Motherless Daughters (40 page)

“The magic number,” one motherless woman called it. “Oh, the invisible line in the sand,” another daughter said. “I don’t know if any other women have said this,” about eight dozen women have confided in me over the years, “but I’m afraid I won’t live longer than thirty-nine (or forty-five or fifty-three).”

The last math class I took was in high school, and I have to use my fingers to add any single digit to a nine. But I have always been able to tell you, without pause for calculation, how many years have stood between my current age and forty-two. Now, as I fast approach
that deadline I’ve started to include months as well. And it gives me a small amount of comfort to know my mother was forty-two years and ten months when she died, which is practically the same thing as being forty-three.

This is Mortality Math 101, in which a mother’s age at death is a fixed value, and the only distance worth measuring is the one between here and there. We fixate on mental additions and subtractions, anxious about approaching the dreaded age—because what if we, too, die?—joyful, yet still fearful, about leaving it behind.

Living beyond a mother’s final year is a daughter’s exquisite reminder of her separateness. She did not—and now cannot—repeat her mother’s exact fate. This realization, says Therese Rando, can evoke a reaction similar to survivor guilt. “For some women, it’s very uncomfortable to survive past the age of a mother,” she explains. “They feel like they got extra time, and got something their mothers didn’t. They feel almost as if they were bad for getting away with it, and that if the mother didn’t have those extra years, they shouldn’t have them, either.” She believes this is why some people die when they predict they will, especially when they’re convinced they’ll die at the same age a parent did.

Two-thirds of the motherless women aged fifty-five and younger surveyed for this book admitted that they fear reaching the ages their mothers were when they died either “somewhat” or “a lot.” Some are so certain they’ll die that same year, they’ve designed their lives in preparation. Take Janine, for example. She was not quite two when her thirty-three-year-old mother died in a car accident, and although she was sitting in the back seat when it happened, Janine says she has no conscious memories of the crash. Nevertheless, she spent the next thirty-one years subconsciously waiting for the same accident to happen again, this time with her in the driver’s seat. “I never thought I’d live past thirty-three, which I didn’t even realize until I turned thirty-four,” she says. “All that time, I just never planned for the future. I sort of lived thinking in the back of my mind somewhere that I’d be in a car accident at thirty-three and die, so why plan beyond that? I had no future orientation whatsoever. I dropped out of college. I got a job, but I’d work only thirty hours a week so I had time to be an activist instead
of working forty hours and saving money to go back to school or to open an IRA.”

So what happened, I asked, when she turned thirty-four?

“Well,” she says, “one thing was that I really started thinking about my mother. For years I could talk about her without crying. I’d just sort of tick off the facts very rationally. But when I kept living at thirty-four, I started getting very emotional about her death.” Passing her mother’s age shifted Janine’s focus away from her own mortality and allowed her to mourn her mother for the first time. She also found herself moving forward, without plans, into years she hadn’t expected to see. She recalls, almost wryly, “When I turned thirty-four, the future suddenly was here. Figuring out what to do with it, however, has been another story. It took me five years to come up with a plan. At thirty-nine, I’m just getting ready to implement it. But I worry about all those lost years. I sort of think that at sixty I’m going to be a bag lady unless I get my act together quickly.”

Janine’s fear of a foreshortened future is common among motherless women. Because a same-sex parent acts as a natural buffer zone between a child and her own mortality, as long as the mother is present, life—and not death—is the daughter’s image of her future. When that barrier is removed, death feels more imminent to her, and decidedly more real. A girl who at a young age loses a mother, also loses the ability to perceive herself growing into old age. If a mother dies or leaves at forty-six, she can represent a physical model for her daughter only until that age. Instead of envisioning herself as a matron of seventy-three, the daughter then sees early demise as a potential—or even inevitable—physical future for herself.

The psychologists Veronika Denes-Raj and Howard Ehrlichman tested this theory in 1991, when they compared a group of New York City college students who’d lost parents prematurely to a group whose parents were still alive. When they asked the students in both groups to predict how long they’d live, based on objective criteria such as their genetic backgrounds, medical history, and past and present health behavior, those with parents still alive estimated that they’d live an average of seventy-nine years. Those who’d lost parents predicted that they’d live for only seventy-two.

Even more telling was the discrepancy between the groups when participants were asked to predict again, based on their “gut feelings,” that is, their hopes, fears, and dreams. This time, the group with parents estimated lifespans of an optimistic eighty-three years. Subjects who’d experienced early parent loss predicted that they’d live an average of fifteen years less—to sixty-eight. Once again, emotion prevailed over rationality. Even those whose parents were victims of random accidents with no potential for genetic inheritance expected to die young. That’s how powerful the parental model can be.

 

Most of us didn’t spend our childhoods obsessed with conscious thoughts about our mothers dying. Occasionally, we might have wondered about our own demise—Who’ll come to my funeral? Will anybody cry?—but chances are that we didn’t think about that very often either. To live in a world constantly aware and afraid of impending death would mean living in a state of perpetual fear and anxiety, a situation so intense it would ultimately consume us. From a very early age our protective mental faculties begin shielding us from the ongoing realization that life comes stamped with an expiration date. Because the concept of self-demise is too enormous, too incomprehensible for anyone to grasp fully at the conscious level, we exist instead in an ongoing tug-of-war between the fear of death, which we must have for purposes of self-preservation, and the illusion of immortality, which allows us to enjoy life.

