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“When one parent dies, the world is dramatically altered, absolutely, but you still have another one left. When that second parent dies, it’s the loss of all ties, and where does that leave you? You lose your history, your sense of connection to the past. You also lose the final buffer between you and death. Even if you’re an adult, it’s weird to be orphaned.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the doctor’s office was to me. Whether she actually would have flown in to act as baby nurse or mailed me cotton balls and calamine lotion if she were alive isn’t really the issue. It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“These things will be hard to do, but you can do hard things.”
― Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed
― Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed
“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?”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
“My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air. It leaves no room for anyone else. Grief and I are left alone a lot. We smoke cigarettes and we cry. We stare out the window at the Chrysler Building twinkling in the distance, and we trudge through the cavernous rooms of the apartment like miners aimlessly searching for a way out . . . Grief is possessive and doesn’t let me go anywhere without it. I drag my grief out to restaurants and bars, where we sit together sullenly in the corner, watching everyone carry on around us. I take grief shopping with me, and we troll up and down the aisles of the supermarket, both of us too empty to buy much. Grief takes showers with me, our tears mingling with the soapy water, and grief sleeps next to me, its warm embrace like a sedative keeping me under for long, unnecessary hours. Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.”
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
― Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss
Michele’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Michele’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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