Today I’m posting a link as well as the original text of this piece my mother and I wrote in 2011. I encourage you to read the comments there. The comments have continued to come in on this one, especially during the recent holidays.
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http://lisabadams.com/2011/05/25/when-daughters-grieve-the-death-of-their-mothers/
One reader wrote:
My mom passed away six years ago, when I was 24, after a five-year battle with cancer. I’m getting married in a few months and I’m finding two things difficult: 1) going through a big life change, and the actual planning of the event, is making her loss feel much more at the forefront than I expected; 2) I’m struggling with marrying someone who didn’t know my mother and doesn’t understand (and honestly, not sure how he can, not being there) my grief.
My questions are: how do you help the new people in your life know the person you lost and understand the depth of your grief? And how do you deal with the new kind of grief that comes with entering a new phase of life?
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My mother, Dr. Rita Bonchek, spent her career as a psychologist specializing in grief, loss, death, and dying. She had some thoughts on the subject. I decided to add my own take on it; that perspective appears after hers.
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Dr. Rita Bonchek writes:
In American society, the topic of death causes great discomfort so people do not think about or discuss the subject. When the death of a loved one occurs, the bereaved are often encouraged to put the occurrence in the past. Freud felt that the mourner needed to ” let go” in order to move on. However, when Freud experienced the death of his favorite grand-child, he often expressed with great sadness that he would never get over the loss.
What is not appreciated about the death of a loved one is that “Death ends a life but it doesn’t end a relationship that lives on in the mind of the survivor.” Some studies have shown that mourners hold onto the relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects.
A childhood death of a parent can be a devastating event. How the child grieves is extremely individual and based on the child’s age when the parent died, the cause of the loss, the quality of the parent-child relationship prior to the death, and the support system available both at the time of the loss and afterwards. If a surviving parent removes all items and pictures of the deceased and does not talk about him or her, the child is denied the grieving process. The secrecy and the inability to have a shared grieving between the child and family that shares the loss is a travesty.
The mourning for a mother never really ends. Even after many years while there may not be active grieving, there are what one child called “mommy-missing feelings.” And what does a mother provide for a daughter: support, advice, a significant person who can help and validate the child during development. No one else is so uniquely important to the child as a mother who helps her to form an image of herself. With this self-image, a daughter is helped to determine how to interact with the world and the people in this world. A daughter’s feelings, thoughts, hopes, desires and attitudes are influenced by a mother. But this mother does not have to be the mother who existed in real life but who is a mother who exists in the daughter’s heart and mind. This is a mother who is carried within a daughter forever.
When a mother-daughter relationship has been strong and positive, a mother loves a child in a very intense and special way. A daughter will miss a mother’s protectiveness, loyalty, encouragement, praise, warmth, and, as the daughter becomes a woman, an adult-to-adult friendship. There are special times in the developing daughter’s life in which the absence of a loving person is painful: graduation, confirmation, Bar/Bas Mitzvah, a wedding celebration, the birth of a child, etc. This is when the wound is re-opened.
Who the daughter was when her mother died is not who she was after the painful event. Every death of a loved one changes us and causes us to re-grieve the loss of other loved ones. Hope Edelman, in her book Motherless Daughters encourages women to acknowledge, understand and learn from the changes that occurred as a result of the early loss of a mother. It can take years. With reflection and understanding of what was lost when her mother died, a daughter can, with greater sensitivity, become her own role model as she creates a strong family and friend network of her own.
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I had the following additional thoughts:
Even though the death was six years ago, it happened to you at a time before marriage and/or motherhood. While not relevant to all women, these are often defining events in their lives. While you had your mother for your childhood, oftentimes daughters do not fully appreciate their mothers until they become wives and mothers themselves. When you no longer have a mother to admit “now I understand what you meant” or “I’m sorry for how I behaved as a child” it can feel that there is unresolved business at hand. Not being able to ask, “Is this how you felt on your wedding day?” or “What was your day like?” is difficult.
Of course, a wedding is one of these events that is tied to family. How can you possibly explain the ways in which these occasions make you miss your mother? As my mom said, it’s not just the relationship you had that you grieve, it’s the relationship you could be having now. There is no way to fill that void, no one can fill that space. I think that incorporating your mother and her memory into your ceremony may provide a way for her to be remembered and present during your wedding. Because your fiance did not know her, he will not miss her in this event. You will, however, as some of the guests at your wedding will too.
It’s a common misconception that talking about your mother or acknowledging her absence will “make people sad.” On the contrary, I believe that talking about her and her absence is appropriate. One way I think this is appropriate is to mention her in the wedding program and/or light a candle during a portion of the ceremony that names those who are “special to us but not here to share this day.” I have seen an acknowledgement of special friends and family who are deceased but remembered on this special day. A paragraph, properly worded, could mention your mother’s role in raising you, making you who you are today, and how you wish she were here to share this occasion. Similarly, wearing a piece of her jewelry or clothing (like a veil) or carrying her favorite flower in your bouquet might help you feel closer to her on the actual day.
