by Hope Edelman
The immediate shock, disbelief, and disorganization that follow the sudden death of a loved one often force mourning into a holding pattern until family members can process the circumstances surrounding the loss. When a daughter’s assumptions about the world as a safe, nurturing place are shattered in an instant, she has to restructure her beliefs and rebuild some of her faith before she can devote much energy to accepting her mother’s absence. We mourn only when we feel stable and secure enough to relinquish some control—not when we’re anticipating another blow from behind.
Donna, twenty-six, remembers the seventy-mile-an-hour car ride she made through San Francisco to reach the hospital after she heard her mother had committed suicide. “I ran into the emergency room,” she recalls. “I was running on adrenaline. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t speak beyond saying, ‘I’m Donna Barry. Where’s my father? ’ The nurse walked me back into the room, and I saw my mother lying there with the tube in her mouth and the tape on her face. My dad was sitting next to her, holding her hand and crying. I turned around and started punching the nurse. I was a basket case. Reality had not hit, and it didn’t hit until months afterward. I knew my mother was gone, but there was still this idea that maybe she’d come back. I kept having dreams that I’d see her again. People kept saying, ‘How are you?’ after she died. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ and they’d say, ‘Donna, you have to.’”
To outsiders, Donna’s initial coping behaviors may have resembled denial, but as Therese Rando explains, this immediate response to sudden death is more a sense of disbelief. “When somebody dies suddenly, you don’t have time to gradually shift your expectations, to tell yourself, ‘Well, next Christmas she’s not going to be here,’ or ‘She won’t be here when I walk down the aisle,’” she says. “Instead, everything is gone all at once, and you cannot bend your mind around the idea that fast. There’s been such an assault on the way you’ve conceptualized your world, which includes that person. And especially with your mother. Your mother is your mother. How can she not be here?”
Sudden deaths, more than any other form of loss, teach children that relationships are impermanent and liable to end at any time, an awareness that can dramatically shape their emerging personalities. Carla, forty-four, says she delayed marriage and childbirth until her forties because she spent her twenties and thirties afraid to form lasting attachments. The deep rejection and abandonment she felt at the age of twelve when her mother committed suicide, and again three years later when her father did the same, made her terrified of losing another loved one without warning. “Since my parents’ deaths, I’ve lived a life in which I always felt calamity might be lurking around every corner, and that some terrible loss might come at any moment for which there is no preparation and no defense,” she explains. Today, Carla is a successful professional, a wife, and the mother of two. But her childhood experiences made it hard for her as an adult to understand that others intend to stay.
Losing a parent to suicide is one of the most difficult types of death a child can experience. It’s sudden and usually unexpected, it often involves violence, and even daughters who understand the part mental illness and depression often play still experience suicide as a clearcut and real rejection. “To a child, parental suicide is a ‘fuck you,’” Andrea Campbell explains. “It’s an ‘I can’t live for you. I can’t stay alive for you. You may hurt, but I hurt more.’”
A mother’s suicide leaves a daughter to contend with a complex array of emotions, including heightened anger, guilt, and shame; lowered self-esteem; shattered self-worth; feelings of inadequacy, deficiency, and failure; fear of intimacy; and an eroded capacity to trust that this type of rejection won’t happen again. Therapists have observed that among young children, poor school performance and eating and sleeping disorders are typical symptoms, whereas older children are more likely to act out with drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, social withdrawal, or aggression. Child survivors also may exhibit posttraumatic behaviors such as distortions of memory when asked to recall the death; the belief they will die young; a collapse of earlier developmental skills; and a tendency to repeat the trauma through dreams, nightmares, and play. And all this takes place in a cultural milieu that typically projects shame and guilt onto the family members left behind, no matter how young.
“After I figured out that my mother had killed herself, whenever I heard the word suicide, I felt embarrassed,” remembers twenty-year-old Jennifer, who was four when her mother died. “I don’t even think I knew exactly what the word meant, but anytime anyone mentioned it, I could just feel my face get warm from my collar up. I was always afraid somebody was going to turn around and say, ‘You! You’re the one whose mom killed herself!’”
When the psychologists Albert Cain and Irene Fast, two early researchers of parent suicides, studied forty-five children between the ages of four and fourteen who were being treated for psychological disturbances after having lost parents to suicide, they found that guilt was a predominant response and that questions such as “Why couldn’t I save her?” and “Did I cause her despair?” were common. They also discovered that few surviving parents had discussed the suicide with their children, and some overtly refused to talk about it. In one-fourth of Cain and Fast’s case studies the child had witnessed some aspect of the suicide yet was told that the parent had died some other way—an additional reason why parental suicide often destroys a child’s basic sense of trust.
Cain and Fast also found that child survivors occasionally, in adolescence or adulthood, identified with the parent to such an extent that they repeated the mother or father’s suicidal act. In some instances the parallels were striking, such as the eighteen-year-old girl who drowned herself alone at night at the same beach and in almost the same way as her mother had drowned herself many years before. Jennifer solemnly reports that in her family, which never openly discussed her mother’s death, that she and an older sister attempted suicide in their teens. When she was feeling depressed and isolated as a college freshman, Jennifer explains, suicide seemed a simple solution to her pain.
