Motherless Daughters With Hope Edelman

"Soldier on" was Hope Edelman's coping method for the sudden death of her mother until seven years later, a broken engagement brought her mother's death roaring to the surface. Hope started writing her New York Times Bestseller Motherless Daughters as a way to comprehend her loss and connect with other motherless daughters. We're talking about how death makes us crave clarity, why it's so important to "add the middle" to our stories, and what other cultures have to teach us about grief.

Transcript

Grief Growers,

I am so wonderfully thrilled to introduce you to Hope Edelman because I read her book Motherless Daughters.

It was probably one of the first 10 books that I ever read about grief after the death of my mother,

And it was so big and so comprehensive and so relatable instantly that I knew one day I had to have the author on coming back to speak with all of you,

Especially because I know that so many of you listening have lost your mothers as well.

So Hope,

Welcome to the show and we'll start where we start all of our interviews with your lost story.

Sure,

Thank you Shelby so much for having me on.

I really appreciate it.

Well,

I was 17 years old when my mom died,

But I need to back up about a year and a half to her diagnosis with breast cancer when I was 15.

She was diagnosed quite late.

Kids in the family didn't know it.

I was the oldest of three.

I mean,

We knew she had cancer,

Of course,

And we knew she had surgery,

But we thought she was getting better for 16 months until at the very end,

We were told that she was going into the hospital and was unlikely to return.

So that was a bit of a shock to say the least.

So even though our mom had been terminally ill for 16 months,

We experienced it as a sudden loss because we didn't have very much time to get used to the idea that she was going to die.

And that was the summer in between my junior and senior year of high school.

And I was the oldest child of three.

So that was a tough year,

The year that followed.

It was 1981,

Which were kind of the dark ages in grief support,

As were the 70s and the 60s and the 50s.

And things got better in the 90s,

But in the 1980s,

There still wasn't anything available for a family that was grieving the loss of one of its members.

So our coping strategy was just to soldier on and not talk about how we were feeling and hardly talk about my mom at all.

And I went to college a year later and did my very best to forget what had happened,

To visit home as little as possible,

To avoid conversations about my mom.

And I was able to sustain that for about seven years until it really came crashing down on me.

And I was engaged and had made the choice to end the engagement for various reasons.

And that loss brought that earlier,

Larger loss right up to the surface.

And I was very fortunate at that time to be able to work with very good therapists to help me process the loss that had never been addressed,

That grief that had been really mismanaged or unattended to.

And that puts me in my mid-20s.

And then I went to graduate school for creative writing and started writing Motherless Daughters while I was there because there wasn't any book on the subject.

And I thought there needed to be,

And I was tired of waiting for one.

So I thought,

Well,

Heck,

I guess I'll just start interviewing women and write it myself.

And the first edition came out in 1994.

And here we are now,

25 years later.

It's the 25th anniversary of that book and it's still been in print.

It's in 15 countries right now,

And it's going to come out in China and Russia within the next year or two.

So that'll be 17.

Well,

I'm so thrilled and congratulations on the 25th anniversary of Motherless Daughters.

I mean,

Who knew that it would be so big and so great,

But also of course it would be so big and so great because it fills this very intense and massive need for conversations from,

About,

Written by Motherless Daughters.

And I think that was my favorite part of the book is reading all of these experiences from others because you,

I mean,

One of the biggest reasons I started this podcast is that you get a bit when you hear somebody else's story,

But when you can get a catalog of people's stories,

Not only does it turn loss into a universal and holistic experience that everybody goes through,

But then you also get all of these individual voices and circumstances that you can start to align yourself with and identify with.

And that's really powerful.

I think the first thing that I want to go back to for you is this notion of we thought she was getting better and then she was going to the hospital and she'd probably never return in this notion of sudden death.

And I wonder,

Was there some kind of,

Was it secrecy on purpose or was there some kind of uncontrollable surprise that happened?

It was secrecy on purpose.

It was 1981 and it was still of the era when doctors would give a woman's medical diagnoses and her test results to her husband and let him decide what and how to tell her.

And so when my mother got very,

Very sick at the end,

Very quickly,

She really declined in a period of about a week and a half.

And while we were waiting for the ambulance to come,

My father sat me down and told me that that's when he said,

You know,

She's going to the hospital and she's not going to come back.

Those were the exact words that he used.

And I remember thinking,

What are you talking about?

Like,

Then where's she going to go?

Right?

Like,

Where's she going to go if not here?

Is she going to go live with her mom or something?

And it was just so incomprehensible to me.

And I said,

But what about all those scans she was having?

Because she would get CAT scans or PET scans and full body scans and come home and tell us that the results were normal.

And he said,

No,

They were never normal.

I've known all along.

And so I had to process,

Well,

My mom's going to die and my dad's known it.

And he hasn't told us and he hasn't told her.

And,

You know,

It was just way too much to process.

And then the ambulance came and brought her to the hospital.

And then we sort of got on the fast forward express to,

You know,

Her funeral essentially.

And it took me a really a long time to sort through that.

And then it took me even longer to let go of that anger toward my dad,

Who I ultimately came to understand was really doing what he thought was best and had to carry that terrible secret by himself for 16 months,

You know?

And that must have been so hard.

