Motherless Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page B

of time. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, so popular as a bereavement model in the 1980s and 1990s, were originally developed for terminally ill patients receiving news of their grim diagnoses, not for the family members they would leave behind. (One grief counseling Web site now suggests renaming them “The Five
Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News” and ditching them as a bereavement model because they’ve done mourners more harm than good.) I prefer J. William Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning: accepting the loss (task I); dealing with the reality of the loss (task II); adjusting to the new environment (task III); and emotionally relocating the lost loved one (task IV). But truly, I’ve found there are really only two stages of grief that matter: the one in which you feel really, really bad, followed by the one in which you feel better. The transition from one to the other is bound to be slow, sloppy, and emotional, and neither has hard-and-fast rules.
    Expecting grief to run a quick, predictable course has led us to overpathologize the process, making us think of it as something that, with proper treatment, can and should be “fixed.” As a result, we begin to view normal responses as indicators of serious distress. The woman who cries every Christmas when she thinks of her mother—is she really a woman who can’t let go of the past, or just a woman who continues to miss her mother’s warmth and cheer at holiday time? And who can count the number of friends and coworkers who expected our mourning to be contained within the confines of those magical six-month or one-year bookends? How many of us came to expect that of ourselves? The messages that so frequently leaked through other people’s words as the summer of my mother’s death melted into autumn and the snow began to fall became exactly the ones I used to criticize myself: It’s been six months already. Get on with your life. Get over it. I tried. I really tried. But it’s impossible to undo fifteen or twenty years of learned behavior with a mother in only a few months’ time. If it takes nine months to bring a life into this world, what makes us think we can let go of someone in less?

Ready or Not, Here It Comes
    Psychologists debated for decades whether or not children and adolescents have the capacity to mourn the death of a loved one. Unlike adults, who invest emotion in several different people they can depend on—spouses, lovers, children, close friends, and themselves—kids typically direct it all toward one or both parents. When a
daughter says, “My mother’s early death completely pulled the rug out from under me,” she’s not exaggerating.
    Most bereavement specialists now agree that fully adapting to the loss of a parent requires elements most young children don’t have: a mature understanding of death; the language and encouragement to talk about their feelings; the awareness that intense pain doesn’t last forever; and the ability to shift their emotional dependence from the lost parent back to the self before attaching to someone else. These capacities develop and accumulate as a child grows, like a train that picks up a new passenger at each stop, and she may have very few riders at the time a parent dies.
    This doesn’t mean children can’t mourn at all; they just do it differently than adults. Their process is more protracted, extending over the course of their development as their cognitive and emotional abilities mature. A five-year-old who believes death is an extended form of sleep may, in her eleventh year, finally understand that death means her mother is never coming back. She’ll then have to work through the sadness and anger that arise with this new realization, even though she’s six years past the actual loss.
    The best example of this process I’ve come across is a story from twenty-year-old Jennifer, who was four when her mother committed suicide. As a young child, Jennifer knew only the most