Elaine

“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.”
― Hope Edelman, 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.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss

“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, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. The result? A sense of inner fragility and overriding vulnerability. She discovers she’s not immune to unfortunate events, and the fear of subsequent similar losses may become a defining characteristic of her personality.”
― Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss