Michele King

“You’re driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, ‘Goddamn it. What gives you the right to laugh?’ Because nothing has happened to them. You don’t understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

“When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

“she loses not only her mother but also the encouragement and revalidation of the self she needs as well as the real sharing she would want to do with her mother at that time.” It”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

“I knew without doubt that my mother’s death had irrevocably altered who I was and who I would become. When a parent dies young, explains Maxine Harris, PhD, in The Loss That Is Forever, children have a personal encounter with death that influences the way they see the world for the rest of their lives. “Some events are so big and so powerful that they cannot help but change everything they touch,” she writes. How could all my thoughts and feelings, then, not be traced back to the event that had created such a jagged fault line through my history, dividing it into a permanent Before and After?”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss