Motherless Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page A

understand a central rule of grief: The more you avoid mourning, the tighter it sticks to you. The only way to release it is to grit your teeth and feel the pain.
    By the time I had figured this out I was several years out of college, working for a magazine in Knoxville, Tennessee. The company had its offices in a twelve-story red brick building, a former hotel where both Hank Williams and Alice Cooper’s boa constrictor were rumored to have spent their final nights. The building was on a main thoroughfare downtown, next to a high-tech, mostly vacant, mostly glass skyscraper built by the notorious Jake Butcher, who was then doing time in jail. I tell you all this because position will be important. In front of the Butcher Building was a traffic light and a crosswalk, which I used when I crossed Gay Street every day.
    A perverse sort of history had settled on this block, which may or may not have had something to do with what I experienced there
the autumn after I turned twenty-four. I hadn’t been having a very good year. In May I abruptly ended an engagement to a man I’d deeply loved, and my world turned painfully inside out. I tried to fix it by jumping into bed with another man, who was wise enough to walk out on me by summer’s end. Two weeks later I got caught in the middle of a Southern bar brawl that landed me in the emergency room with a split lip and a bump the size of a golf ball on the crest of my head. Things, you might say, were getting out of control. I was living alone on two acres in a small white house I could barely afford to maintain, and that season, escape was on my mind. I was considering graduate school in Iowa, the Peace Corps, and a vegetarian commune in central Oregon, in no particular order of preference. Worried I would scare away my friends with this litany of woe, I spent most of my time alone on my land with a noncommittal kitten I often turned to for advice. In the evenings when I felt lonely I walked across the street to pick wildflowers and play with my neighbors’ goats and sheep. I’m sure that part sounds idyllic, but the truth is, I was scared. There was no one to take care of me but me, and I didn’t feel up to the job.
    By mid-October, I was oversleeping and getting to work late every morning, taking two-hour lunches, and crossing Gay Street several times a day. On this particular afternoon I was returning from the post office, and as I reached the middle of the crosswalk I looked up. A cloud passed just then, and I saw the midday sun bounce sharply off one of the glass panels of the Butcher Building. Or should I say I felt it? Like a size-twelve work boot kicked into my gut I felt it, and I clutched my stomach, unable to breathe. The light turned green and cars started honking; a few drove around me; someone leaned out of a truck window and shouted, “Hey, you! Are you okay?”
    I was not okay. I was definitely not okay. All I could think as I stood there holding myself was, “I want my mother. I want my mother. I want my mother, now. ”
     
    From what depths did I dredge up that one? I hadn’t allowed myself to miss my mother once in the seven years since she’d died. Instead, I’d spent that time convincing myself I conveniently didn’t need the one thing I didn’t have, and that my freedom and independence were
an unfortunate but much-cherished outcome of my early loss. With the kind of cocky certainty usually reserved for either the very young or the very naive, I’d decided by twenty-four that I’d already sailed through the five stages of grief so neatly outlined in the pamphlet the hospital social worker pressed into my palm as my mother had lain dying in a room down the hall.
    Denial, anger, bargaining, disorganization, acceptance. It had sounded simple enough to me then, a straightforward five-step ascent to normal life again. The night before my mother died I’d broken down and prayed, asking God to accept a clean trade. Although I’d never seriously