Motherless Daughters (4 page)

My mother was forty-two when she died, just past what should have been the midpoint of her life. I had just turned seventeen. My sister was fourteen, my brother nine, and our father was left with little idea about how to manage the three of us and his own grief. Before cancer reduced us to four, I’d always thought of us as the most typical suburban family in New York: a father who commuted to a job in the city, a mother who stayed home with the kids, a house in a carefully manicured subdivision, a dog, a cat, two cars, three TVs. Tragedy was supposed to pass over a home such as ours, not burst through its door.

Like most other families that lose a mother, mine coped as best it could; which meant, essentially, that we avoided all discussion of the loss and pretended to pick up exactly where we’d left off. We
were not an expressive family to begin with, and we had little idea about how to mourn. We had no friends or relatives who’d been through a similar experience, no blueprint for action, no built-in support. During that first year we continued with the routines of schoolwork, vacations, and bimonthly haircuts as if a central family member were so dispensable that her absence required only a minor reshuffling of household chores. Anger, guilt, sadness, grief—we suppressed all emotions, letting them shoot out like brief bullets only when we couldn’t contain them any more.

When I left home to attend college in the fall of 1982, I headed to the Midwest with a desire to become a journalist and a conviction to experience life as my mother had never done. She had graduated from college in 1960 with a degree in music and a diamond ring, and her domain had quickly become a split-level suburban ranch home. Mine, I decided, would be the world. In the years following her death, I criss-crossed the country in my car, studied Kafka and de Beauvoir, dated men of varied ethnic backgrounds, and backpacked across Europe alone. But wherever I traveled, I carried within me a sadness I couldn’t leave behind, no matter how forcefully I tried. Someone dies, you cry, and then you move on: This was no mystery to me. Far less clear was how the effects of this loss were likely to appear and reappear throughout the rest of my life.

It would take seven years for me to begin to understand a central rule of grief: The more you avoid mourning, the tighter it sticks to you. The only way to release it is to grit your teeth and feel the pain.

By the time I had figured this out I was several years out of college, working for a magazine in Knoxville, Tennessee. The company had its offices in a twelve-story red brick building, a former hotel where both Hank Williams and Alice Cooper’s boa constrictor were rumored to have spent their final nights. The building was on a main thoroughfare downtown, next to a high-tech, mostly vacant, mostly glass skyscraper built by the notorious Jake Butcher, who was then doing time in jail. I tell you all this because position will be important. In front of the Butcher Building was a traffic light and a crosswalk, which I used when I crossed Gay Street every day.

A perverse sort of history had settled on this block, which may or may not have had something to do with what I experienced there
the autumn after I turned twenty-four. I hadn’t been having a very good year. In May I abruptly ended an engagement to a man I’d deeply loved, and my world turned painfully inside out. I tried to fix it by jumping into bed with another man, who was wise enough to walk out on me by summer’s end. Two weeks later I got caught in the middle of a Southern bar brawl that landed me in the emergency room with a split lip and a bump the size of a golf ball on the crest of my head. Things, you might say, were getting out of control. I was living alone on two acres in a small white house I could barely afford to maintain, and that season, escape was on my mind. I was considering graduate school in Iowa, the Peace Corps, and a vegetarian commune in central Oregon, in no particular order of preference. Worried I would scare away my friends with this litany of woe, I spent most of my time alone on my land with a noncommittal kitten I often turned to for advice. In the evenings when I felt lonely I walked across the street to pick wildflowers and play with my neighbors’ goats and sheep. I’m sure that part sounds idyllic, but the truth is, I was scared. There was no one to take care of me but me, and I didn’t feel up to the job.