I can't imagine carrying that burden by myself,

But I was not mature enough.

And I did not have the experience or the wisdom to even understand that at 17,

I was just a big ball of white hot rage that my mom hadn't known she was dying and the kids hadn't known.

And we didn't really get to say goodbye.

It just felt so unfair.

And it still does.

I don't have the anger around it now.

I think it's more sadness.

But it was deliberate silence.

And it's really debatable how much she knew now,

Because I think how could your body be failing you that much and not know that you weren't getting better?

I mean,

She was on chemotherapy straight for 16 months,

And the doctor just kept changing the protocol,

You know,

Trying to find something that would help or extend her life.

And,

You know,

Now,

Of course,

I know that's not a good sign.

But at 17,

I mean,

That was my first encounter with it.

I just I thought that was normal.

I know,

This is a question that goes far bigger than you and the work of Motherless Daughters.

But I wonder why or why you think people think that they still need to keep death and the process of dying is such a big secret,

Because I don't think this is.

I think it's gotten better.

But we're not,

We're not having these conversations every day either.

No,

That's a really good question.

You know,

There's a film out now called The Farewell.

Have you heard of it?

It's a Chinese film.

I have and I haven't seen it yet.

And I'm so so like waiting to just sit down and watch it because I believe the plot if I'm not mistaken,

Is there's an elderly woman dying,

And she doesn't want to talk about the fact that she knows she's dying and her family thinks she doesn't know and but they won't tell her because they're afraid to tell her.

I think there's also a real cultural element to it.

I believe from what I understand from watching and reading about it in Chinese culture,

You would not tell someone that they were that sick out of fear that they would give up and then die.

So they thought by not telling her they might be keeping her alive longer.

And so the family I believe goes from America maybe to China.

I'm probably getting this all wrong.

So I'm going to stop because I haven't seen it yet.

But it looks fascinating to me.

Because I think that might have been part of what was going on in my family,

You know,

This idea that maybe if my mom knew how sick she was,

She would give up.

And I had a conversation with her best friend many years later,

Who basically said as much to me.

She said,

First of all,

Don't discount the possibility that your parents have been married for 21 years,

And they may have had an unspoken agreement between them that your dad would always get the bad news and then decide,

You know,

What to tell her.

And she was okay with that.

She said,

I don't know what kind of relationship your parents had.

And that might have been,

You know,

An unspoken agreement between them that your mom was actually part of.

She said,

The other thing is,

She said,

I've known your mom,

I knew your mom since she was 13 years old.

I don't think she was strong enough to handle that news.

She said,

I think you would have lost her sooner.

She said,

I think you may have gotten a couple more months with her because she didn't know.

And that was kind of eye opening because I hadn't considered that possibility.

And then I realized,

Oh,

This is so much more layered and complex than my 17-year-old mind could handle at that time,

Which was just,

You know,

Men are bad and the woman was the victim,

And I'm going to be on my mom's side and,

You know,

Fight for justice.

And that was energizing for a while,

I suppose.

I mean,

It did make me very,

Very,

A very strong advocate for my own health.

I get my checkups very regularly.

I always,

I want the doctors to be straight up with me.

You know,

I don't ask for handholding or sugarcoating if there's bad news.

Fortunately,

There's never been terrible news for me,

But there has been for others.

And I've just wanted to get it.

You know,

I feel like I can handle anything as long as I know it's the truth.

What I really don't think I can handle is to have facts hidden,

You know,

Or have things unspoken.

And that's,

I believe,

A residual effect of having discovered in such a surprising and shocking and conflated manner that my mom had been dying for 16 months and wasn't going to make it more than a few more days.

I'm going to validate that as well,

Because I think something that happens in the aftermath of losses,

All of a sudden,

We're craving clarity.

We're like,

If that was true,

Give me everything else that's going to be true,

Because I can't take any more hidden crap.

You know,

There's this,

There's this longing or even like a restless angst that comes up of like,

Tell me everything that's true,

Give it to me straight up,

I can totally take it.

And also too,

If I can take this person's death,

Then I can handle anything else that's true.

I think also,

I mean,

My God,

Someone dying is so real,

Right?

It's like,

Then I just wanted to like traffic in the real for a while.

It's probably not a surprise that I became a nonfiction writer,

Because I just wanted to,

You know,

I wanted,

I had such a hunger for the facts and the truth and,

You know,

The verifiable details of an event.

And,

You know,

I loved researching and fact checking.

Fact checking is usually the part of journalism people like least I think it was the part I liked best.

You know,

Just making sure that everything was accurate and true,

You know,

And verifiable to the extent that it could be.

And,

You know,

I think I just had such a hunger for things that were real after that,

You know,

Like,

I didn't want to be,

I didn't want to stay at the surface anymore.

I didn't want to be gaslit or,

You know,

Even like I said,

Handheld,

I just had this like real sense of wanting to be there in the grit of real life,

And not be afraid of it,

In fact,

Welcome it and honor it.

You know,

I lead retreats now for women whose moms have died.

And really frequently,

In fact,

Just the other day,

Someone said to me,

How do you do that?

It must be so sad.

Like,

How do you sit in a room with all these women crying?

And I said,

Well,

A couple things.

First of all,

It's not like I sit in a room for four days with 26 women who can't stop crying.

