Motherless Daughters (17 page)

The violence or mutilation often involved in sudden deaths such as suicides, homicides, and accidents may consume a daughter’s thoughts, even invading her dreams, and often takes on elements more horrific in imagination than they were in reality. Children who
witnessed or were physically involved in the death have another layer of distress added to their loss. Janine, thirty-nine, has no conscious memories of the automobile crash that killed her mother when she was twenty-one months old, even though she was sitting in the back seat. “But after I went off to college, I started to dream about the accident,” she says. “I still don’t know whether or not my images were real or just my imagination. I know some of it was fabrication, but I think I was having those dreams to try to live it, remember it, and put it to rest. I would dream I was in the front seat, and I would have feelings of suffocation and see red. I would imagine that my mother covered me with her body to protect me, and that’s why I felt suffocated. Of course, that’s not what happened, but I wanted her to have protected me. Then, in waking hours, when I would hear sirens or hear flashing lights, I would start to shake and get scared. I think it was sort of my way of saying, ‘You deserve some attention around this stuff.’”

Janine’s response may also have been a delayed form of posttraumatic stress disorder, a syndrome that often afflicts accident survivors. Lenore Terr, M.D., a specialist on childhood trauma who studied the twenty-six children involved in the 1976 Chowchilla, California, school-bus kidnapping, found that terror, rage, denial, shame, guilt, misperceptions of the event both as it occurred and in memory; a sense of futurelessness; and recurring dreams were evidence of posttraumatic behavior. She found that many of the children’s posttraumatic fears remained literal, specific, and related to the kidnapping, such as the fear of vans (like the ones used by their kidnappers) and school buses (like the one that was hijacked). They also feared actions they associated with the initial trauma, such as slowing down on a road. Some of these fears, she discovered, lingered well into the children’s adulthood. The psychologist Lula Redmond observed similar characteristics in hundreds of family members who’d lost loved ones to homicide. Even when they hadn’t witnessed the death, children and adults nevertheless experienced nightmares, flashbacks, eating and sleeping disturbances, fear of strangers, irritability, and angry outbursts immediately following the murder, with some symptoms persisting for as long as five years.

In the aftermath of a homicide, blame, anger, fear, and fantasies of revenge often surge to the surface of a survivor’s psyche. The intensity of her responses may frighten a child, making her question her own stability and sanity. These emotions are further complicated when the child witnesses the murder or knows the aggressor. In 43 percent of all homicides in 2003, the victims knew their assailants, and more than 30 percent of all female victims were slain by husbands or boyfriends. Children of those women often lost two parents: one to death, the other to arrest or incarceration. One need look no farther than the night of Nicole Brown Simpson’s death in 1994, when her children sat in a police station for five hours, refusing candy, wondering why neither of their parents came for them, to imagine how terrifying such a scenario must be.

Because homicides are sometimes random and always violent, they leave survivors feeling particularly vulnerable and helpless. Children whose parents die this way may later need to collect as much information about the murder as possible, as horrific as some of those facts may be. Trying to find meaning and assigning blame act as important attempts to restore control, predictability, and justice in a daughter’s world.

Twenty-two-year-old Laura was nineteen when her mother was stalked, shot, and killed by an ex-boyfriend. When the case came to trial the following year, Laura decided to attend.

By identifying with her mother this way, Laura could experience some of the intense emotion she’s just starting to work through in counseling today. Such delayed or protracted grief responses are often found among children who lose mothers to homicide. Counselors at the Dougy Center for Grieving Children in Portland, Oregon, have found that children who have lost a loved one to murder often say their feelings were “put on hold” until an investigation or trial ended, until the shock started to wear off, or because of confusion surrounding the facts. When police officers, journalists, lawyers, and judges typically become involved after a homicide, pertinent information about the death may be withheld pending trial. Many times, even when details are out in the open, kids aren’t told what has happened and are left to piece the story together on their own.

Furthermore, homicides, along with acts of terrorism and natural disasters, bring a family’s intensely private grief into the public eye, an experience that can both help and hinder a child’s recovery. Perhaps nowhere has this been more evident than among the nearly 3,000 children under the age of eighteen who lost parents in the attacks of September 11, 2001, about 340 of whom lost mothers, and the more than 200 children who lost a parent in the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing in 1995. News coverage and a period of national mourning can initially offer a sense of community and validation, but when the cameras stop rolling and the country moves on, the grief can be brutally isolating and intense.

Annual memorials, meant to commemorate the deceased, often serve to reactivate survivors’ grief. For the “9/11 kids,” as they’re called, every September now brings a flood of reminders—television specials, classroom discussions, magazine photos—of the horrific circumstances of their parents’ deaths. The annual publicity can interfere with a child’s ability to separate good memories of the parent from the tragic scene of his or her death, which is an important goal of mourning.

