Many women feel that the emptiness left by the loss of a mother can never be filled.

When Hope Edelmann was 17 years old, her mother died. Her subsequent struggles with a grief that was “non-linear”, a pain that ebbed and flowed but never went away, inspired her book, Motherless Daughters. In it, she interviews dozens of women for whom Mother’s Day is an exquisitely painful reminder of the precious time they had with their mothers. It is also, however a reminder of what they have lost.

Her book opens with a woman on Mother’s Day recognising those feelings.

She says: “I’m sitting here alone on Mother’s Day. I am 23 years old. My mother died 10 years ago when I was 13. There is an emptiness inside of me, a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does… I will never be loved that way again.”

Edelman identifies powerfully with those feelings. She says: “Losing my mother wasn’t just a fact about me. It was the core of my identity, my very state of being.” She wrote her book in part to come to terms with her grief.

A different way to look at grief

C.S. Lewis, in his book A Grief Observed says: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning, I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me.”

And while grief may not remain forever in the intense stage described by C.S. Lewis, Edelmann’s book was one of the first to recognise that some types of grief just don’t go away. There may be no end point to it, no landmark at which you can look back and say, “that’s when I moved on”.

She explains “When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends. This is something that motherless women have always intuitively known, although in 1994 [when she wrote the book], it wasn’t yet a widely accepted idea.”

The prevailing view then was that grief was something to get over. Sigmund Freud himself was a subscriber to the idea that people should let go of grief, until he lost his favourite grandchild. He later wrote that the ongoing pain was, “the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish”.

After her mother died, Edelmann went to college, then travelled. But she came to understand that that grief could not be so easily outrun or bypassed; it followed her. “Wherever I travelled,” she says, “I carried with me a sadness that I couldn’t leave behind, no matter how forcefully I tried. Someone dies, you cry and then you move on…. It would take me seven years to 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.”

Mother’s Day can be a harsh reminder for those who have lost their mother.

When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends

She says she discovered that grief is not predictable. “It’s anything but smooth and self-contained. Someone did us all a grave injustice by first implying that mourning had a distinct beginning, middle and end. That’s the stuff of short fiction. It’s not real life.”

Dr Rita Bonchek, a psychologist specialising in grief agrees. She wrote: “The topic of death causes discomfort so people do not think about or discuss the subject. The bereaved are often encouraged to put the occurrence in the past. What is not appreciated is that death doesn’t end a relationship that lives on in the mind of the survivor.”

So mourning for a mother may change but never end. Even after many years, while there may not be active grieving, there are what one child told Bonchek were “mummy-missing feelings”. And those feeling are intensified at particular events such as weddings, graduations, births and yes, Mother’s Day.

No silver linings…. but a little hope

Edelmann gives us hope that losing a mother may bring strength to certain aspects of our lives. She says that it helps her to identify with other women in the same boat. “Mother loss is a great equaliser among women, as if the core identity issues it creates cut straight through the superficial variables that might otherwise define us.”

And it has given her a strong sense of her own mortality, meaning that she appreciates the small moments in each day. For that reason, she has a particularly powerful desire to be a good mother to her own children, to give them something that she never had.

I ultimately learned to treat the actual day, Mother’s Day, as a day of celebration for my mother

She has found that to be a motherless daughter is to, “know the grit of survival, to hold an insight and maturity others did not obtain so young, and to understand the power of renewal and rebirth”. She goes on: “We have learned something from mother loss – lessons that perhaps no child or adolescent should have to learn, but valuable lessons nonetheless. We have learned, if nothing else, how to take responsibility for ourselves.”

Coping with M-Day

In an article in the Huffington Post, Jeryl Brunner sums up the Pandora’s Box that opens at dawn on Mother’s Day for those who have lost their mums. She says that when she sees the tacky adverts for Mother’s Day, she, “feels that same icky jolt that I first did …. when my mother’s death was just too new, too raw. Those ads are a harsh reminder that I’m pressed against the candy store window, watching, longing, still wondering why. How? How could my mother, so full of life, with so much left to do and give, have perished?”

Brunner says: “I ultimately learned to treat the actual day, Mother’s Day, as a day of celebration for my mother. I return to the spots in Central Park in New York, where we spent her last one. I try to eat her favorite mocha almond fudge ice cream. I follow the footsteps of our walks and I conjure all I loved about her: her velvety-smooth voice, the way she laughed with every last inch of her body. I imagine what she would love to do most, and then I combine the day with things I adore [theatre, dancing]. Last Mother’s Day I had a picnic with friends [one who had also lost her mother], in Central Park. We swapped photos, stories and treasured mementos.”

And Leann Schrieber sums the broad reach of losing a mother in her essay When a Parent Dies: “What I have learned from my friends is that a single death can transform your life, especially if the death is that of your mother or father. And it doesn’t matter whether that parent was beloved or resented, whether the relationship was close or distant, warm or cold, harmonious or hotly conflictual. It doesn’t even matter how old you are, or how old your parent was at the time of death. For most people, the death of a parent, particularly when the parent is of the same sex, is life altering.” Despite this, Schrieber notes that there is “little social recognition of parental death as a milestone of adult life”.

So while there’s no specific prescription that will get you through the day, Mother’s Day after a maternal death is a good time to mark that milestone; to recognise losing a parent as a life-changing experience, one to be examined, understood and above all felt.