I mean,

Yeah,

There's tears,

But there's a lot of laughter at these retreats,

Because these women share a certain kind of humor,

And they get each other,

You know,

And it's really funny at times over the weekend.

It's not funny that their mom's side,

Of course.

But the way they tell their stories sometimes,

You know,

Someone will stumble into a saying or a certain,

You know,

A certain turn of phrase,

And everyone will laugh because they understand where it's coming from.

You know,

They'll laugh in recognition and relief,

Not even always out of humor.

But I say,

Oh,

I'm not afraid of it,

Though.

It's not a burden to me.

It's like,

I love doing this work.

I look forward to it,

Because for four days,

These women are open and vulnerable and honest,

And they're talking about real stuff,

And they're connecting at this very human,

Very deep level that I think we have less and less of these days,

You know,

Now that we're plugged in all the time.

But they turn their phones off or leave them in their rooms,

And they come and sit in the circle face to face and have real conversation.

And I think that's beautiful.

So it's not hard for me at all.

I mean,

It's emotional,

But it's not overbearing.

It's not,

You know,

Exhausting.

It's actually really,

Really beautiful to witness.

Well,

Because that's where the truth lives,

Is in those spaces where clarity and honesty are.

It's like,

I don't have to do the exhaustion of trying to keep up with something that isn't true or carry something that's too heavy for me.

It's like,

I just get to be where the truth is.

And when it doesn't,

I'm getting an image of like a cork in your throat when it's not stop-pered by something.

You can relax into things that are hard because everything's out in the open.

And I'm just contributing that from my own experience as well,

Because that's also how I prefer to live.

I want to circle back to this conversation that you had with your mom's best friend,

Because it reminded me of conversations that I've had with my mom's friends and her sisters and things like that after her death.

And one of the quotes that I highlighted the first time I read Motherless Daughters is,

When a mother dies,

She takes her stories with her.

And there's this notion of all of a sudden,

Or gradually having to piece together the people that our moms were and then in addition,

Having these new discoveries and new insights over time.

So I wonder if you can talk about maybe one or two of the stories that have come forward for you that you never expected to learn about your mom or other ones that caused like this light bulb to turn on for you,

Added another facet to your mother,

Added another facet to her.

Well,

That's a big one.

And that one from her best friend,

I think,

My mom took stories with her.

What she took were her interpretation of events.

Like I can find people who were there and shared experiences with her.

But when I asked them to share those stories,

What I get is their take.

And I think one of the greatest gifts I ever had was when I was writing Motherless Daughters,

I was,

I think,

On my way from Washington,

DC,

Back to New York,

Which is where I lived when I wrote the book.

And I went through Philadelphia.

And I stayed overnight with another very good friend of my mother's.

There were two women who had lived in the same apartment building as us when I was born.

One was my mother's childhood friend,

Who I just mentioned,

And another was someone that she'd met in the building.

And she stayed very close with these two women,

Even after they all moved into houses,

Different cities,

Different states,

Even.

And I saw them and their children a lot when I was growing up.

So I stopped in Charlotte's house in Philadelphia on the way back to New York,

Spent the night.

And she knew I was working on this book.

And she took a box of tissues and she came and sat on the bed with me and put the box of tissues in the middle and said,

Ask me anything you want to know about your mom.

Anything that I know,

I'll share with you.

She said,

I bet you have questions.

I'll tell you stories you don't know.

And we sat and she knew from my mom the story of her wedding night.

And she knew,

She remembered stories from my very early childhood that I wouldn't remember because I was too young,

But she was there and had witnessed.

She remembered my first birthday party.

And it was a terrific gift because my father clearly was there for some events,

But he was really not that useful when I asked him stories about childhood,

Especially when I became a father.

For whatever reason,

He completely revised history.

And according to my dad,

We were the most wonderful children who had ever walked on the earth and never did anything wrong.

Which is not true.

I know that's not true.

I remember.

I was there.

I do remember that.

And so it was very sweet to hear him recount things in this way,

But it was completely revisionist history.

So I could get stories from her friends and,

You know,

Whatever my younger siblings remembered as well.

But I really craved that when I became a mom.

I was 32 when I got pregnant.

So that was 14 years after my mom had died.

And I didn't know anything hardly about her pregnancy.

I didn't know anything at all about her labor,

Which was a twilight sleep in the 1960s.

So I'm not sure it would have been that helpful to know it anyway.

But I was really interested in knowing what I'd been like as an infant and how she had managed.

And I didn't have access to any of that.

What I did have were she kept very detailed baby books for all three children.

And somehow I was in possession.

I don't even know how,

Honestly.

But somehow I was in possession of the baby book that my grandmother kept for my mother from 1938.

So I had those two generations of details to compare to my daughter when I started bringing her to the pediatrician,

You know,

To get measured,

To get weighed,

Etc.

Took her first steps.

So I could piece together things as best as I could from those original documents and from stories from people around me.

And it wasn't nearly as good as having them from my mom,

But it was better than not having anything at all.

And so I was grateful for that.

And it inspired me to keep pretty detailed baby books for my daughters as well.

I hope,

Of course,

That I'll be here if when and if they have children of their own.

But even if I am,

I think it's great to have that record because I can't hold all that in my head.

