I Couldn't Say 'My Mother' Without Crying

I was so moved by Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert’s interview on August 15, and their candid talk about childhood grief, I wrote an op-ed piece about it. The link to read it on the NYT web site is here. I’ve also cut and pasted it below. Please feel free to share with others!

I Couldn’t Say ‘My Mother’ Without Crying

Losing a family member at a young age has lasting impacts, well into adulthood. There’s no quick fix for childhood grief.

By Hope Edelman

Ms. Edelman is the author of “Motherless Daughters.”

Aug. 25, 2019

This month on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert engaged in a candid conversation about the long-term effects of childhood grief. Mr. Cooper was 10 years old when his father died from a heart attack. Mr. Colbert also was 10 when his father died in a plane crash that also took two of his brothers’ lives. Their early losses, both men agreed, shaped their priorities, their worldviews and the adults they ultimately became.

“I was personally shattered,” Mr. Colbert recalled. “And then you kind of re-form yourself in this quiet, grieving world that was created in the house.”

This story I know well. My mother died of breast cancer in 1981, when she was 42 and I was 17. At the time, I thought grieving was a five-stage process that could be rushed through and aced, like an easy pop quiz. When I still painfully missed my mother three and five and even 10 years later, my conclusion was that I must have gotten grieving wrong.

It took me quite a few years of therapy, interviews with hundreds of other motherless daughters, and several books written on the subject to finally let go of the cultural message that grief is something to be “gotten over” in the service of “moving on.” I’m hoping the Cooper-Colbert interview will help save others that kind of time.

What their conversation brings to light is how tenacious and recurrent childhood grief can be. It often flares up around anniversary events, such as birthdays and holidays; makes appearances at life milestones, like graduations and weddings; and sneaks up at age-correspondence events, such as reaching the age a parent was when he or she died. That’s a big one.

It also appears in regular, everyday moments. Mr. Colbert spoke about still being undone by the song “Band on the Run,” which was playing in heavy rotation the month his father and brothers died. Similarly, every time I hear “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tennille I’m transported back into a wood-paneled basement circa 1978 where I’m teaching my mother how to dance the Continental, and missing her feels raw and fresh again. Then it passes.

To lose a parent in the 1980s was to do so in the Dark Ages of grief support. Stoicism, silence and suppression were still the ethos of the day. It would take me five years to be able to say “my mother” without crying. I wish I could say I was an anomaly, but I’ve met so many others with this story that at some point I began wondering if we were the norm.

Yet despite all the progress made in organized bereavement support over the past 40 years, very few services exist today for adults bereaved during childhood and adolescence. And this is a puzzling omission, because millions of Americans fall into this category. A New York Life Foundation nationwide survey of 1,006 adults age 25 and over revealed that 14 percent of those surveyed lost a parent or sibling before the age of 20. If we apply that percentage to the United States adult population as a whole, even conservatively, nearly 30 million people in America experienced the death of an immediate family member during childhood or adolescence.

Why is this important? Because we know that mismanaged and unexpressed grief can surface later as unregulated anger, take root as depression or disease and fuel a desire to self-medicate. Imagine a population of 30 million people with stories of major, early loss, many of them unspoken and suppressed. Then look around. Unmourned losses from the past could be a public health crisis.

A child’s response to major loss depends on several factors, including the cause of death, the closeness of the relationship and the child’s developmental stage. Very young children may not yet understand what death means. They’ll come to that awareness later, as their intellect matures. Tweenagers may grasp the concept cognitively but don’t yet have the emotional maturity to manage the feelings that arise. They’ll have to attend to those later. Teenagers have to balance the typical tasks of adolescence with the extraordinary demands of mourning. If overwhelmed by both, they may push one aside for a while, only to revisit it 10 years down the road. Or 20. Or more. This is how childhood grief becomes protracted over a lifetime.

Most of all, early, major loss can derail a life narrative and shatter a child’s sense of safety and assumptions about the future. As Anderson Cooper shared, his father’s death “changed the trajectory of my life. I am a different person than I feel like I was meant to be.”

Western culture has been labeled “death-denying,” but really, death-dodging is just as accurate. We skid away from discomfort and vulnerability around grief. We like prescriptions, easy instructions and a sense of mastery and control. Given a choice, we’ll opt for the quick fix. Every time.

Two Thursday nights ago on national television, Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert said the quiet part out loud: There is no quick fix here. The effects of early parent loss reverberate throughout a lifetime.

Continuing this conversation is more than a dialogical exercise. It’s a social responsibility. No adult left behind. We need to keep educating one another about the long arc of childhood grief and offering support to everyone along its route.

Hope Edelman (@hope_edelman), the author of “Motherless Daughters” and the forthcoming book “The Aftergrief,” has been writing and speaking about early loss for 25 years.

Comments

Barbara Amdur says
August 26, 2019 at 5:40 pm

I WAS SO MOVED READING ABOUT THE LOSS OF YOUR MOTHER AT 17.HOW STRONGLY I IDENTIFIED WITH YOU—HAVING FOUND OUT WHEN I WAS 23 AND NOT YET MARRIED THAT MY MOTHER HAD ONLY 1 YEAR TO LIVE ( ALSO DUE TO BREAST CANCER (NEGLECTED).ALL OF LIFE’S MILESTONES ARE FOREVER ALTERED FOR DAUGHTERS WHO WHO SUFFER SUCH A LOSS AT A RELATIVELY EARLY AGE

Lana says
August 28, 2019 at 11:51 am

I thought the Cooper Colbert interview was very interesting as well. It was powerful to see how the childhood death of a father affected the sons in different ways and how their perspectives on life were molded by that. I lost my mother last year when I was 30, so reading your story allows me a different appreciation for what guidance I did get before she passed.

Caroline Stilwell says
September 1, 2019 at 8:04 am

I lost my 5 year old brother when I was 7. After my mother said, “Billy is dead” we never spoke of him again, yet his memory filled our days and nights for the remainder of my childhood. Just reading this post I feel sorrow, sadness and even guilt. I am 74.

Leah S says
September 6, 2019 at 8:38 am

I lost my father to suicide before my second birthday. It was covered up & labeled a “heart attack”. However, only when I was 26 did I find out it was a suicide. I then spent twenty years with a suicide support group (that I co-founded). Today I am 82 years old and my father-loss is still with me every day.

D. Feldman says
September 8, 2019 at 3:05 am

My mother died when I was 17 from a heart attack. No one knew how to help during the 1970s… and I and our family were forever changed. I understand what Mr. Colbert and Mr. Anderson mean when they say life’s trajectory was altered. No one wanted to hear… no one understood and it took me many years to understand my melancholy at so many otherwise celebratory events. To this day I still feel an uncanny sense of isolation and a distance from relationships….And my loss was 50 years ago. Thank you for sharing.

Jennifer says
September 10, 2019 at 3:50 am

Hope-your book changed my life. Lost my mom at 19 and my dad 5 years later. Hit a wall of grief 10 years after and finally went to therapy. What I was feeling was all in your book and I have recommended it to so many people. Keep up your wonderful work it makes a difference.

C says
September 28, 2019 at 3:13 pm

I very much appreciated your opinion piece in the New York Times. Many of the sadnesses that you described could easily be said about young women who were forced to give away their babies for adoption because they they were unmarried, and were told to never speak of it again and that we would get over it. That kind of unspoken grief, longing, misery, and shame has stayed with any woman I have ever met, including myself, who had to surrender their baby.

Mary Nochera Knight says
November 6, 2019 at 2:59 am

I buried my feelings for years. My Mom passed when I was 5. I replied to sympathetic folks with an “it’s okay, I was only 5, I don’t remember “, but I do. I was abused for years following by a jealous “new mother” and abused by a man from 9-12 yrs old. I read some of your book while I was a mother of 3 grade schoolers and found myself in such a downward spiral that I could not function. I struggled to do laundry, make a meal, help with homework. Two years later, divorce. Now 20 years later, with my children being raised by a clueless “motherless daughter”, I still fear your book will make me have to travel that path and derail me again. I love you Hope and I relate. But at 50+, I think I am just forever altered, never to be whole.
Kindly,
Mary

- Mary says
  November 6, 2019 at 3:23 am
  
  Ps. I still have your book, and 25+ years later, I still cannot open it. I ask caretakers of motherless children to read it but not share with the motherless child just so they can get a glimpse and maybe help them commiserate and guide. My Mom left me at 5yrs, to the wolves, when she was 40yrs young, November 17, 1972.
  
- Hope Edelman says
  November 26, 2019 at 2:37 pm
  
  Love you right back, Mary. It sounds like reading the book reactivated a long-buried trauma for you that your little self found too big to face and that it surged up again in adulthood. (This is very common.) Therapy, EMDR, and EFT can help a great deal with stabilizing the trauma but it needs to be a practitioner who’s well versed in this kind of bereavement experience. You HAVE been forever altered. Early loss does that to us, no doubt. But I believe in my heart that we all have the capacity to feel whole, at any age. I’ve seen incredible things happen at Motherless Daughters Retreats, even among women who are 70+. Please try to come to one if you can…and let us know if the cost is an issue, as we do often have scholarship funds available. Sending a big hug to you & yours for the holidays.