Other daughters develop isolated symptoms that relate to a mother’s suicide in some way. Margie, twenty-five, describes the chaotic scene that took place when she, as a seven-year-old, awoke in the middle of the night to her grandmother’s screams and learned that her mother’s body had just been found in the garage. “A main thing I remember from the rest of my childhood is this rigid fear at night, just lying in bed stiff and terrified out of my wits,” she recalls. “I think the fear came at night because I was so obviously alone then, and also because my mother died at night. I’ve been an insomniac for most of my life, which I’ve just recently connected with that.”
The violence or mutilation often involved in sudden deaths such as suicides, homicides, and accidents may consume a daughter’s thoughts, even invading her dreams, and often takes on elements more horrific in imagination than they were in reality. Children who witnessed or were physically involved in the death have another layer of distress added to their loss. Janine, thirty-nine, has no conscious memories of the automobile crash that killed her mother when she was twenty-one months old, even though she was sitting in the back seat. “But after I went off to college, I started to dream about the accident,” she says. “I still don’t know whether or not my images were real or just my imagination. I know some of it was fabrication, but I think I was having those dreams to try to live it, remember it, and put it to rest. I would dream I was in the front seat, and I would have feelings of suffocation and see red. I would imagine that my mother covered me with her body to protect me, and that’s why I felt suffocated. Of course, that’s not what happened, but I wanted her to have protected me. Then, in waking hours, when I would hear sirens or hear flashing lights, I would start to shake and get scared. I think it was sort of my way of saying, ‘You deserve some attention around this stuff.’”
Janine’s response may also have been a delayed form of posttraumatic stress
disorder, a syndrome that often afflicts accident survivors. Lenore Terr, M.D., a specialist on childhood trauma who studied the twenty-six children involved in the 1976 Chowchilla, California, school-bus kidnapping, found that terror, rage, denial, shame, guilt, misperceptions of the event both as it occurred and in memory; a sense of futurelessness; and recurring dreams were evidence of posttraumatic behavior. She found that many of the children’s posttraumatic fears remained literal, specific, and related to the kidnapping, such as the fear of vans (like the ones used by their kidnappers) and school buses (like the one that was hijacked). They also feared actions they associated with the initial trauma, such as slowing down on a road. Some of these fears, she discovered, lingered well into the children’s adulthood. The psychologist Lula Redmond observed similar characteristics in hundreds of family members who’d lost loved ones to homicide. Even when they hadn’t witnessed the death, children and adults nevertheless experienced nightmares, flashbacks, eating and sleeping disturbances, fear of strangers, irritability, and angry outbursts immediately following the murder, with some symptoms persisting for as long as five years.
In the aftermath of a homicide, blame, anger, fear, and fantasies of revenge often surge to the surface of a survivor’s psyche. The intensity of her responses may frighten a child, making her question her own stability and sanity. These emotions are further complicated when the child witnesses the murder or knows the aggressor. In 43 percent of all homicides in 2003, the victims knew their assailants, and more than 30 percent of all female victims were slain by husbands or boyfriends. Children of those women often lost two parents: one to death, the other to arrest or incarceration. One need look no farther than the night of Nicole Brown Simpson’s death in 1994, when her children sat in a police station for five hours, refusing candy, wondering why neither of their parents came for them, to imagine how terrifying such a scenario must be.
Because homicides are sometimes random and always violent, they leave survivors feeling particularly vulnerable and helpless. Children whose parents die this way may later need to collect as much information about the murder as possible, as horrific as some of those facts may be. Trying to find meaning and assigning blame act as important attempts to restore control, predictability, and justice in a daughter’s world.
Twenty-two-year-old Laura was nineteen when her mother was stalked, shot, and killed by an ex-boyfriend. When the case came to trial the following year, Laura decided to attend.
I tried to get through the whole trial, but I only made it through three days. The lawyers told me I could leave when they showed the pictures and evidence, but I said, “No, I want to see it.” I didn’t believe she was dead. I needed to see it. . .
Mark, the guy who killed her, got the maximum sentence, twenty-five years to life. I sat there and thought, “I’m looking at you, you son of a bitch.” When I said that, it wasn’t just me looking at him. It was me and my mom. While I was there, it was like my mom seemed to come through me. Or I pretended I was her, and her energy got in me. I didn’t have my own anger yet, but I had hers, so I pretended I was her. I sat in the back of the courtroom and twisted my hands like she did when she was angry.
By identifying with her mother this way, Laura could experience some of the intense emotion she’s just starting to work through in counseling today. Such delayed or protracted grief responses are often found among children who lose mothers to homicide. Counselors at the Dougy Center for Grieving Children in Portland, Oregon, have found that children who have lost a loved one to murder often say their feelings were “put on hold” until an investigation or trial ended, until the shock started to wear off, or because of confusion surrounding the facts. When police officers, journalists, lawyers, and judges typically become involved after a homicide, pertinent information about the death may be withheld pending trial. Many times, even when details are out in the open, kids aren’t told what has happened and are left to piece the story together on their own.