I just want to speak to this idea of something happens,

I think with all people who have lost,

Where we become people that just make do with what we have left.

And there can be a bitterness in that.

But there can also be like a scrappiness or like a resilience in that too.

Sometimes I'm really proud of that.

Like,

Look at me making do.

I'm still here.

And other days,

I'm like,

Man,

I wish I had a lot more to work with.

Yeah,

I totally agree.

You know,

I call that two truths,

Holding two truths side by side.

On the one hand,

You can celebrate your scrappiness and your resilience and your resourcefulness.

Right?

I think,

Wow,

I'm so adaptable,

Because I've had to just adapt and read out so many times in my life.

And I like that about myself.

I do.

On the other hand,

I really wish I didn't have to be all of those things or hadn't had to learn them the way that I did.

Right.

And both of those things can be true,

I can be grateful for those qualities.

And I can wish that I'd never had to develop them.

And you it seems like they'd be contradictory or cancel each other out.

But they're not.

They're both equivalently true in my life.

And I'm a coach also.

And I coach women who've lost moms or anyone who's had an early loss that's still resonating decades later,

As it does.

And we talk about that,

You know,

We talk about,

Okay,

You know,

I can,

I can tell myself,

My surviving parent did the very best that they could with the limited tools that they had.

And I can feel compassion for them.

And I can hold that truth side by side with,

They were the parents and I was the kid and I needed something that they didn't give me and I didn't get it.

And I'm pissed about that.

You know,

It's okay to be angry about that.

It's not the same thing as being angry at that parent today,

Necessarily.

Sometimes it is,

But not always.

And I think we have to learn how to hold those two truths side by side.

You know,

Life is not binary.

Binary thinking is the easiest and most reductive way to get through our lives.

But I think it's the least interesting,

To be honest.

I think most experiences and circumstances that we're in are much more layered and complex than a simple,

You know,

Yes or no,

A or B,

Black or white.

And so it's,

I think it's in that complexity that we find the richness.

And then we find,

You know,

Like,

Like you were saying,

Some of those things that we really can celebrate in addition to whatever brings us pain.

Yeah,

I think that makes perfect sense.

I know in my own work,

In my own,

Why I call it grief guidance,

I call it the divine dichotomy.

You hold one truth in each hand and you can't let either of them drop because they're both true.

And you kind of just carry them around forever.

And in my mind,

It's a sign of maturity or even evolution in grief,

Because to think that we can only hold one thing at a time is like an immature thought in my mind.

And then to be able to hold multiple or even to hold these oceans and oceans of emotions and grief as you do,

Is,

Is just proof that we can become bigger and better containers for our grief as it matures alongside us.

Right,

Exactly.

And it is going to mature and change,

You know,

We're going to have new insights.

And sometimes those are going to bring us great joy and peace.

And sometimes those are going to bring us great joy and peace.

And sometimes those insights are going to be really destabilizing and bring us a lot of,

You know,

Sadness and the feeling that we're regreiving.

And,

You know,

Because we are reprocessing now from,

You know,

Those same facts from a new point of view and interpreting them differently and integrating that new point of view into our identity today,

As we,

You know,

As we move forward.

Yeah,

Did you see the interview that Anderson Cooper did with Stephen Colbert a couple of weeks ago?

I did.

It made me cry.

Because I love the two of them so very much.

And I had no idea that this was a part of their history.

I knew it about Colbert.

I had no idea that Anderson Cooper was 10 when his dad died.

Okay.

So yeah,

I had vice versa.

I was like,

I knew about Anderson Cooper.

I didn't know about Stephen Colbert.

And so when I watched it,

I was like,

Oh my God.

And he has a tragic story,

Right?

It was his dad and two of his brothers all died in airplane,

Commercial airplane crash together.

But he talks about,

You know,

Learning to love the thing you most wish had not happened.

And I thought,

Oh,

It's such a beautiful way to,

To express this.

You know,

It's not putting a positive spin on loss.

Cause no one's,

I'm not,

I tell my clients,

Nobody's trying to take away your pain or the fact that this was really hard and tragic and sad and still is.

No one's taking that away.

But what we're saying is that there are multiple ways to look at it.

There are many alternative storylines that are equally true and let's,

You know,

Let's tease out and,

And,

You know,

Really engage and activate some of those because that's another form of resilience is to,

You know,

Not just walk around with the sad story defining you,

But to find the others that define you at the same time without letting go of that original one.

You know,

It's when people's identity is wrapped up in this sadness or this tragedy or this belief that everything's in their life today is difficult because this terrible thing happened to them when they were younger,

That it's much harder to find happiness,

Right?

Because you can't do much with that.

If you're,

If you're making that direct equation between,

You know,

My mom or my dad died when I was 12 and now I'm 35 and you know,

I,

Everything's been really hard for me,

Then everything's going to keep being hard for you because your dad's always going to be dead.

Right.

But when we tease apart that story and I say,

Okay,

Yeah,

Okay,

You're dead when you were 12 and that's,

That's a really hard thing.

And yes,

It did lead to some adverse events.

Let's look at what they were,

You know,

Cause it's usually it's,

Well,

The dad died and then something else happened and then something else happened and then something should have happened and didn't,

And then something else happened and then,

You know,

And,

And so there's many steps along the way to get to where they are today.

