Motherless Daughters (5 page)

Adults usually start their griefwork immediately after a loss, but children tend to mourn in bits and pieces. They do it in the midst of the rest of life, dipping in and out of grief, with intense bouts of anger
and sadness punctuating long periods of apparent disregard. “They know how much pain they can tolerate at any given moment, and when they reach their limit, they simply shut it off and do something else,” explain Mary Ann and James Emswiler, the authors of
Guiding Your Child Through Grief
.

Adults often mistake this process with blocked mourning, believing that a child either doesn’t understand what happened or is denying the loss, when in fact she knows quite well that her mother is gone. Children can’t withstand severe emotional pain without support from an adult they trust. Instead of grieving openly, they often speak through play. A girl who lost a mother in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, for example, may have returned from the funeral and headed straight for her toy chest, appearing oblivious to the day’s events, but her play might have been telling. If she created a tall stack of blocks and knocked them down, over and over again, she probably would have been acting out her experience of parent loss.

Therapists at the Barr-Harris Children’s Grief Center in Chicago have observed that a child’s grief response is directly influenced by the surviving parent’s behaviors. “The loss is tougher for kids when the recovery of the surviving parent is slower, when that parent is exceptionally depressed, goes on as if nothing has happened, or is so exhausted that things get disorganized,” says Nan Birnbaum, M.S.S.C., who was a Barr-Harris staff member throughout the 1990s. “We noticed that kids tend to start dealing with the loss six to nine months after the actual death, when the surviving parent is beginning to cope better. They need the safety and psychological security to be able to feel that intense distress. Surviving parents have to be picking up the pieces of their lives and running things relatively comfortably before kids can let down their hair and feel safe enough to grieve. Sometimes the surviving parent takes a year before he’s doing better, and then the child won’t begin grieving and having intense reactions until a year and a half after the loss.” It’s difficult for children to move beyond a surviving parent’s place of progress in the mourning process. If a parent gets stuck in a particular stage, chances are the child will, too.

Researchers have found that children who lose a parent need two conditions to continue to thrive: a stable surviving caregiver to meet their emotional and physical needs, and open and honest communication about the death and its impact on the family. Sheer physical care isn’t enough. The child who can express her sadness and who feels secure in her environment is the one most likely to integrate the loss and avoid serious ongoing distress. But the child who faces continuing difficulties—a father who can’t stop grieving, a stepmother who rejects her, an unstable home life—can end up a long way from the point where she once began.

Adolescents—with their attachments to peer groups and their capacity for abstract thought, which allows the leap from “My mother is gone” to “My life will never be the same”—come closer to modeling an adult mourning process, but their experience is still limited by developmental constraints. Some therapists have viewed adolescence itself as a form of mourning—for the lost childhood and for the foregone image of the omnipotent, protective parents—and believe that until we complete this type of mourning process in our late teens or early twenties, we can’t adequately grieve for a loved one later on. Adolescence, inconsistent and insecure as it is, may be our built-in preparation for learning to let go.

Women who lost mothers during adolescence frequently speak of their inability to cry at the time of loss, or even for months or years afterward. This often serves as a personal black mark in their pasts, a point of self-recrimination when they look back as adults and discuss their mother’s death: What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I cry?
What was my problem?

Sandy, thirty-four, whose mother died of cancer twenty years ago, still remembers the confusion she felt at the time. “Never cried at the funeral,” she says. “Didn’t want to let anyone know that I had feelings at fourteen. I mean, I remember sitting in the way back of the funeral parlor with my friends, hanging out—because I didn’t know how to handle it. You know, I didn’t want to stand up and act like it bothered me. I didn’t know how to act. But we had a lot of timberland, and I’d go down there and sit on a log and be alone. I cried a lot then, but not at the funeral.”

In response to a major loss, both older children and adolescents cry less freely than adults do. Teens, in particular, often feel threatened by the potential magnitude of their emotions. While a young child may cry impulsively, without thought of whether the outburst will end, a teenager who feels she may “lose it” in front of others sees mourning as a threat.

If the loss occurs at a time when a girl is struggling to assert her independence from the family, she may associate crying and other emotional outbursts with a regression to a dependent, childish state. Because she equates crying with being “babyish” she avoids all public displays. The abandonment she feels after her mother dies is exacerbated by the alienation that comes with normal adolescence, and she’s then left feeling doubly isolated with a grief she’s afraid to express.

I’d like to say my family was a safe forum for expression, that we talked about both my mother’s death and her life, and that each of the children found someone who provided much-needed emotional support. But none of those things was true. My father couldn’t juggle the demands of his own grieving with the sudden responsibility for three children he barely knew, and he was not a man accustomed to asking for help. I don’t think he discussed my mother’s death with anyone at the time. He certainly didn’t talk about it with us. The briefest mention of my mother’s name would cause his eyes to fill, forcing him to retreat to his room while my sister, brother, and I sat staring silently at our full dinner plates. Seeing our only parent so close to total collapse was terrifying, and we were determined to prevent it however we could. He was the only parent we had left; we couldn’t risk losing him, too. As we learned to dance around the words that destabilized him, silence descended on us all like dense fog. Within two months after my mother’s death we had stopped talking about her at all.

Silence and suppression transformed me into an emotional mannequin, frozen and ersatz, with proportions so perfect they were never more than an ideal. The night my mother died, I entered a survival zone of counterfeit emotion: no tears, no grief, little response at all except a carefully monitored smile and an intense desire to maintain the status quo. If I couldn’t control the external chaos, I could at least try to balance it with my internal reserve. And how could I give
in to the intense emotion I sensed was underneath it all? My father told relatives at the funeral and in the house afterward that I was “the rock” of the family. “We’d all fall apart if it weren’t for Hope,” he said, and they nodded in agreement.

Their praise, of course, only served as further incentive for me to maintain a perfectly chiseled marble facade. I never did break down during those early years. My mother had always been the parent who gave the children a safe place to cry, my father more an advocate of the stiff-upper-lip school of emotional expression. I needed someone to tell me it was all right to feel anger and despair, but I received only kudos for my synthetically mature, responsible behavior. Perhaps this sounds juvenile for a girl of seventeen, this need for permission to express emotion. I might think so too, if it hadn’t happened to me.

Families like mine aren’t rare; many households view even the most innocuous expressions of grief as reminders of the loss, and shy away from confronting collective pain. Daughters left with fathers are at a particular disadvantage in a culture that still encourages women to express emotion and men to suppress it. Fathers may feel grief just as—or even more—intensely than other family members, but having been socialized to repress their feelings, take control, and solve problems often leaves them with little outlet or tolerance for emotional display. Twenty-eight-year-old Leslie, who was seventeen when her mother died, recalls, “My father’s message, and it was clearly stated to me, was, ‘Don’t you start crying, because we’ll all fall apart.’ That was his true belief. Grieving and mourning and crying were such a hazard in my house. We just weren’t allowed to do that. I wish I could have said to my father back then, ‘It’s not true, Dad,’ and cried and cried and cried. And then looked up and said, ‘See? Nothing happened. Lightning didn’t strike.’ He would have cried too, but so what? What was so threatening about that? I’ve cried a lot in therapy, and I’ve gotten angry at my therapist. And nothing bad has happened. I think there was this message in my home that my emotions held that much negative force. I then believed I was that all-powerful, which of course simply wasn’t true.”

Grief doesn’t vanish just because we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer, yet that’s the way many of us are encouraged to cope: Ignore the pain, and it’ll go away. Anyone who’s tried that approach knows
what a superficial venture it can be. “Ultimately, the thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died,” says twenty-nine-year-old Rachel, who was fourteen at the time, “but that you can’t talk about it, and you can’t let yourself think about it.” The sounds of silence, left to echo without response, become more haunting than the actual words. To keep our mouths soldered shut only means the grief will find a way to seep out elsewhere, through our eyes and our ears, through our very pores.

An unfortunate fact we can’t escape—but one we all would, if we could—is that mourning hurts. “Little things like looking at your hand and seeing hers triggers it with such intensity that you just want to run away,” explains Donna, twenty-six, whose mother committed suicide three years ago. “But you don’t know where you can run to, because there isn’t anywhere to go. You try calling your dad to explain it to him and he says, ‘We’ll get you a plane ticket and you can come out here.’ But what good is that going to do? You’re still battling it in your own head.”

Mourning involves risk: We have to relinquish control to our emotions, and let them run their course. Maintaining that control gives us the illusion of normalcy, but at what cost? And for how long? Rita, forty-three, who was sixteen when her mother died of cancer, says that deliberately avoiding her grief has given her a veneer of strength but hasn’t destroyed the emotions at her core.

Rita says she wants to face her sorrow, but that’s only half of a mourner’s journey. The other half is feeling ready to embrace the pain. Before that seven-year watershed in Tennessee, was I ready to admit that my mother’s death had had a profound effect on me, or that I needed to go back and reevaluate its impact? Not a chance. I wasn’t about to dive into that, not even in a shark cage. I had to wait until the equivalent of a psychic explosion occurred, until the pain of
not
mourning my mother had gotten worse than grief could ever be.

Evelyn Williams, C.S.W., a therapist who led bereavement groups for college-aged students at Duke University for thirteen years, believes we know, internally, when the moment to mourn arrives. She saw students who had lost parents during childhood or adolescence find their way into her groups in college, prepared to discuss their losses for the first time. Once they had physically separated from their families and achieved the psychological and emotional stability they needed to mourn without fear of abandonment or collapse, they could face their grief head-on. Our psyches seem to protect us until we’re able to confront the pain, and then the internal alarm clock rings, telling us it’s time to wake up and go to work.

Experiencing that intense emotion is what helps us, ultimately, accept that our mothers are gone. Insulating ourselves may feel better in the short run, but it’s not a successful long-term coping skill. “The ability to cognitively understand and comprehend the loss of a mother only comes with numerous times of bumping up against reality—she’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here—as we go through life and miss her and want to see her or hold her and she’s not with us,” explains Therese Rando, Ph.D., a bereavement specialist in Warwick, Rhode Island, who was seventeen when her father died and eighteen when she lost her mother. “Those are the times that
make you feel pain, and the person who avoids that hurt is never really going to get it. The pain, in essence, teaches you.”

Some daughters, like Rita, consciously choose to avoid this pain. Others cling to it to keep the loss—and their mothers—alive. “The hurt can be a connection to the loved one for a long time,” Dr. Rando says. “It may be the only thing you have that keeps you connected to the person who died. Sometimes pushing the pain away is a way of holding on, and sometimes holding it close is. I held on to my parents by staying immersed in my grief. It was the hardest thing for me to give up, but I had to do it and find other ways to stay connected.”