40 Quotes by Hope Edelman

When my mother died, a lot of people tried to comfort me by saying, ‘Well, you still have your father. You still have a brother and sister. You have a wonderful husband and beautiful children.’ And you know what? That’s all true. That’s all completely true. But I still don’t have my mother.

But the fact is that she went away and left us all to cope with the wreckage she left behind.

Sometimes I wonder what losing my mother would have been like if I’d spent just a few more years with her, or if I’d known her for a few less.

Every cause is painful, and every loss leaves us wondering how we could have acted otherwise to prevent the death. But because different causes of death provoke sufficiently different responses – anger toward suicide victims; blame for homicide, terrorism, and war; helplessness and fear with natural disasters; and hopelessness with terminal disease – the specific way a mother dies or leaves influences how her daughter will respond. Long-term.

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.

My mother, as a woman in her sixties, is mostly a mystery to me. In my mind, she’s an eternal forty-two, and as her daughter, I never get past seventeen. There.

I couldn’t chance failing in New York yet, letting the city fail me. It was the only place I knew I belonged. If I couldn’t survive there, I would have no place else to go.

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.

Experiencing that intense emotion is what helps us, ultimately, accept that our mothers are gone.