women who’ve lost both parents young, detailing the uniqueness of their situations.
Although orphan is defined as a child under the age of eighteen who has had at least one parent die, most of us associate the term with a Dickensian image of a child alone, without either biological parent alive. In 2003, 29,140 U.S. children under eighteen fit this description—“double orphans,” they’re called—and about another 32,000 were between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six.
For such a child, Tamar Granot says, “the sense of calamity and loss is absolute. The child’s entire world is instantaneously shattered, and he feels he is left alone in the world. Suddenly, he goes from being an ordinary child with parents and a family to one who has nothing.” To a child in need of a legal guardian, the loss of the last surviving parent usually means a change of residence and new caretakers. Outsiders intrude on the family system in the form of relatives, neighbors, social workers, and other professionals compelled by altruism or law to intervene. The child may go live with relatives or move into a foster home. If she has siblings, they become her only living connection to her nuclear family, and their importance to her may increase.
Darlene, forty-three, says her younger sister became the only constant figure in her childhood after she lost both her parents in separate accidents by the age of ten. “My sister and I were always very, very close,” Darlene recalls. “If anyone had tried to separate us, that would have been the last straw. I don’t think I would have been able to accept that at all. If I were an only child, I would have had to handle things differently, I think. But because I had my sister, we depended on each other a lot for support and acceptance and approval. As adults, we still do.”
Multiple losses within short periods can seriously stress a child’s coping skills. Instead of mourning for the lost parents, an early orphan often has to pour all her emotional energy into just getting from day to day. The enormity of such a trauma is too overwhelming for someone who is still a child to touch. Only years later, as an adult who’s found stability within herself and through external relationships, can she revisit the losses, take in the significance of the pain, and begin to process it.
Along the way, the early orphan may endure long and lonely stretches in her quest to find a replacement for the parental love she lost. After both her parents died in a car accident when she was thirteen, Diane, now thirty-nine, lived in nine places over the next three years, searching for one where she felt she belonged. “I was such a lost soul,” she says. “I tried drugs. I was pretty loose and easy with the sexual things in my early years. I was looking for love, looking for anything that would dull the pain and make me feel like I fit in.” Jokes, she discovered, decreased tension and earned her positive feedback, and humor became the coping skill she relied on to alleviate her feelings of dislocation and isolation.
Today, Diane is a successful stand-up comedian. Her early experience as an orphan instilled in her a strong will to survive, which she believes members of her audience can recognize and appreciate. “The life force is ver
y strong in me, and people are drawn to it,” she says. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I get after my shows, just incredible stories of pain and anguish. A lot of women come over and tell me they’re on the road to healing themselves. They say, ‘You know, you’ve given me a lot of strength.’ I’m not sure why. I don’t particularly talk about my past on stage. It’s just something they get out of me.”
The very term orphan reflects the uniqueness of a solitary, insightful state. The alchemists originally used the word to name a unique gem once found in an emperor’s crown, similar to what we call a solitaire today. They compared the orphan stone to the lapis philosophorum, or the philosophers’ stone, considered worthless and priceless at the same time, despised by fools but loved by the wise. Even then, it was believed that orphans held special knowledge and had acquired an insight that others had not attained.
Some early orphans find solace in this archetypal association, using it to attach meaning to and justify their double loss. Twenty-five-year-old Margie, who was seven when her mother died and then went to live with an indifferent father and antagonistic stepmother, neither of whom she speaks to today, says, “I’ve felt emotionally alone since my mother died, and that kind of heightens my feelings of difference and uniqueness. I’ve felt that I’ve had to raise and take care of myself. Sometimes I wonder if my feeling of uniqueness is all bad. I wonder if I’m getting something out of that, thinking that I’m extraordinarily different.” Reminding herself that she was “special” became the defense that helped Margie through a difficult and lonely adolescence. It became her compensation for losing her mother physically and her father emotionally at such a young age. As an adult, however, she’s now aware of how risky this self-definition can be. She’s secretly pleased about being different from most other women she knows, but she’s cautious about letting her self-perception slide into delusions of grandeur.
As Margie’s example illustrates, a woman need not lose both parents to death to identify with the orphan archetype. Many unmothered women who still have one or both parents nevertheless describe themselves as spiritual or emotional orphans. “Functionally orphaned” is a term they understand well. Their mothers, though physically present, may have offered them little emotional support; their fathers, though still alive, may have played minimal roles in their lives. As children, their most crucial emotional needs were never met.
As early orphans search for a reason why such tragedy would befall them, they reach for religion, metaphysics, rationalizations, even platitudes—anything that will help them believe the cosmos is not so random that disaster can strike anyone at any moment, and that they are not doomed or marked in any dark way. A girl uses whatever cognitive and emotional resources are available to her at her time of loss, and in adolescence and then adulthood she continually reworks the images, seeking renewed comfort at each developmental stage.
Darlene, who lost her father and then her mother to separate accidents by the age of ten, says her search for meaning has continued well into her adult life:Between thirty and forty, I really felt like I needed an answer. My husband and I both came from a pretty religious background, but after we married, we didn’t go to church very much. After my son was born, we wanted him to have an upbringing similar to ours, and we started going back to church. I prayed a lot then, for help and guidance. My husband is really good about talking about things like this. I’ve talked with him for hours and hours. It’s just something I’ll never know, why it happened, or why it happened to me. I want to believe there was a reason why my mother had to die, too. I like to think maybe it’s because she missed my father an awful lot, and now they’re happy together. That’s helped me a lot, to think about it that way.