By mid-October, I was oversleeping and getting to work late every morning, taking two-hour lunches, and crossing Gay Street several times a day. On this particular afternoon I was returning from the post office, and as I reached the middle of the crosswalk I looked up. A cloud passed just then, and I saw the midday sun bounce sharply off one of the glass panels of the Butcher Building. Or should I say I felt it? Like a size-twelve work boot kicked into my gut I felt it, and I clutched my stomach, unable to breathe. The light turned green and cars started honking; a few drove around me; someone leaned out of a truck window and shouted, “Hey, you! Are you okay?”

I was not okay. I was definitely not okay. All I could think as I stood there holding myself was, “I want my mother. I want my mother. I want my mother,
now.
”

 

From what depths did I dredge up that one? I hadn’t allowed myself to miss my mother once in the seven years since she’d died. Instead, I’d spent that time convincing myself I conveniently didn’t need the one thing I didn’t have, and that my freedom and independence were
an unfortunate but much-cherished outcome of my early loss. With the kind of cocky certainty usually reserved for either the very young or the very naive, I’d decided by twenty-four that I’d already sailed through the five stages of grief so neatly outlined in the pamphlet the hospital social worker pressed into my palm as my mother had lain dying in a room down the hall.

Denial, anger, bargaining, disorganization, acceptance.
It had sounded simple enough to me then, a straightforward five-step ascent to normal life again. The night before my mother died I’d broken down and prayed, asking God to accept a clean trade. Although I’d never seriously thought about dying before, that night I asked to be taken as I slept, in exchange for letting my mother live. I knew the family needed her more. I’d missed out on all the intermediary steps, all the times when I might have prayed
Please God, make my mother well, or I promise I’ll never talk back to her again
because I’d never known she was dying, and now, in these final hours, I believed that only an act of great selflessness could still save her. Sunrise reminded me that such miracles are rare, but I later found small comfort in knowing that the attempt placed me firmly in the bargaining stage, already at midpoint along the emotional ruler of mourning.

Seven years later, I’d reached the point where I no longer cried each time I talked about my mother, and when someone said, “I’m sorry,” after learning about her death, I could finally respond with a deferential smile and a nonadversarial nod. Time had worked its healing magic, as everyone had promised it would. And I’d proven I didn’t need a mother to survive. So I thought I’d done it properly; I thought I’d somehow won. Until that moment in the middle of the crosswalk, which left me wondering how it had all gone so horribly wrong.

Here’s what I’ve learned about grief since then: It’s not linear. It’s not predictable. It’s anything but smooth and self-contained. Someone did us all a grave injustice by first implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end. That’s the stuff of short fiction. It’s not real life.

Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons, like the moon. No one is better created to understand this than a woman, whose bodily existence is marked by a monthly rhythm for more than half her life. For centuries, writers, aware of grief’s organic cadence, also have used
seasonal metaphors to describe a process that continually leads us from the deepest sorrow toward the peak of renewal, and back again.

Mourning works like any series of cycles: One ends and a new one begins, slightly different from its predecessor, but with the same fundamental course. A daughter who loses a mother does pass through stages of denial, anger, confusion, and reorientation, but these responses repeat and circle back on themselves as each new developmental task reawakens her need for the parent. Say a girl of thirteen loses her mother to a heart attack. In the midst of the initial shock and numbness, she grieves to the best of her ability at that time. But five years later, at her high school graduation, she may find herself painfully missing her mother and grieving all over again. Years after this episode she may be back in the mourner’s role again, when she plans her wedding, or gives birth to her first child, or gets diagnosed with a serious illness, or reaches the age at which her mother died. At each milestone a daughter comes up against new challenges that make her long for a mother’s support, but when she reaches out for her, the mother isn’t there. The daughter’s old feelings of loss and abandonment return, and the cycle begins again.

Seven years, as it turns out, wasn’t such a terribly long delay. I’ve since received letters and e-mails from women who say their grief was put on hold for twenty years, thirty years, or more. “Some individuals become conscious of the effects of the loss on them only midway through adulthood,” explains the Israeli psychologist Tamar Granot, the author of
Without You.
“At times, this belated awareness is sparked by a change in their lives, especially in the wake of a crisis during adulthood.” Vacillation over a career choice, difficulties in maintaining a relationship, or problems with one’s own children, she says, can suddenly make a woman aware of the connection between her present-day behavior and the trauma she experienced as a child.

We’re an impatient culture, accustomed to gratifying most of our needs quickly. But mourning requires a certain resignation to the forces of time. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s
Five Stages of Grief,
so popular as a bereavement model in the 1980s and 1990s, were originally developed for terminally ill patients receiving news of their grim diagnoses, not for the family members they would leave behind. (One grief counseling Web site now suggests renaming them “The Five
Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News” and ditching them as a bereavement model because they’ve done mourners more harm than good.) I prefer J. William Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning: accepting the loss (task I); dealing with the reality of the loss (task II); adjusting to the new environment (task III); and emotionally relocating the lost loved one (task IV). But truly, I’ve found there are really only two stages of grief that matter: the one in which you feel really, really bad, followed by the one in which you feel better. The transition from one to the other is bound to be slow, sloppy, and emotional, and neither has hard-and-fast rules.

Expecting grief to run a quick, predictable course has led us to overpathologize the process, making us think of it as something that, with proper treatment, can and should be “fixed.” As a result, we begin to view normal responses as indicators of serious distress. The woman who cries every Christmas when she thinks of her mother—is she really a woman who can’t let go of the past, or just a woman who continues to miss her mother’s warmth and cheer at holiday time? And who can count the number of friends and coworkers who expected our mourning to be contained within the confines of those magical six-month or one-year bookends? How many of us came to expect that of ourselves? The messages that so frequently leaked through other people’s words as the summer of my mother’s death melted into autumn and the snow began to fall became exactly the ones I used to criticize myself:
It’s been six months already. Get on with your life. Get over it.
I tried. I really tried. But it’s impossible to undo fifteen or twenty years of learned behavior with a mother in only a few months’ time. If it takes nine months to bring a life into this world, what makes us think we can let go of someone in less?

Psychologists debated for decades whether or not children and adolescents have the capacity to mourn the death of a loved one. Unlike adults, who invest emotion in several different people they can depend on—spouses, lovers, children, close friends, and themselves—kids typically direct it all toward one or both parents. When a
daughter says, “My mother’s early death completely pulled the rug out from under me,” she’s not exaggerating.

Most bereavement specialists now agree that fully adapting to the loss of a parent requires elements most young children don’t have: a mature understanding of death; the language and encouragement to talk about their feelings; the awareness that intense pain doesn’t last forever; and the ability to shift their emotional dependence from the lost parent back to the self before attaching to someone else. These capacities develop and accumulate as a child grows, like a train that picks up a new passenger at each stop, and she may have very few riders at the time a parent dies.

This doesn’t mean children can’t mourn at all; they just do it differently than adults. Their process is more protracted, extending over the course of their development as their cognitive and emotional abilities mature. A five-year-old who believes death is an extended form of sleep may, in her eleventh year, finally understand that death means her mother is never coming back. She’ll then have to work through the sadness and anger that arise with this new realization, even though she’s six years past the actual loss.

The best example of this process I’ve come across is a story from twenty-year-old Jennifer, who was four when her mother committed suicide. As a young child, Jennifer knew only the most basic facts about the death. Still, she couldn’t fully understand their implication until she became cognitively able and emotionally ready to process the truth.

“My mother died in the garage, from carbon monoxide poisoning,” she explains. “For a long time, I thought the gas cap had fallen off the car and that she had died from that. It was totally ridiculous, but it was the story I had in my head. Years later, when I was in junior high, I finally realized she had done it on purpose. I was telling the story to someone and right in the middle of it I thought, ‘That’s pretty stupid. Why would the gas cap just fall off like that?’” Nearly ten years after her mother’s death, Jennifer began a new cycle of grieving, for news she says she is still trying to reconcile.