Motherless Daughters (2 of 4 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. Copyright 2006 by Hope Edelman
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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INTRODUCTION (CONT'D)

When a mother dies, a daughter's mourning never completely ends. This is something motherless women have always intuitively known, though in 1994 it wasn't yet a widely accepted idea. Twelve years ago, the general public still held fast to the notion that grief had to follow a set, predictable series of stages or else it was progressing wrong. Mourning was (and sometimes still is) treated as something that had to be fixed or overcome, not as a lifelong process of accommodation and acceptance. The idea that mourning might be cyclical, sloppy, and erratic was still considered novel to those who weren't already part of the bereavement community itself.

When my mother died in 1981, our town offered no support services for grieving families. We didn't yet have a local hospice, just a well-meaning hospital social worker whose officious manner I found so offputting that I ducked into the nurse's lounge whenever I saw her coming down the hall. After the funeral, my father attended a Parents Without Partners meeting, our New York suburb's single nod to the single parent, only to find himself the only widower, and the only man, in a room full of women left partner-less by divorce. He never went back. As for children's bereavement programs, they were still years away from reaching our county. The Dougy Center for Grieving Children, the grandmother of children's bereavement programs in the United States, wouldn't open its doors in Portland, Oregon for another year, and it would take another six or seven years for its influence to reach the East Coast. Until then, families were essentially left to muddle along on their own.

By the time Motherless Daughters was released in 1994, this situation had improved a great deal. By then, The Dougy Center had been training facilitators in other states for seven years; a number of weekend camps for children who'd lost loved ones had launched; and hospice had become an international movement. We had developed a much better sense, as a culture, of what grieving children needed, and better means for providing it.

While all this was undeniably helpful for families in the midst of losing mothers, it was somewhat less useful for readers of Motherless Daughters, whose losses had occurred ten, twenty, and in some cases forty years in the past. These women had grown up surrounded by more rigid ideas about bereavement. Most had been discouraged from ever talking about the loss. Many years later, they were still experiencing residual effects of loss--not only as a result of the death, but also from their families' and communities' responses (or nonresponses) to their needs.

As adults who'd experienced loss as children, they didn't yet have a niche in the bereavement support field. They'd call local hospices, looking for support groups, only to be told they didn't qualify because their loss had occurred too long ago. Or they'd join bereavement groups, to discover that everyone else was in the acute phase of a recent loss. Other group members couldn't relate to, and became deeply troubled by, the idea that a daughter could still be mourning a mother a decade or more after she'd died.

Fortunately, quite a lot has changed since then, too.

Motherless Daughters groups, dedicated to bringing support and services to girls and women whose mothers have died, now exist in more than a dozen locations, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, all run by volunteers. Two nonprofit organizations have incorporated: Motherless Daughters of Orange County, in Irvine, California, and Circle of Daughters outside Buffalo, New York. The Internet has also become a significant form of support, connecting thousands of motherless women through message boards and chat rooms worldwide. Online memorials for mothers who've died have become so pervasive that a group of psychologists even conducted a research analysis of the phenomenon. Expansion within the children's bereavement community over the past twelve years has been equally as exponential. The Dougy Center Web site now lists more than 370 children's grief centers in the United States and seven other countries.
There's also a National Alliance for Grieving Children forming to help educate and provide resources for grieving children, families, and bereavement professionals throughout the United States.

The highly publicized deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1996 and Princess Diana in 1997 also focused the country's attention on maternal death, and on the well-being of the children left behind. As Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., a bereavement expert and the author of Never Too Young to Know, has written, the whole "death system" in the United States is changing as the culture becomes ready to hear about dying and mourning, due in large part to television and print media coverage of loss events. One need only remember the outpouring of televised, national grief after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the newspaper memorials printed for each victim, to understand the effect the media has on the culture of grief.

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