Loss is a part of life as involuntary as a heartbeat, as inevitable as nightfall. This is even more poignantly true for women, whose gendered experiences are so closely linked to natural separation and loss. In her essay “The Normal Losses of Being Female,” Lila J. Kalinich explains that although a man experiences potential and real losses throughout his life, a woman encounters a significant loss about once every decade: the first individuation from the mother during her toddler years; the end of childhood when menstruation begins; the second individuation during adolescence; the loss of virginity during adolescence or young adulthood; the possible loss of her original surname when she marries; the sacrifice of certain elements of motherhood or career if she decides against combining both; her children’s departure from home; the loss of her childbearing capacity at the onset of menopause; and, because women are likely to outlive their husbands, the possibility of widowhood. Biologically and socially, women are surrounded by loss. Within this larger landscape, the loss of a mother is an inevitable, though tragic, female experience.
Eva, Mary Jo, and Margie, as adults, each found a compassionate counselor to help them mourn their mothers’ deaths. Other women interviewed for this book mentioned strong religious beliefs, dependable lovers and spouses, and close friendships as supports that have helped them cope with subsequent separation and loss and approach it with less trepidation.
“After the first death, there is no other,” Dylan Thomas wrote. He understood how influential that first loss can be. It continues to sit on our shoulders, guiding our response to future separations, until we can put it to rest. When you lose a parent early, you develop an increased sensitivity to later loss. The challenge isn’t to bury that early experience, but to understand it, to accept it, and to keep it from interfering with your ability to enjoy and fully experience the rest of your life.
II
Loss
Sophie stared at the pans lying upside down on the counter. “Doesn’t it seem kind of pathetic—just us?”
“What do you mean?” said Caitlin. “We’re a family.”
“Yah, but it doesn’t feel like we’re all here.”
“We’re not,” Chicky said.
“Joanie Nathan said the first year needs to go by before you get used to it,” Caitlin said.
“We have a month, then,” Chicky said. It had been eleven months since the accident.
“I’m not expecting to get used to it,” said Delilah with disgust.
“Well, it feels like more than just Mum,” Sophie said.
Everyone nodded. It wasn’t just one thing; a thousand things were missing. The house was filled with missing things, despite the Christmas decorations being up. . . The girls put the decorations where they always got put—the creche on the Chinese table in the hall, the laurel looping down the banister, the wooden fruit poked into wreaths. They taped Christmas cards to the stair railing the way Mum had and lit the pine candle. Nothing was the same.
—Susan Minot, Monkeys
Chapter Five
Daddy’s Little Girl The Father-Daughter Dyad
MY FATHER WAS NEVER much of a talker. Even when my mother was alive he preferred to stay at home listening to the radio and working crossword puzzles while she went out at night. She scheduled the social events, organized the dinner parties, made all the new friends. After she died, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he spoke even less. Over the years, his occasional phone calls consisted mainly of questions about the weather and the performance of my car. Later, he’d ask about my daughters. He wanted to hear only the good news. If I mentioned my mother or said I was having a hard day, silence was typically his response. If I brought up his drinking or his weight, I’d hear a quick goodbye and a click. Maybe he’d call back in a few days or weeks. Long portions of my adult life were spent wondering which one of us would break down first and pick up the phone.
The easy explanation for my pervasive fear of abandonment is that my mother died when I was seventeen, but that’s never been a reason that’s made much sense to me. Although it taught me a quick lesson about the impermanence of relationships, I know, and have always known, that my mother did not want to leave. But my father, well, that was a different story. The threat of his departure, which was both symbolic and real, began with
the moments in my childhood when he stormed out of the house after an argument and reached a terrifying peak one evening when I was a sophomore in college and my sister called me, crying, pleading with me to do something, because my father, momentarily overcome by the demands of single fatherhood, was packing his bags to leave.
In the end he didn’t go anywhere that night, but my siblings and I quickly learned how to tiptoe through the minefield in this new landscape we all shared, careful not to tread too hard on any topic that might make our father explode. A friend of mine who at age eight lost her mother describes this kind of tentative choreography as a dance between the threat of rejection and a denial of the self. To confront any painful issue with her father, especially concerning her mother, meant risking that he, too, would leave her, but to pretend such topics did not exist was the most blatant denial of her reality. Because the children in my family were too young—and too afraid—to risk total abandonment, we chose silence. The times our father did show emotion and let us see his pain, we deliberately forced him back into the safety of suppression. When he broke into jagged tears at my brother’s bar mitzvah, I elbowed him hard and hissed at him to stop. To me, his crying signified the first stage of what I was afraid would lead to complete collapse, undermining the only security I had left. While my father never gave me a safe place to air my feelings, neither did I, until much later, give him the chance to express his.
My father died at the age of seventy-four. His children and grandchildren were around him at the end, but he didn’t have a partner or even any close friends. He never remarried. As far as I know, he never even dated. He lived alone in a small, tidy apartment with dozens of photos of his children and grandchildren clustered on the walls. Twenty-four years after my mother’s death the mention of her name still brought him to tears. Until the very end of his life, he refused to talk about her final days or the role he’d played in them. And so, as fate would have it, he had to live them instead. Her primary cause of death was liver failure, and liver cancer was what finally did him in. The last seventy-two hours of his life, as his liver shut down, mirrored the last three days of hers with eerie precision. If I hadn’t believed in karma before that experience, I surely would have started believing in it then.