- Adrienne Rich, Of Women Born
This legacy of loss became mine at the age of fourteen, when my mother, having been sick for many years, died suddenly of a stroke, caused by Lupus, at the age of 44. Since then, I have been priveleged to meet many other women who know this pain and understand the difficulties a girl faces when she is forced to grow up without a mother. I know women who lost their mother due to death when they were only toddlers, to women who lost their mother due to emotional absence and abandonment. Whatever the scenerio maybe, we all carry that loss, but it is up to us to take that loss and make it mold us into survivors.
Through talking with many women I have noticed that we all share the same description of the intial loss; it feels as though there is a hole in our chests that can never be filled. Some women try to fill that gap with tempoary fixes, such as drugs, alcohol, sex, or any other addictive thing. As I've discovered, the hole never really goes away, but the presence of it lessens some with every passing day. Of course, like all losses, the "hole in the chest" maybe torn open again when the daughter is confronted with another loss. Recently, I experienced this phenomenon when my aunt (my mother's older sister) suddenly died of a stroke at the age of 54. Though my aunt lived in a different state and was not a daily fixture in my life, her death has stirred up many of the past feelings and memories I had from losing my mother. It also uncovered the hole in my chest, making me keenly aware that it was still there. Naturally, other things can cause these feelings to resurface again. Maybe it's a change in jobs, a special occasion, a failure, or a holiday that causes grief to rear it's ugly head. I know every year there are three incredibly difficult days for me; the day my mother died (November 2nd), my mother's birthday (November 11), and Mother's Day. It's during these times that I would like to find a nice, dark cave somewhere to curl up and be by myself. Unfortunatly, this never happens and I am forced to go on with the day like we all are when we hit an anniversary.
My heart goes out to all the young girls who have lost their mother due to any circumstance. It is so hard to make up for what we lose when we do not have our mothers to teach us. It's always the subtleties that we miss, like how to remove specific stains from clothes, what make-up to wear for what occasion, how to make a drab outfit look better, and many, many other things. My personal favorite was trying to figure out how to iron a blouse and a pair of slacks. I think that the blouse had more wrinkles in it after I was finished than it had when I began. I love how Hope Edleman, in her book Motherless Daughters, describes how she would try to use some of her mothers accessories to help make an old, drab outfit look snazzy or more professional, but would be unable to use it because she wasn't sure what to do with it all.
To close, I would like to mention how, thought sometimes we feel like we are a square peg in a round hole in this world of mothered women, we also must realize what we carry through us. Through us shines the glimmer of hope for girls or women facing the loss of their mother that we survived and they will too. We take our "legacy of loss" and make it our "destiny of remembrance". There is a Native American tribe that believes if your loved one dies, they only die to our world, for their spirit lives on through those who remember. So, as long as someone remembers, then they shall live on.
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