Motherless Daughters (2 page)

Losing my mother has affected my life drastically. Yes, it molded me into a “tough” woman who could, seemingly, handle anything that was tossed her way. It also destroyed almost entirely my ability to trust. It has returned to haunt me when I sustained further losses of loved ones through death, divorce, rejection.

Thank you so very much for writing about mother loss.

San Antonio, Texas

Over the past twelve years, so many people have been instrumental in getting this book on the shelves and keeping it there: Elizabeth Kaplan, my agent; Carl Klaus and Mary Swander, my early mentors; Elizabeth Perle, my first editor; Jackie Cantor, the book’s paperback editor; Marnie Cochran, its current editor; and the sales, marketing, and publicity departments at Addison-Wesley, Dell, and Da Capo. You’ve helped hundreds of thousands of women find a framework for their experiences.

The Motherless Daughters groups currently operating around the country have worked toward this end as well. Cami Black, Casey Enda, Laurie Lucas, MaryAnn McCourt, Vicki Waldron, Day Cummings, Ruta Grigola, Dawn Klancic, Linda Mills, Colleen Russell, and Irene Rubaum-Keller deserve special notice, as do the ninety-nine women who volunteered their time and their stories for inclusion in this book.

The work of Phyllis Silverman, J. William Worden, Maxine Harris, Laura Munts at Mommy’s Light Lives On, and everyone at the Dougy Center in Portland, Oregon, continually guided and inspired my writing. Many thanks to all of you for your generosity and your research.

Ten years ago, a woman stood outside the
Today
show studio in Rockefeller Center with a handmade sign that read, “Thank you, Hope.” I handed her a brochure about support groups in New York City. She turned into one of the most dedicated volunteers the children’s bereavement community has ever known, a valued resource, and a trusted friend. She also did a stellar job as the research assistant for this book. Michele Cofield, stand up and take your bow.

Thirty years ago, an Archie comic book pen-pal service matched me with a girl my age in Minnesota. We wrote letters almost every week for eight years, through my mother’s death from cancer and then, unpredictably, through her mother’s death two years later as well. For many years, she was the only other motherless girl I spoke with about my loss. Sylvia, where ever you now are, please know how important your friendship was to me at a time when I needed it most.

My siblings were always staunch supporters of this book, even when my version of events differed from theirs. My father died before this new edition was completed; he would have been proud to know the book has such a life of its own. And my mother, whose life and death gave me the inspiration to write and my first story to tell—she is the real heroine of this book.

Finally, if not for a small and dedicated group of women in New York City in 1994, there would have been no Motherless Daughters organization; if not for the Motherless Daughters organization I never would have met my husband Uzi; if not for Uzi there would be no Maya or Eden, who each carry a portion of my mother’s name. Because of them, I believe in immortality. Through them, pieces of her live on.

Twelve years ago, the first edition of
Motherless Daughters
was published. It was the final step in a long odyssey for me, the end result of years I’d spent searching for just such a book. I was seventeen when my mother died of breast cancer, no longer a child but not yet quite a woman. I was old enough to drive, however, and one of the first trips I took after the mourners dispersed was to a local library. I was a reader, and in lieu of a support group or teen-grief therapy, neither of which existed in my town in 1981, this was my best option for support. I needed information. I wanted to know how you were supposed to feel at seventeen when your mother had just died. I wanted clues for how to think about it. How to talk about it. What to say. I wanted to know if anything, ever, would make me feel happy again.

I didn’t find that book, not that year, nor the next year, nor in any of my subsequent searches in bookstores and university libraries and computer databases in any of the next four states in which I lived. In every book I skimmed about mother-daughter relationships, the assumption was that a mother’s death occurred after a daughter had reached mid-life or beyond. I was seventeen, twenty, then twenty-four years old. These books weren’t speaking to me. The same was true for the academic texts I found, some of which discussed the short-term effects of early parent loss on children, but none of which talked specifically about daughters who’d lost mothers and how the loss affected them over time. I knew I had a specific set of difficulties, and a point of view that departed significantly from most of my friends’, but I couldn’t find anything written about this. The silence that descended upon my family after my mother
died seemed echoed on the bookstore shelves. I had no idea that thousands of other girls like my sister and I were out there. In my mind, we’d gone through something so strange, so rare and aberrant, that it didn’t even merit inclusion on the page.

Then, when I was a senior in college, my boyfriend clipped an Anna Quindlen column from the
Chicago Tribune
for me. “My mother died when I was nineteen,” Quindlen wrote. “For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: ‘Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes—I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.’” I read it four times on the el train on the way to my part-time job that afternoon, and carried it around in my wallet for years. Only later, much later, would I learn how many other motherless women around the country had saved that same syndicated column, and how many, like me, had felt as if someone had discovered a secret portal into their innermost thoughts.

Losing my mother wasn’t just a fact about me. It was the core of my identity, my very state of being. Before writing the first edition of this book, I had no sense of how many other women felt the same way. The answer, as I soon learned, was a lot. Within two months of its initial publication,
Motherless Daughters
landed on the
New York Times
bestseller list
.
I hadn’t unlisted my phone number, and I’d come home at the end of the day to find long, heartfelt stories of mother loss left on my answering machine. I was living in New York City at the time, and about once a week the clerk at my local post office would hand me gray mailbags filled with envelopes—letters that readers had sent to the publisher, who had forwarded them on to me. “What kind of business are you running, woman?” she once asked me. “I want a piece of
that.
”

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: