Motherless Daughters (15 page)

Of 149 motherless women who knew their mothers’ causes of death, 44 percent reported cancer; 10 percent, heart failure; 10 percent, accidents; and 7 percent, suicide. Three percent each cited pneumonia; infectious diseases; complications of childbirth, abortion, or miscarriage; kidney failure; and cerebral hemorrhage. The remainder named alcoholism, overdoses, aneurysms, strokes, and complications from surgery. Five women said they didn’t know.

In the Motherless Daughters support groups I’ve led, part of the first session is always devoted to talking about a mother’s cause of
death. Women who’ve lost mothers to long-term illnesses always believe that losing her quickly and not witnessing her suffering would have been easier. Women whose mothers died as the result of accidents or other sudden deaths disagree: they would have done anything, they say, to have had time to say goodbye. Only after they hear each others’ stories do they concede there’s no good way to lose a loved one—just, in the words of one twenty-six-year-old woman, “different kinds of hell.” Every cause is painful, and every loss leaves us wondering how we could have acted otherwise to prevent the death. But because different causes of death provoke sufficiently different responses—anger toward suicide victims; blame for homicide, terrorism, and war; helplessness and fear with natural disasters; and hopelessness with terminal disease—the specific way a mother dies or leaves determines how her daughter will respond.

When Kelly contracted a urinary tract infection a few years ago, she was blunt with the gynecologist who diagnosed it. “I don’t like doctors,” she told her. “I don’t trust modern medicine, and I won’t take pills.” What she didn’t tell her doctor was the reason why. Ever since her mother’s death from metastatic breast cancer fifteen years ago, Kelly, now thirty, has associated the medical profession with chemotherapy and failure.

Like Kelly, daughters of terminally ill mothers usually face several conflicts at once: watching the physical deterioration of someone they love, feeling helpless and angry, trying to maintain as normal a life as possible, and having to readjust each time a new crisis develops. That’s a lot to cope with at once. After fifteen years, Kelly has overcome the guilt she once felt for subjecting an ill mother to her adolescent strife, but she still mistrusts doctors and is terrified of developing cancer herself.

Though the actual death is the most profound loss, a child whose mother dies from a long-term illness usually experiences other losses throughout its duration. The family’s previous way of life may vanish as the group reorganizes to accommodate a sick member; the active attention of one or both parents may diminish, leaving some of the child’s needs unmet; financial resources may dwindle; and a daughter’s perception of her mother might change several times. A younger daughter may, as an adult, remember her mother only as a patient, never having had a relationship with a mother who’s healthy. An older daughter may resent having to give up the interests and concerns of her peer group to spend more time at home. As the illness progresses, a daughter may have to become a caretaker for her
mother—a distinct and premature role reversal that can make both sides angry and resentful.

A daughter also finds that her assumptions about parental power are shattered. No longer is her mother an all-powerful icon in the family, the one with an awesome ability to shelter her children from distress or harm. “When a child witnesses the slow deterioration of a parent, he or she sees not only impending death but the collapse and destruction of a powerful protector as well,” Maxine Harris explains.

Daughters of all ages might find that they have no one in the family to talk with about their fears, because their parents and siblings are preoccupied with the same stresses. A mother is a daughter’s natural refuge at times of distress, but a mother often can’t fulfill this role when she’s overwhelmed by worries of her own.

This was particularly troubling for Stacey, who grew up as an only child in a single-parent home. Her father died when she was nine, and her mother was diagnosed with the virus that causes AIDS when Stacey was fifteen. For the next four years, Stacey took care of her mother, attended school, and tried to cope with the stigma and shame surrounding AIDS—all without the emotional support of the mother who’d been her closest confidante. “I was losing her as she was alive,” Stacey recalls. “I remember a few times when I was sick and I wanted to go and be with her, just to lie next to her and feel that comfort. But I couldn’t, because my germs were dangerous to her. I couldn’t go to her to be taken care of, and that hurt a lot. My father died suddenly, and I remember thinking, ‘I wish that I’d known, so I could be by his side.’ And there was my mother and it was the slow process, and I think that was even harder.”

Most therapists agree that sudden death is more difficult in the short term, because all major family adjustments have to take place while shock and disbelief still fill the house. A death that’s anticipated—provided the facts are out in the open and discussed, which they often are not—permits families to prepare gradually for the loss. Thirty-two-year-old Samantha, who was fourteen when her mother died after a two-year illness, remembers how her mother tried to prepare her five children for coping without her. “She knew she was
going to die, so she did certain things she thought were important from her frame of reference,” Samantha recalls. “Like, ‘How is this household going to function when I’m not here? Who’s going to clean the house? Who’s going to cook?’ She used that period of time to pull us all together and teach us how to do those things. She never said, ‘I’m going to teach all of you how to cook,’ but she was doing it from her bed. We all took turns making dinner, and each day she would explain how to cook that night’s meal. We would run back and forth between the kitchen and her bedroom to write down the recipe and get verification. So we were being taught without even knowing it.” After her mother died, Samantha and her four siblings ran the house without much turmoil, which she says helped them feel competent and self-assured, both as children and, later, as adults.