And we can look back and say,

Well,

You know,

Any of those intervening variables,

Can we work on those today?

Can we change some of those now to create a different outcome for you in the future?

And then there's movement,

Right?

Because we're letting air into that story because my dad died when I was 12 and my life is really hard today is a story without a middle,

Right?

It's just a beginning and an end.

When you open it up and look at the whole middle of that story,

There's a lot more room to work in there.

And that's the majority of what I do with my clients is,

Is really open up their stories and see places where we can really affect some change or change belief systems to create a different outcome for them moving forward.

And I think it's really powerful work because no one taught me how to do that.

I had to learn how to do it myself and it took decades.

So it's really a gift to be able to help people do it in even a first or second session,

Right?

And save people a couple extra decades of work on their own,

And then they can go forward and do other things in the future.

I'm just totally geeking out about this idea of adding the middle or questioning where the middle of the story is,

Or even sometimes writing the middle because where people can often really easily identify here's the beginning,

Here's the end,

What happens in between can be a blur or a blackout or a mixed up tangle events.

And we're like,

I don't even know where to start writing the middle.

And so to even say,

Start from here,

Or let's find out or walk through the spirally path together is really,

Really powerful.

And I think that's where a lot of us land in grief.

Well,

Most of the story lives.

You know,

I live in Los Angeles,

A lot of my friends are screenwriters and screenwriters like to say that the middle of the second act is the middle of a screenplay,

Right?

They say the second act is where a story goes to die.

Because that's where they go all tangled up in the changing circumstances and developments and the overcoming of the obstacles,

Right?

It's the largest part of a story,

The second act,

You know,

In Aristotelian structure,

Which is what a screenplay is based on usually.

And so the middle is the middle of the story,

The middle is the hardest part to write.

And I think if from some of us,

You know,

It's the hardest part to remember.

It's oftentimes the hardest part to live through.

Yes.

Everything that comes after the death event,

Right?

It's the topic of my next book,

Basically.

The topic of my next book is everything that comes after someone dies and how far into the future it extends,

Because bereavement services are really there just for the first year or two after someone dies.

And if you're having a grief reaction 10 or 20 years later,

Which happens,

And it's not abnormal,

It happens for,

You know,

A number of different reasons.

But if you're having a grief reaction 10 or 20 years later,

And you try to find support services,

It's really hard to find.

Because most institutions or most centers will not have the funding or have it in their mission statement to help people 10 or 20 years down the road.

They're there for the acute phase just in the first couple of years.

So my initiative is to call more attention to that what I'm calling the long arc of grief,

Because my mom died 38 years ago.

And it's not anywhere near as fresh anymore as it was for me at,

You know,

Two years or five years or even seven years,

But it still comes up.

You know,

It still comes up.

And there are very predictable points in someone's story where a grief resurgence is likely to occur.

And there just isn't any kind of structured support for that out there.

Really anywhere that I'm aware of in this country,

I mean,

Certain cultural groups,

I think,

Do a better job of giving their members a framework,

At least for understanding how long the process is.

But,

You know,

In the secular world,

There's very little.

There's the funeral,

And then you go home and maybe if you're lucky,

You get three days off of work,

And then you have to go back.

And for the sake of the people around you,

Pretend that everything's okay.

Yeah.

And I'll echo that there in the sense that there's nothing that ritualizes or memorializes it that's societally set in place.

And so oftentimes the burden is on the grievers to have an empty memorial chair at the wedding or name your child after your deceased person or kind of all these things that come with these big milestones where it would be lovely if there was some kind of prescribed norm of,

And this is what we do when this milestone happens,

And this is what we do when this milestone happens.

But there's a disproportionate burden of decision on what to do now that these huge milestones are rolling through 10,

20,

30 years later.

And that's so much of what we talk about on coming back is this notion of regrieving or grief being a long-term relationship as opposed to something that comes and then it goes away.

And I think something that you kind of touched on too is this idea that the grief resources don't exist 10,

20,

30 years down the road because that's something that,

At least from what I've seen,

That society still pathologizes.

Like,

Oh,

You're still there?

Then there must be something wrong with you.

Right.

Haven't you gotten over it yet?

Yeah.

What gives?

Right?

You're not over it yet?

Right?

Like,

I mean.

.

.

Yeah,

Exactly.

If I could remove one phrase from the English lexicon,

It would be that.

It would be,

Haven't you gotten over it yet?

Because I don't think people asking that question really even have an idea of what that means or what they'd be asking for.

Like,

Really,

What would it look like to be over it?

Would that mean that you never talk about the person who died?

No way.

I'm not going to stop doing that.

Does it mean that you don't ever think about them?

I mean,

That sounds pathological to me,

Actually,

To just wipe them from your memory so you don't get upset or upset the people around you.

I think that finding healthy ways to remember and incorporate our deceased loved ones into our lives is what we are meant to do because that's what humans did for millennia,

Basically until the 20th century,

To be honest.

I've been doing research on ancient and romantic and Victorian mourning practices,

And it's extraordinary how ritualized they were and how many rules there were.

In 19th century England,

You would walk down the street and if you were up on things,

Because there was a thick book that most women kept in their houses so that they could refer to it when someone died,

You would have a sense of who was in mourning and who wasn't because of the way that they were dressing.