Grief sneaks up on you when you least expect it; the reflexive reach for the phone is a hard habit to break. Both happy and sad events can make you miss loved ones. Every little thing reminds you of your loved one, the things you did and the things you had yet to do. You grieve the relationship you lost and the one you had yet to build. The relationship was truncated, and that cannot be fully appreciated by someone who has not experienced it.
I don’t know if you have shared a lot about your mother with your fiance, but I think it’s important to do so before you get married. I think it’s important to write about her and talk about her with him. He’ll never be able to understand fully, and he’ll never miss her since he didn’t know her as you did. But he does need to understand how important she is to you now even though she’s no longer alive. That may not be intuitive– although your mother died six years ago she is still a very important part of your life.
It’s important to say that not all of the memories surrounding your wedding would necessarily be happy; after all, weddings can be prime opportunities for mothers and daughters to clash. However, the pivotal moments of walking down the aisle, first dance, photographs, and so on can be especially difficult.
Sometimes when we grieve we don’t know exactly what we need, and in the end, no one can provide the “fix” for us — that could only happen if our loved one came back. Realizing that you don’t really know what you need all the time as you go through this is important, too. Something your fiance says might be incredibly aggravating one minute (a reminder that “he just doesn’t understand”) but other times the same thing may strike you as supportive. He’s in a tough situation because he’s trying to support the woman he loves on a day that is supposed to be one of the happiest days of your lives together. However, it has a component of pain involved for you. He needs to accept that dialectic and not try to gloss over or erase the pain that will accompany all of the happy days you will have together. He needs to know that grief will be a part of every happy event you will have in the future because your mother is not there to share it. The sooner he can accept that truth, the better it will be for both of you, I think.
I hope that some of these thoughts will help you in the months leading up to your wedding and that you can find a way to incorporate your mother’s memory into your ceremony. I know she will be in your heart and on your mind.
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Thank you, Lisa, for posting this. I lost my mother 7 months ago to Breast Cancer and am getting married this coming June. It helps to know that there are others out there who understand why this has compounded the grief.
Thanks, Lisa. I lost my mom 11 years ago and I’m still sad
. In Feb 2012, I lost my dad during the same year my son was having his bar mitzvah. My dad was the person most looking forward to the ceremony. It was very difficult, but we continued as planned. We remembered him in the program and put a framed picture up of him with our son in the foyer of the temple. It was beautiful and was easier than I thought to talk about it during the service, mostly – I think – because I was surrounded by a lot of people. It’s always much harder when you’re alone. Thanks for posting this. I wish you all the best. I don’t know you but follow you on twitter. I always look forward to reading your posts. Thank you for sharing.
I loved this piece the first time you posted it, and I love it more now. I’ve thought a lot about this subject because I actually had the opposite experience of the “strong and positive” one your mom describes. Only a few friends knew about this as it unfolded for me, and I have never spoken (or written) of it publicly before. My mom had serious postpartum depression when I was born, was not maternal, and had a profoundly difficult childhood she kept from her four children. I was in my 40s when my dad, with whom I had a close and loving relationship, but who was often gone for work, died. It was then I finally “met” my mom, after the loving buffer provided by my dad was gone. It was difficult to face the reality of who my mom was and had been in my life, particularly since she was such a wonderful person in so many ways: she kept a “perfect” home with wonderful meals, books everywhere, stories and poetry read, the history of places we traveled to read to us aloud, crisp sheets, hung to dry on the line, ironed, and folded into a linen closet filled with lavender sachets; she was smart, well-educated, well-read, refined, funny, caring and informed about the world. It felt indescribably terrible to realize she had not felt love for me as an infant and as a child. I am lucky, that through much hard work on my part, which she responded to, at first with great difficulty, but also with great strength, acknowledgement, regret, and love, that we now have a particularly loving relationship, and are close friends. There is a psychological concept that states that surviving a negative parent can make us stronger; that is true for me. My mom’s incapabilities, that came from her own past, and how that affected her ability to respond to a child with my particular temperament at a particular time in her life, have had some adverse effects on my life, but have also made me both a stronger, and, I hope, a more compassionate person. My mom is 91 years old now—I had atypically older parents—and her sharp mind has recently been adversely affected by an illness that caused a lack of oxygen to her brain. I know I am now beginning the process of losing the woman I have only fully found in the last 12 years of our lives. I told her on the phone recently how much I will miss our talks when she dies—she and my dad always gave their children the gift of calling death by its name, speaking honestly about it as a part of life, and preparing for it—and she said in a voice filled with honest emotion and gratitude, how much she loves me and will miss me. As she is losing her mental capacity, which grieves me deeply, I also know I now have her love forever, and that is a priceless gift. It is a gift to me from you that you reposted this particular piece on my birthday, a day that my mom and I reminisced about yesterday. So, thank you. xo
Particularly poignant for me as I move into the unknown beside my mom, terrified of what is ahead. I want to be hopeful. I’m following her lead right now but I remain realistic. Many decisions will be made in the next several days as more info is available. I’m grieving what she may have to face (or what she may choose not to face). Thank you, Lisa for your support.