WHEN MOM ISN’T THERE
Mother’s Day is all about mothers who are alive. But for motherless daughters like Hope Edelman, the holiday can be more pain than pleasure. She’s worked hard to change that for herself and others.
When Hope Edelman was 17 years old, she lost her mother, who was 42, to breast cancer. Her grief was overwhelming and unrelenting, and for many years she looked everywhere for comfort and emotional healing to no avail. “I remember my first Mother’s Day without my mother. I was in high school and I pretended it didn’t happen,” she says.
Her mother’s death and the sorrow she felt haunted Edelman and forced her to break the silence about early parent loss. In 1994 she published Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, a groundbreaking study of the unique effect that a mother’s death has on her daughters. The New York Times best-seller sold more than a million copies and changed how we think about grief. The book and its follow-up, Letters From Motherless Daughters: Words of Courage, Grief, and Healing, revealed how grief evolves as a daughter grows. “There is never a day when my mother is not important to me,” Edelman, 52, says. “She might not be living, but she’s still the woman who had more influence on me than anyone else.”
To honor mothers who are no longer alive, Edelman and a group of women in New York City decided in 1996 to hold a Motherless Daughters luncheon. Over the years, luncheons have been held in more than a dozen other cities, including Vancouver, Canada, and Melbourne, Australia. Motherless Daughters support groups—45 and counting—have sprung up across the country, and each year Edelman co-hosts healing retreats with author/therapist Claire Bidwell Smith. And through it all, she continues her own grieving and healing process.
“Two years ago my daughter Maya graduated high school, and my sister and I sat in the bleachers together and we cried because our mom never made it to any of our high school graduations,” Edelman recalls. “We were happy and grieving at the same time. Everyone else was cheering and laughing, and we sat there just weeping because we were so glad that we got my mother’s first grandchild to high school graduation and that we were there to see it, both of us older than our mother lived to be.”