The men wore black armbands and the women had very elaborate rules for dress.

Not only would you know who was in mourning,

You would know how long ago the loss occurred because,

Especially for women,

The color of the clothing you were allowed to wear changed over time.

If you knew the person,

You would,

Of course,

Well,

If you really knew them,

You would know who died.

But if you were just observing them,

You would have a sense of who died eventually because of how long they were mourning,

Because there were rules that extended anywhere from six weeks to two years,

Depending on whether it was your sister-in-law or your spouse.

There was an enormous industry around mourning products.

You'd also walk down the street,

You'd know which houses had lost a loved one because there would be a specific kind of wreath hanging on the door to let people know.

We just lost all of that.

We don't have any of that anymore.

We can't tell when somebody is mourning or grieving.

There's no visible evidence.

Like you said,

The burden is on the mourner to explain why they might be looking downcast or why they might not want to partake in social activities yet.

It's definitely up to the mourner to let other people know rather than having signals or signs that others would be able to interpret and know how to act because there were also social codes for how to treat the mourners and how they were to act in society as well.

Fascinating,

Isn't it?

That's incredible.

I love looking at historical traditions of mourning as well.

My favorite and one that I've shared on the show is the practice of keening,

Which is where people would either hire,

Bring in,

Or their own relatives would wail and tear their hair out and make a lot of noise vocally at funerals and memorial ceremonies to express a collective grief and allowing grief to have that very carnal animalistic sound is one of my favorite things because that's my first instinct when this happens is to yell about it and it's not polite society by any means.

The Celts knew that,

The Irish knew that.

I understand that in certain Hindu traditions,

The women go to a room to mourn and all the women from the area,

The village,

The family come in that room with them and they hire somebody,

A professional woman to come in and do the wailing with them so that they release it from their bodies.

If we look at a lot of indigenous tribes or indigenous societies and tribal customs,

There's quite a few that are really about allowing you to release it from your body as a form of mental hygiene and to do it in the community of people who can help you contain it.

We don't do any of that,

Really.

We do not.

And really quickly,

I want to circle back to what kind of kicked off that whole conversation,

Which was banishing this question of,

Haven't you gotten over it yet?

And I think a really helpful tip for grief growers who are listening to this episode is to push back with Hope's question of,

Well,

What would that look like to you?

Because forcing people who are asking the question to define it on your behalf,

I think jokingly and lovingly helps them see that there really is no prescribed picture of what that really looks like.

And if they think there is,

If they say something like,

Well,

Once you stop talking about it,

Or once you stop acting so sad,

Or blah,

Blah,

Blah,

That's a really good permission slip or even a red flag to cut that person out of your life.

You know,

I've also found that if someone says,

Aren't you over it yet,

It's generally someone who hasn't had a major loss in their lives,

Right?

For the most part,

Those who have any EQ know not to ask that question.

But what I've found is that for me,

And it's an individual,

Of course,

But for me,

The best answer has been,

Yeah,

It doesn't really work like that.

I wish it did,

But that just isn't how it works.

And I feel like then I'm educating them,

Right?

So that when the time comes and they discovered,

Oh,

That's not how it works,

Maybe they'll remember that someone,

They don't have to remember it was me,

But maybe they'll remember that someone told them,

You know,

It's okay if you haven't gotten over it 10 or 20 years later,

That's just not how it works.

I want to kind of get into specifics with you,

Because your book is called Motherless Daughters and focuses on this relationship between mothers and daughters specifically.

And I want to know what makes that relationship special and how is it different from other types of grief?

Because I know because I've lived this,

But I think,

Especially for friends and coworkers and things who don't quite know what it's like,

I think you touch on so many things in the book,

But I wonder if there's a couple of definite pinpoints you can look at and be like,

This is how it's different from other losses.

Well,

You know,

Again,

It depends on the family.

In most families,

The mother is the more emotionally expressive parent who helps the children learn how to regulate their own emotions and tends to their distress.

If she's the one who did that and then she's not there,

Then you're in distress because she's not there and she's not there to help you with that distress,

Which is a really big conundrum,

Especially for small children.

But there are families where the father is the more nurturing parent.

That certainly can happen.

So that depends,

You know,

And not all mother-daughter relationships are close.

I happen to have a good mother and I was pretty close with her,

But not everybody feels that their mom did the best job that she could.

And some are very ambivalent about the relationships or had moms who were addicted or abusive or mentally ill.

So there are many varieties of mother-daughter relationships.

What I can share with you is that I was speaking not long ago with a professor at Northwestern,

Dan McAdams is his name.

He specializes in self-narratives,

Which is the study of how people construct their own life stories.

And he said that,

You know,

He has collected people's narratives and asked them to tell their stories and study how they tell their stories for decades now.

And he said that when women tell their stories,

That the hardest part for them to recollect,

And often the saddest part for them is talking about their mother's dying.

That there's something so primal about that connection,

That it's a really tender part of a woman's story,

Especially,

You know,

If she had a close relationship with her and she misses her.

And I think there's also something so rich about if you have children,

You know,

About being the maternal line and when your mom dies,

Oftentimes you're then the oldest woman in that line.

