Motherless Daughter: The Legacy of Loss

“The loss of the daughter to the mother; the mother to the daughter, is the essential female tragedy.”
— Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

It was January 30 and my 25th birthday. I was sitting here alone on this very special day of mine. My mother died almost seven years ago — I was 18. I was quite young and naïve. And nothing prepared me for the pain or the depth of the loss. Some people say it was easier for me to recover from the pain and loss at my age. But they were wrong. Until now I am still being haunted by the experiences of my mother’s death. The memories are still fresh and vivid in my mind.

After my mother’s death, my sister and especially my father had a nervous breakdown. They were both drastically depressed for a year, and now, thankfully, they have quite recovered. My younger siblings almost stopped going to school. Our businesses went bankrupt. We really sunk into financial crisis and there was even an unpaid debt. My father was no longer interested in finding means for our survival. We just relied on the “come what may” principle.

It tortured me a lot that I thought I wouldn’t be able to get over it, or be able to move on. I used to think that there was something terribly wrong with me and that this loss was visited upon me by some wretched twist of fate just to make me suffer. After this ocean of time has passed, tears sprang to my eyes in a moment when I remember her and the loss. I’ve felt guilty about the unhealed wound I carry, but the emptiness is real. The sense that I am “alone” (alone in a sense that I don’t usually confide with anybody more than with my mother), that death is inevitable, that I feel insecure in my friends relationship with their mothers, that I still search for her in so many ways and faces: these tell me the loss is real.

Thinking of becoming a mother in the years to come will be the most difficult area in which the loss will affect me, and which I have to face. The desire to remain the child in relationships, even parent-child, is a struggle to overcome. How does a mother act, anyway? How do I give wealth of love when I feel empty in the place where a mother’s love grows? How do I help my would-be-daughters feel good about their sexuality and womanhood when my mother died before I could learn these things from her? How could I convince them that I will always be here for them, that I won’t die before they’re ready, or ever, as they would wish? I know it wasn’t true for me…

I have reflected on the loss of my mother and tried to distance myself somewhat from the grief by trying to gauge its effect on my life as objectively as possible. This is effective when I am in my conscious self, but like most of us, a good deal of my time is spent in unconscious thought and choice, and they’re the grieving 18- year-old reigns.

Losing my mother has really affected my life drastically. Yet it molded me into a “tough” woman who could seemingly handle anything that was tossed her way. It also destroyed almost entirely my ability to trust. It has returned to haunt me when I sustained further loss of loved ones through death.

I truly believe that the depth of my mother’s death has made me what I am today. I am a survivor, mentally strong, determined, strong-willed, self-reliant, and independent. I also keep most of my pain, anger and feelings inside. I refuse to be vulnerable to anyone, especially to the opposite sex.

And that nameless, elusive and simply terrible feeling of hopelessness has been with me since. Even after 25 years of “living with my loss,” there is a general, chronic melancholy that has been inexplicable to me, much less anyone else.

There is emptiness inside of me — a void that will never be filled. No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no pure, unconditional and strong as a mother’s love. And I will never be loved that way again.