Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman Page A

“Because the parent was never known, the surviving child does not have the experience of being torn away from a parent who was loved and cherished,” explains Maxine Harris . These children have to contend with what’s known as “the absent memory,” the story of a mother whose face is neither remembered nor preserved in the family album. “Loss requires some prior relationship,” Harris writes in The Loss That Is Forever . “One can experience emptiness, however, when one has known only absence. For the survivors of the very early death of a parent, emptiness and void are inextricably tied with the enigmatic image of a parent they never knew.”
    Although young children’s capacity for memory and understanding is limited, as the British psychiatrist John Bowlby emphasized, it is not zero. He observed that children as young as one will look for a mother in the last place she appeared, and that this association may persist into adulthood. The daughter whose mother favored a particular wing chair, for example, may continue to look toward that chair longingly as she grows up, and associate such chairs with desire or distress as an adult.
    A woman who was a toddler when she lost her mother may be able to recall specific tactile or visual images—such as hair, hands, or skin—that she associates with her mother. Amanda, thirty-three, who was separated from her mother at the age of three when her parents divorced, says she’s still not sure whether some of her early memories of her mother are real or imagined. “In my twenties, I started asking my father about places and people I remembered, and he’d say, ‘Well, that sounds pretty accurate,’ or ‘That doesn’t sound right to me,’” she recalls. “Once, I remembered her taking her hair and rubbing it on her face, and he remembered that about her, too. It blew me away, because it was like this hidden, weird thing that I did. Whenever I was under stress, I would play with my hair and pull it.”
Discovering this connection, small as it may be, Amanda says, helped her feel closer to the mother she never expects to see again.
    The trauma of separation often illuminates a particular scene or event and fixes it in a young child’s memory. Women who were three or four when their mothers died report having fairly detailed memories of particular events. Although toddlers don’t yet fully understand death, and typically won’t for at least another five or six years, they can sense when something has gone seriously wrong, often from interpreting the responses of those around them. If a child of this age is left alone with her confusion, certain memories may continue to trouble her for years after the actual event.
    Claudia, forty-one, who was four when she lost her mother, remembers the night her mother died, the casket in the home, the funeral, and the burial. “I remember going to the interment, and standing over the grave,” she says. “It seemed like it would never stop when they were lowering the casket. I wondered how deep they were going to put her. They gave us flowers to put in, and when I walked over to put mine in, the hole was so deep. I felt like I should jump in. I didn’t, but really I wanted to jump in with her. That’s what I felt.” The moment left such an emotional imprint on Claudia that she refused to return to the cemetery for more than twenty years, until her father died. As she stepped up to the family plot again, the sadness and fear she’d felt at the age of four returned. “My aunt touched me on my back and said, ‘Go ahead, baby. Go ahead. Put the flower on his casket,’” she recalls. “I didn’t want to do it, because I could remember looking into that hole before. I didn’t want to get near it. So I went up very quickly, put the flower in, and rushed back.”
    Young children are totally dependent on someone to help them through the intricate maze of early developmental skills and to offer encouragement and support. This