Children who lost parents in Oklahoma City and on September 11 have the difficult task of recovering from what’s known as “traumatic bereavement,” the devastating intersection of trauma and loss. Traumatic bereavement is likely to result when a death is sudden and unanticipated; when it involves violence, mutilation, or
destruction; when it has an element of preventability and/or randomness; and when it involves massive or shocking multiple deaths. Survivors must contend with the dual demands of posttraumatic stress and grieving—an experience, Therese Rando explains, that’s much larger than the sum of its parts.

Conversely, the national attention focused on traumatic bereavement after the September 11 attacks gave some motherless daughters a public forum for discussing their losses for the first time. Thirty-seven-year-old Beatrice, who was eleven when her mother died in a commercial airline crash, always felt marginalized as a griever because of the dramatic and unusual circumstances of her mother’s death. Shortly after September 11, she was standing with a group of commuters at a train station discussing the horror of the attacks. “I said to someone, ‘I remember what it felt like when someone drove my mother’s car home from the airport, and how that was when I realized she was never coming back,’” she recalls. “I was never able to say something like that before in the course of conversation. September 11 normalized my experience somewhat. It made it seem less bizarre.”

Daughters who lose mothers to forms of sudden death often believe they could have prevented the tragedy
if only they had been there, delayed her, apologized in time.
Daughters may imagine themselves as key cause-and-effect players in events otherwise too arbitrary to comprehend. “Why hadn’t I heard her walk down the stairs?” wonders Alice, the 15-year-old narrator of Leslie Pietrzyk’s 2004 novel
A Year and a Day,
who loses a mother to suicide. “Why hadn’t I kissed her when I went to bed? I didn’t even have a bad dream that night; I didn’t get up for a glass of water. I went to bed and slept through the night like everything would be exactly the same in the morning. Why didn’t Mama come into my room and wake me up? I would have said something. One word might have been enough.”

This phenomenon is prevalent enough to be called the “if only” syndrome: “If only I’d asked my mother one more question before she walked out the door, she wouldn’t have been crossing the intersection at that precise moment” is the type of statement that allows a daughter to blame herself and impose a sense of order and control on an otherwise unpredictable world.

Sheila, who was fourteen when she found her mother dead from a heart attack one morning, says it took her more than ten years and several maturational phases to stop blaming herself for the death.

Many daughters who lost a mother to sudden death say the experience guided them into a new state of awareness. Having learned that life can end at any moment, they become determined to appreciate each moment for its beauty. They make sure they say “I love you” to
their husbands and children before saying goodbye, just in case they never see them again. And in their attempt to attach a meaning to the loss, some of these women choose to view it as a necessary step in their personal journey. As twenty-five-year-old Heather, who was fourteen when her mother was murdered, explains:

The mother who abandons her daughter leaves a pile of questions behind: Who was she? Who is she? Where is she? Why did she leave? Like the child whose mother dies, the abandoned daughter lives with a loss, but she also struggles with the knowledge that her mother is alive yet inaccessible and out of touch. Death has a finality to it that abandonment simply does not.

A daughter whose mother chose to leave her or was incapable of mothering may feel like a member of the emotional underclass, like a dispensable part of society whose needs the government has ignored. As a result, she often develops a sense of devaluation and unworthiness even more profound than that of the daughter whose mother has died.

“Loss by death, as hard as that is, doesn’t imply a rejection,” explains Gina Mireault, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Johnson State University in Johnson, Vermont, who was three when her own mother died. “Daughters whose mothers walk away are at much greater risk, psychologically, than women whose mothers die.
Because at some point, if your mother died, you can say, ‘I know she didn’t want to leave. She didn’t choose to die. This was an illness or an event she couldn’t control.’ But kids whose parents do choose to leave are left with this baggage of, ‘What could I have done? I must not have been good enough as a kid. I wasn’t loveable enough. I must have made her so miserable that she wanted to leave.’ And that’s a harder pill to swallow.”

Whether a mother leaves physically or emotionally, the result is invariably a blow to her daughter’s self-esteem. Judith Mishne, in her article “Parental Abandonment: A Unique Form of Loss and Narcissistic Injury,” explains that abandoned children may suffer from lack of empathy, depression, feelings of emptiness, delinquency, addictions, uncontrolled rage, pathological lying, hypochondriacal preoccupations, and grandiose fantasies of the self. These children often have trouble mourning a lost parent, she says, because they have difficulty letting go of the image of an idealized mother they hope will one day return—either in person or in spirit.