Furthermore, homicides, along with acts of terrorism and natural disasters, bring a family’s intensely private grief into the public eye, an experience that can both help and hinder a child’s recovery. Perhaps nowhere has this been more evident than among the nearly 3,000 children under the age of eighteen who lost parents in the attacks of September 11, 2001, about 340 of whom lost mothers, and the more than 200 children who lost a parent in the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing in 1995. News coverage and a period of national mourning can initially offer a sense of community and validation, but when the cameras stop rolling and the country moves on, the grief can be brutally isolating and intense.
Annual memorials, meant to commemorate the deceased, often serve to reactivate survivors’ grief. For the “9/11 kids,” as they’re called, every September now brings a flood of reminders—television specials, classroom discussions, magazine photos—of the horrific circumstances of their parents’ deaths. The annual publicity can interfere with a child’s ability to separate good memories of the parent from the tragic scene of his or her death, which is an important goal of mourning.
Children who lost parents in Oklahoma City and on September 11 have the difficult task of recovering from what’s known as “traumatic bereavement,” the devastating intersection of trauma and loss. Traumatic bereavement is likely to result when a death is sudden and unanticipated; when it involves violence, mutilation, or destruction; when it has an element of preventability and/or randomness; and when it involves massive or shocking multiple deaths. Survivors must contend with the dual demands of posttraumatic stress and grieving—an experience, Therese Rando explains, that’s much larger than the sum of its parts.
Conversely, the national attention focused on traumatic bereavement after the September 11 attacks gave some motherless daughters a public forum for discussing their losses for the first time. Thirty-seven-year-old Beatrice, who was eleven when her mother died in a commercial airline crash, always felt marginalized as a griever because of the dramatic and unusual circumstances of her mother’s death. Shortly after September 11, she was standing with a group of commuters at a train station discussing the horror of the attacks. “I said to someone, ‘I remember what it felt like when someone drove my mother’s car home from the airport, and how that was when I realized she was never coming back,’” she recalls. “I was never able to say something like that before in the course of conversation. September 11 normalized my experience somewhat. It made it seem less bizarre.”
Daughters who lose mothers to forms of sudden death often believe they could have prevented the tragedy if only they had been there, delayed her, apologized in time. Daughters may imagine themselves as key cause-and-effect players in events otherwise too arbitrary to comprehend. “Why hadn’t I heard her walk down the stairs?” wonders Alice, the 15-year-old narrator of Leslie Pietrzyk’s 2004 novel A Year and a Day, who loses a mother to suicide. “Why hadn’t I kissed her when I went to bed? I didn’t even have a bad dream that night; I didn’t get up for a glass of water. I went to bed and slept through the night like everything would be exactly the same in the morning. Why didn’t Mama come into my room and wake me up? I would have said something. One word might have been enough.”
This phenomenon is prevalent enough to be called the “if only” syndrome: “If only I’d asked my mother one more question before she walked out the door, she wouldn’t have been crossing the intersection at that precise moment” is the type of statement that allows a daughter to blame herself and impose a sense of order and control on an otherwise unpredictable world.
Sheila, who was fourteen when she found her mother dead from a heart attack one morning, says it took her more than ten years and several maturational phases to stop blaming herself for the death.
What haunted me for a long time was that I got there too late. My feeling that I could have saved her was focused on the moment that I found her lying in bed, and that if I’d gotten there earlier, she’d still be alive.
For months at a time
in high school, I wouldn’t allow myself to think about it. Then in college I was reading my abnormal psychology textbook and I saw a list of stress-related symptoms that could result in cardiac problems. I saw my mother had had many of them, and I decided I should have been able to see those things at fourteen and save her. And then I started fixating on the moment before her death. My brother was the last one to see her alive, and I thought maybe if it had been me, I would have known something was wrong, and we could have gotten her to a doctor in time.
Now, I still have a lot of anger and feelings of rejection and loss, but I don’t have as much blame. I accept things happen as they do, and people do the best they can, even though it’s not enough. That realization came when I began to understand that my father and stepmother, even though they weren’t the greatest parents to me, did the best they could. I really believe that on a level I didn’t before, and that makes a big difference for me. Emanating from that comes the realization that as a kid, I did the best I could do, and when I accepted that, I was able to step back further and say I couldn’t stop my mother from dying. I didn’t cause her to die, and I couldn’t have caused her not to die. I always knew I didn’t kill her, but I’d thought I should have stopped her. And finally, in my midtwenties, I realized that act wasn’t within what I had the power to do.
Many daughters who lost a mother to sudden death say the experience guided them into a new state of awareness. Having learned that life can end at any moment, they become determined to appreciate each moment for its beauty. They make sure they say “I love you” to their husbands and children before saying goodbye, just in case they never see them again. And in their attempt to attach a meaning to the loss, some of these women choose to view it as a necessary step in their personal journey. As twenty-five-year-old Heather, who was fourteen when her mother was murdered, explains:
