Motherless Daughters
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Synopsis:
Ask any woman whose mother has died and she will tell you that she is irrevocably altered, as profoundly changed by her mother's death as she was by her mother's life. And although a mother's mortality is as inevitable as nightfall, no other book has addressed the lasting effects of this incalculable loss. First published more than a decade ago and now available in this updated edition, Motherless Daughters is still the book that women of all ages look to for understanding and comfort when their mothers die, and it is the book that they continue to press into each other's hands.
Building on interviews with hundreds of mother-loss survivors, this life-affirming book is newly expanded to reflect the author's personal experience with the continued legacy of mother loss. Now married and a mother of young children herself, Hope Edelman better understands how the effects of mother loss change over time and in light of new relationships.
Book Excerpt:
Chapter One
The Seasons of Grieving
Mourning Takes Time
MY MOTHER DIED IN THE MIDDLE of summer, with everything in full bloom. It had been sixteen months since the afternoon she returned from the doctor’s office with the news of a malignancy in her breast, sixteen months of chemotherapy and CAT scans and desperate attempts to hang on to the little rituals that announced a normal day. We still took our orange juice and vitamins together in the morning, but then she swallowed the white, oval pills that were supposed to stop the cancer’s spread. After school I would drive her across town for her oncology appointments, and on the way home, in the car, she promised me she would live. Because I wanted so badly to believe her, I did, even as I watched her lose her hair, then her dignity, and finally her hope. The end came quickly, and we all were unprepared. On July 1 she was sunning herself in the backyard; before dawn on the twelfth, she was gone.
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.
Topics/Categories:
Adolescence, Death, early parent loss, Grief, Illness, Loss, Motherless women, Mothers and Daughters, Nonfiction, orphan archetype, Psychology, Relationships, Self-Help, Women’s Interests
Genre:
Adolescence, Biography and Memoir, Family - Relationships, Healing, Motherhood, Self-Help, Women's Studies - Interest, Young Adult Non-Fiction
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Awards:
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
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Original Publish Date:
June 26, 2009
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