Motherless Daughters Read Free

it.

    While all this was undeniably helpful for families in the midst of losing mothers, it was somewhat less useful for readers of Motherless Daughters, whose losses had occurred ten, twenty, and in some cases forty years in the past. These women had grown up surrounded by more rigid ideas about bereavement. Most had been discouraged from ever talking about the loss. Many years later, they were still experiencing residual effects of loss—not only as a result of the death, but also from their families’ and communities’ responses (or nonresponses) to their needs.
    As adults who’d experienced loss as children, they didn’t yet have a niche in the bereavement support field. They’d call local hospices, looking for support groups, only to be told they didn’t qualify because their loss had occurred too long ago. Or they’d join bereavement groups, to discover that everyone else was in the acute phase of a recent loss. Other group members couldn’t relate to, and became deeply troubled by, the idea that a daughter could still be mourning a mother a decade or more after she’d died.
    Fortunately, quite a lot has changed since then, too.
    Motherless Daughters groups, dedicated to bringing support and services to girls and women whose mothers have died, now exist in more than a dozen locations, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, all run by volunteers. Two nonprofit organizations have incorporated: Motherless Daughters of Orange County, in Irvine, California, and Circle of Daughters outside Buffalo, New York. The Internet has also become a significant form of support, connecting thousands of motherless women through message boards and chat rooms worldwide. Online memorials for mothers who’ve died have become so pervasive that a group of psychologists even conducted a research analysis of the phenomenon. Expansion within the children’s bereavement community over the past twelve years has been equally as exponential. The Dougy Center Web site now lists more than 370 children’s grief centers in the United States and seven other countries. There’s also a National Alliance for Grieving Children forming to help educate and provide resources for grieving children, families, and bereavement professionals throughout the United States.

    The highly publicized deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1996 and Princess Diana in 1997 also focused the country’s attention on maternal death, and on the well-being of the children left behind. As Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., a bereavement expert and the author of Never Too Young to Know, has written, the whole “death system” in the United States is changing as the culture becomes ready to hear about dying and mourning, due in large part to television and print media coverage of loss events. One need only remember the outpouring of televised, national grief after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the newspaper memorials printed for each victim, to understand the effect the media has on the culture of grief.
    The attacks of September 11, perhaps more than any event in the past thirty years, thrust grieving and parent loss into the forefront of national consciousness. At least 2,990 children and teenagers lost a parent in New York City or Washington, D.C., that day, 340 of whom lost mothers. Six years earlier, more than 200 children had lost one parent and 30 children lost both in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. 1 Due in large part to these two attacks, “traumatic bereavement” has become a distinct field within children’s grief counseling, as the particular needs of children and teens who lose parents to sudden, violent causes have become known.
    The means by which children are losing mothers has changed in both predictable and unanticipated ways over the past ten years. Accidents and cancer are still the leading causes of death among women ages eighteen to fifty-four, but the U.S. cancer