Long-term illness also allows a family time for anticipatory grieving, in which mourning begins before the mother dies. When a daughter knows what the outcome of her mother’s illness will be, she has time to adjust to the idea piece by piece, relinquishing one hope and expectation at a time.

As twenty-eight-year-old Beth discovered, anticipatory mourning is possible to an extent, but it’s rarely a complete process. She was twenty-four when her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and had almost two years to adjust to the idea that her mother would die. “My father says he mourned while she was sick,” Beth says. “But for me it was different. Yeah, we all cried and grieved while our mother was dying, but when it was over and she was never coming back, I really fell apart.” This kind of response is normal, says Benjamin Garber, who believes that even with time to prepare for a loss, you can’t really experience a death until it happens. “You can anticipate it, and sure, it’s easier if you’re not immediately overwhelmed, as is the case with a violent death,” he explains. “But in the long run, preparation for the loss doesn’t carry that much weight. As long as the person is right there talking and laughing and crying with you, then they’re alive. That’s all there is to it.”

This is true when the mother is still vital and functional, but in the advanced stages of many illnesses, a patient often is in severe pain, if she is conscious at all. In such a situation, long periods of anticipatory grieving are often complicated by a daughter’s resentment
that her life is on hold and—even more troubling to her—her unexpressed wish for her mother to finally die.

“Particularly when the patient is extremely ill, and especially with teenagers, who want to be out individuating and spending social time with their friends, at some level daughters will just wish for it all to be over,” Arlene Englander says. “Which means they wish their mothers would die, because they want their lives to get back to normal, and then they experience tremendous guilt for even thinking that.”

“Women need to recognize that in times of great stress, such extreme thoughts are normal,” she says. “It’s a very human impulse to want to live your life in a happy, healthy, productive way, and it’s a terribly stressful experience to watch someone you love in pain and know she’s not enjoying life herself. When we wish a loved one would die not only so that she’s out of her pain but also because we want our lives to continue as normally as possible, it’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply human.”

Beth and her sister, Cecile, remember grieving throughout the twenty-one months their mother was ill. Sort of. In their family, the word
cancer
was viewed as a synonym for
death.
No one ever spoke the word after the diagnosis or discussed the poor prognosis. Even as the sisters watched their mother’s health decline and knew what the inevitable outcome would be, they tried to hide their fear from their parents, who insisted on modeling optimism and hope. So the sisters would cry in the car on the way to their parents’ house, smile and pretend to be happy during their visit, and then cry again in the car on their way home. To share their grief openly, they believed, would have been more disruptive to the family system.

Today, Cecile understands how harmful those twenty-one months were to her. She leans forward, her chin-length hair swinging against her face. “It took a long time for me to get used to not living like that anymore,” she says softly. “I was so used to putting on that kind of show, and living at a heightened state of urgency, and panicking every time the phone rang. I couldn’t grieve until about six months ago, way after the first year, and it wasn’t until things felt somewhat normal again. And then I realized that I was really angry at my mother for never talking about it, and for making me go through such a show. That one realization just made all the difference
to me. It happened like this”—she snaps her fingers—“but to get to that point took me more than a year.”

Witnessing a mother’s slow physical decline can be the equivalent of experiencing a long-term trauma . The daughter’s feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear persist. And persist. And persist. She may alternate between wanting to protect her mother and resenting her, an advance-and-retreat dance of identification and rejection that can span years.

Holly, twenty-six, was twelve and the youngest of three children when her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and fifteen when she died. The only time during our two-and-a-half-hour interview when she came close to crying was when she talked about an incident she says represents her mother’s struggle with a disease that refused to go into remission, and her own frustration and anger as an adolescent who couldn’t do anything to change it.

The mother who returned home from chemotherapy treatments was not the same mother Holly had emulated for her first twelve years. To an adolescent, this new mother appeared helpless and weak. The side effects of chemotherapy—nausea, vomiting, hair loss, and weight loss or gain—as well as the final stages of AIDS and other degenerative diseases can turn a mother who was once vibrant into a figure a daughter finds frightening or repulsive. In a culture that places a premium on a woman’s physical beauty, the ill mother is seen as an aesthetic deviant. The daughter, by association, feels inadequate and ashamed.