The loss of a parent—especially a same-sex one—can drastically tip this balance. A mother’s death is as close as a daughter can get to experiencing her own, leaving her with the sudden realization of vulnerability and exposure. When my mother died, I remember feeling as if a tornado had blown through town and carried my roof away. Although I’d turned away from religion a few years before, I’d been raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition that houses its almighty God in a kingdom in the sky, and those early images never completely evaporate. The week after my mother died, I developed a bizarre, painful (and probably psychosomatic) stomach ailment, and I went to sleep each night for a week half-expecting a divine hand to reach down from the heavens and snatch me before I woke. This sounds
ridiculously dramatic to me now, but I can remember how it felt then—that I was the next woman in line, that the next one to go would be me.

This wasn’t exactly what I’d expected to be thinking about at seventeen. When I tell this story to twenty-eight-year-old Sheila, who was fourteen when her mother died, she says her adolescence and young adulthood were filled with similar fears. For her first five years, her mother was an alcoholic with little time or energy for her children. After she stopped drinking, she and Sheila became so close that when Sheila found her mother dead of heart failure, she became convinced that the same could happen to her at any moment—and probably would.

Sheila spent those years courting death like an ambivalent lover, daring it to find her at the same time she took deliberate steps to keep it away. In my twenties and early thirties, before I had children and the stakes became too high, I also tested the limits many times. I would take the subway alone at midnight, go rock climbing in a remote gorge with someone of questionable skill, and accept rides from people I’d never met before. Internally, I knew, I was vulnerable to cancer, but I would delude myself into thinking nothing external could take me down. “Nothing bad will happen to
me
” was my insistence that I was immune to harm, that bad luck no longer had an
interest in me, that I was one who could take risks and win. It was my urgent self-reminder that
I am not my mother,
when, of course, underneath it lay the very visceral fear that I was.

Confronting feelings of vulnerability with the actions of the invulnerable is a behavior so common that clinicians have a name for it: “counterphobic mechanisms.” Like the acrophobe who takes flying lessons to overcome her fear of heights, motherless daughters will try to master their fears of dying by taking risks that give them the illusion of having control over their destinies. To gain the exhilaration and validation that come from tempting fate and winning, they’ll often engage in precisely the behaviors—for example, smoking after a mother dies of lung cancer—that put them at highest risk for getting a mother’s disease.

“Some women really walk the line, and not only with health behaviors,” Dr. Milburn says. “Women are less likely than men to drive recklessly or jump out of airplanes. Their risk taking usually is interpersonal, like doing things to screw up their relationships. I see a lot of women who respond to their fears of illness or death by making crummy choices with regard to sexual partners, or having a lot of affairs.”

As Denes-Raj and Ehrlichman discovered, the college students in their study who feared dying early and from the same cause as their parents were also the ones most likely to engage in harmful health habits such as smoking or eating poorly. This may be because children model their parents’ health behaviors, the authors suggest, or because poor health is a consequence of bereavement. But Dr. Denes-Raj believes it more likely that parent loss leads children to develop a sense of fatalism, which in turn leads to the belief, “If my destiny is to die young, or if the disease is already in my genes, why should I bother taking care of myself now?”

As researchers have found, many high-risk women don’t. When Kathryn Kash, Ph.D., was the head psychologist at the Strang Cancer Prevention Center in New York City studying women at high risk for breast cancer, she initially expected to find that women who perceived themselves to be most vulnerable to the disease would be the ones most likely to engage in regular screening. Instead, she found the opposite to be true. Women with the most anxiety about
developing breast cancer rarely did breast self-exams and often canceled or missed their appointments for clinical checkups. “These women say if they feel okay, then they’re not going to come in or do self-exams,” Dr. Kash says. “It’s easy to think that if you don’t do any screening, you won’t find anything, because if you don’t do any screening, you can’t.”

Brenda, thirty-two, who was sixteen when her mother died of breast cancer, says because her maternal grandmother also had the disease, she perceives herself as especially high-risk. The memory of her mother’s two-year illness, however, prevents Brenda from taking the suggested precautionary measures for herself.

Avoidance becomes a high-risk behavior when it prevents a woman from obtaining adequate care. When the mother evaded or eluded medical care, a daughter’s avoidance also can be an attempt to identify with her mother. I won’t say motherless women consciously want to die; I don’t know one who truly hopes for a life-threatening disease. But I have met daughters who long for a connection, any connection, with the mothers they lost during childhood or their teens. For example, a woman whose obese mother died of heart failure may, years later, gain enough weight to put a dangerous strain on her own heart. Or a woman whose mother committed suicide may refuse to get therapeutic help for her bouts of depression.

Twenty-two-year-old Stacey, who lost her mother to AIDS three years ago, says she’s terrified of dying from the disease yet took few steps to protect herself from it after her mother died. She’s been
tested for the virus several times and has always received negative results. “But the scary part about it is that losing a mother to AIDS didn’t make me a self-proclaimed, rejuvenated virgin, or even make me more discriminate about men,” she says. “In fact, after she died, I even went through a very promiscuous period. I still had that part of me that needed to feel loved, and I needed to escape, so I did it through men. I didn’t even feel present during those sexual encounters, but for some reason it felt necessary for me to do it as a way to hurt myself. It was weird, because I would almost wish the disease upon myself so that I could feel the pain my mother felt. At the time I felt, and sometimes I still do, that I deserve to feel the same pain, because it’s not fair that she had to go through it alone.”