And if your mom dies when you're relatively young and your grandma's not still around,

You know,

I think I was the oldest woman in my direct maternal line when I was 30,

29.

I was really young to feel like,

Geez,

I'm the matriarch of,

You know,

This line.

I had a sister,

Of course.

So,

But I'm talking about,

You know,

Just sort of like the direct maternal line.

And now I have two daughters.

But at the time I didn't.

And it was just kind of this strange feeling like I didn't have a ceiling or a floor,

You know.

And I kind of felt untethered for a while.

So I think maybe that's part of it.

You know,

I think it,

But it very much depends on what kind of mom you had,

What kind of,

You know,

What kind of mothering she was capable of,

What kind of mother-daughter relationship you had.

So I'm reluctant to generalize because I don't want to marginalize the women who had really difficult relationships with their mom,

You know,

Often because their mom had problems that she couldn't master on her own that got in the way of her mothering.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

That absolutely makes sense.

And it's all so diverse.

And yet I think you touched on losing a mother,

Especially through this arc of storytelling,

Is this ancient thing that happens that even we struggle to put words to sometimes.

There's not a lot,

There's not,

There's very little language for a lot of what I find myself thinking about and writing about these days.

You know,

I feel like we're,

Maria Shriver,

I think it was,

Who said we are a grief-illiterate nation.

And I've really thought about that because I think not only are we grief-illiterate in terms of knowing how to express it in ways that are widely acceptable and supported,

But we don't even have good language for a lot of it.

And so,

You know,

When I'm interviewing women or leading a retreat or,

You know,

Engaging in discussions or facilitating conversations,

You know,

We're often sort of like just reaching for the right words to express what it is that we want to say.

We find English to be limited in that way.

Maybe it's no more limited than any other language,

But there are words in other languages that I do find helpful.

Like in Portuguese,

There's a word and I'm probably going to mangle its pronunciation.

I think it's suarade.

And it means the feeling of longing for something that you've lost while you are also grateful for having once had it.

Isn't that beautiful?

Yeah.

And I'm like,

Oh my goodness,

Thank goodness for other cultures that have grief words that we do not.

There's an outlet called Modern Loss that accumulates them and they've got words from Germany,

They've got words from Spain,

They've got words from South America,

Like all these other different places that have,

And they kind of cover one every couple months or so.

And so there's a bunch of different articles and I can't off-right recall one.

And then they also make up their own.

So the phenomenon of suddenly gaining 15 pounds after somebody you love has died,

They made up a word for that.

And then there's something else that they call grief bacon.

And I don't recall the definition,

But I remember looking at that and being like,

Oh,

I've experienced grief bacon as well.

And so it's really funny to watch people make up words around loss.

That sounds like pure Rebecca Sofer.

I know her and I love her.

Oh,

Good.

And she's been a guest here on Coming Back as well.

She,

Oh,

Good.

I love that woman.

She's so funny and so smart.

And yeah,

I love,

And I love what she and Gabby are doing with Modern Loss.

They're terrific.

It's phenomenal.

And just another resource for motherless daughters,

But also I think there's tilts very much toward loss in your twenties and thirties,

Which is really important because much of grief support still is geared towards loss that happens after 50,

After 60,

Because that's quote unquote,

The natural order of things,

But that's not how things actually happen.

Honestly,

It's also just demographically more,

I don't want to say popular,

But it's just demographically more common,

Right?

It's statistically more probable.

So there's a larger need for bereavement services among that population in terms of sheer numbers,

But it still overlooks this group that I've been really working,

That I've dedicated the last 25 years to,

Which are adults who were bereaved as children and teenagers who didn't get what they needed back then oftentimes because nothing existed for them back then,

Except,

You know,

It was really,

Really compassionate and intuitive extended family,

Maybe who could be there for them.

But I don't think,

You know,

It's unrealistic to expect that our family members are going to be able to help us through these tough times when they're bereaved themselves.

And,

And then,

So they're just,

There's,

But I will say that children's grief services have come a long way since my mom died.

You know,

There was just nothing in my community.

There wasn't even hospice yet for the dying in 1981,

Suburban New York.

And when my dad died,

23 years later,

24 years later,

He died at home with hospice care.

And it was really,

Really a beautiful,

It sounds like an oxymoron,

But it was a beautiful death.

And he was surrounded by his family.

He was making his own choices.

He was,

You know,

He really went into it very consciously with his eyes open,

Knowing what was happening and cared for very well until the very end.

And it was a much better experience than what my mom had gotten.

And granted,

His children were adults now and not young kids,

But I feel like end of life care is so important for the,

Not just for the dying person,

But for the bereaved family members,

Because they're going to carry that memory forward with them,

Right?

Of how their loved one died.

Of course,

This is not,

This cannot be the case for someone who lose a loved one in an accident or by suicide or homicide,

Right?

I'm talking,

This is just for terminal illness.

There's,

There's no,

You know,

There's no way I think to ameliorate the shock and the numbness and the suffering of those who lose someone very suddenly without any warning,

You know,

Especially to a random act.

But end of life care when someone is terminally ill makes a good end of life care,

Makes a really big difference in the people who are left behind.

It can reduce their trauma significantly.

And it gives them warmer memories to look back on when,

You know,

As they move forward,

Because we are constantly,

I like what you said earlier about having a relationship with grief,

Because I'm writing in this new book about something I really believe to be true,

Which is that the facts of a loss don't change,

Right?

