40 Quotes by Hope Edelman

Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

Grief needs an outlet. Creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child’s contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent’s death represents precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression.

Even though we knew she was going to die eventually, when it happened it was still a terrible, rude shock. I thought I was prepared, but when it happened I fell apart. That's when I realized I'd been hanging on to the hope, however slim, that as long as she was alive she might somehow get better.

Witnessing a mother's slow physical decline can be the equivalent of of experiencing long-term trauma. The daughter's feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear persist. And persist. And persist. She may alternate between wanting to protect her mother and resenting her, an advance-and-retreat dance of identification and rejection than can span years.

When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways.

When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends.

There is an emptiness inside of me – a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, unconditional and strong as a mother’s love. And I will never be loved that way again.

Our lives are shaped as much by those who leave us as they are by those who stay. Loss is our legacy. Insight is our gift. Memory is our guide.

I see the enormous value of a mother’s presence because I live everyday with its absence.