I mean,

My mom is always going to have died of breast cancer in 1981 when I was 17 and she was 42.

But my relationship to those facts have changed a lot over time.

You know,

They looked one way when I was 17 and they looked different when I became a mom and they looked different when I,

You know,

Approached and turned 42,

Which is a huge transition for women in this group.

It's a very big deal.

And then they look different again.

You know,

I've lived a decade past my mom,

More than a decade past my mom.

And,

You know,

The facts of her death seem at the same time more distant and more preposterous at the same time that,

You know,

That she could have died at 42 is more surreal to me now than it was back then even,

Because 42 is so young to me.

And so I'm sorry,

I meant to ask you,

Han,

How,

What your story,

You were how,

You were 21 when your mom died,

Is that right?

I was.

And I think what drew me to your book a lot in the first place is that our stories were very similar and that my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.

And then she actually,

She kept us fairly well informed throughout the process.

But she went into remission in January of 2013.

And then in November of that same year,

What doctors had thought was like pneumonia wouldn't go away,

Or just like a chronic cough turned out to be the cancer returned.

And we essentially got about a week's notice that she was going to die.

And so we brought in,

We thought we were going to have a lot longer for what it's worth.

We were told anywhere from six weeks to six months.

But then essentially,

Once she found out she was dying,

I think her body knew intuitively also,

And this is something you touched on too,

Is like,

How could you not know that you're dying?

And she was,

She wasn't ready to go,

But I think she was ready to stop trying to fight it off for our sake.

And it's not that we weren't important enough.

She's like,

It's so hard to put words to.

I still struggle with this,

But she wasn't ready to be done.

But I think if it came between the choice between that or continue trying to fight off cancer or struggle against this,

She was like,

I can't make that choice for myself anymore.

And yeah,

She died in a week.

And I kind of want to circle all of this back to your book and your story as well,

Because on close to the last page of your book,

You talk about taking your kids and your husband on this trip to the Redwoods in California.

And this is another thing that connects the two of us across space and time is that before she died,

My mom was like,

Whenever I go into remission,

We're going to go to the Redwoods.

And she kept talking about,

Relentlessly,

About trees you could drive a car through.

She's like,

These trees are so big,

You can drive a car through them.

And she just could not fathom and could not believe that to be true.

And we never got to go there.

Like she never got to get there in life.

There were a couple of things that she wanted to do before she died.

And that was one of them.

And so the year after her death,

We actually got a permit through the Park Service in California to scatter her cremains in the Redwood Forest.

And we had this moment where we didn't get to see the trees you can drive a car through,

But we got to go to this place called Remembrance Grove.

And my sister and I were kind of trying to scout out the perfect tree so we would know if we ever came back.

And we got about probably less than a mile up into the trail.

It was an upward hike.

And my sister taps on my shoulder and she's like,

Turn around.

And we saw this tree.

She's like,

What do you see?

And like,

Clear as day,

There was the silhouette of a woman's face in the side of this tree.

It was like something out of Pocahontas,

Like Grandmother Willow or something like that.

And she and I both just got these full body chills.

She's like,

This is where she stays.

And it was really,

Really cool to read your story in the end of Motherless Daughters of visiting the Redwoods and finally being in this place where your mom was born.

And I was so excited to see the moment where your mom had wanted to go and was so amazed by it because I was like,

Is my mom her mom?

Like I was just having this moment where it was so connected.

It's like they died at the same thing.

I'm also the oldest and she couldn't stop talking about the Redwoods.

Like is this,

Are we having a moment here?

And I just wanted to touch on that before we got off the air today because that was one of the most connecting points in Motherless Daughters for me was that story of her lingering even there in the trees years later.

And I was like,

That's lovely.

I grew up in New York.

Who knew I was going to wind up living in California and passing Redwoods all the time.

I back and forth to Northern California where my older daughter was in college.

And we developed a real relationship with driving through Redwoods over those four years.

And yeah,

My mother was really taken by those particular trees.

I'm not sure why.

She grew up in New York City,

But there was something about them,

Maybe their majesty or nature.

And I found it really compelling to spend time among them and feel close to her and bring my daughters there too.

And both of my daughters are very avid back country hikers.

They spend a lot of time in Redwood Forest and in the Sierras and Kings Canyon.

And I like to think that that's some kind of connection with my mom who,

I don't know if she ever slept in a tent in her life,

To be honest.

Oh,

She went to summer camp,

I think.

But they do both carry her name.

My older one is named after my mother's first name.

My younger one's named after my mother's middle name.

And I see pieces of her in them.

I do.

Every now and then,

A little gesture or a tilt of the head or some kind of talent that they have that certainly didn't come from me,

You know,

That I think that I remember her having.

And sometimes those 17 years I spent with her,

I felt so brief.

And sometimes they feel like,

You know,

They were enough.

And I'm grateful to have had them because there's plenty of women who get less with their moms.

And I've met a lot of them.

And I know how hard that is.

It goes back to holding those two truths.

You can't drop either of them.

And they're simultaneously true at the same time.

Reviews

Great and helpful interview. It ended rather abruptly though. Thanks for sharing these stories.