Daughters Reflecting on the Death of their Mother

My son recounted to me an exchange he had with a cashier in a local store surrounding a Mother's Day card. It went something like this:

Cashier: Is this card for your mom?

Son: Yep.

Cashier. I don't have a mom anymore. She's been gone for two years.

Son: Oh…my mother is…. I'm sorry.

A simple exchange between two people filled with vulnerability, longing, and the shared awareness of the uniqueness of the life and death of our mother in our lives.

As Mother's Day celebrations approach each year, it can be unsettling for women who experienced the death of their mother three months, three years, or even 30 years ago. This loss leaves an empty place in a heart and at the table.  

What does a woman do with the death of her mother that has its uniqueness? A woman may experience several different responses to such grief all on the same day.

What Are the Grief Responses?

Denial Daughters 

This response moves beyond the pain, grief, and anger so quickly that they negate their mothers entirely. Their life stories become, "I had a mother. She's dead. I've moved on." The result is a kind of motherless martyrdom that focuses on absence.

Suppression Sisters 

This response distances the challenging emotional territory for fear that sadness will overwhelm them. They're embarrassed by their grief and concerned that their friends will judge them as depressed, weak, or emotionally crippled. So they avoid the very memories that have the power to heal them.

Runaway Daughters 

This response determines that they will not face their grief for many reasons: the relationship was too complicated, or they are afraid of the emotional pain. Instead, they feel if they explore and express their grief and life moves on. They believe that it is impossible to resolve a conflict with someone who died before they got the relationship straightened out. 

Mourners 

This response understands that something significant has happened: someone who was here and impacted a daughter's life in meaningful ways, whether wonderful or difficult, is gone. It's okay to long; it's okay to be sad; it's okay to feel all those feelings. However, mourners discover that through their grief, there are ways that they may continue a bond with their mother that moves them forward to a place of being able to remember her but with less pain.

A New Hope in Grief

Moving towards becoming a "mourner" for our mothers may be painful and take a good amount of heart work. However, mourners recognize that their grief cannot be wrapped up easily by following a prescriptive and linear approach to their grief. It is time to abandon the paradigm of grief many know as "the stages of grief." Instead, they realize that their grief is an experience that connects with all of who they are: intellectually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In short, it changes who they are in both expected and unexpected ways.  

And yet: For mourners who know Jesus Christ, there is a new hope that is an anchor for their soul as they grieve. 

In the gospel of John, Jesus encounters Martha a few days after Lazarus has died. In their exchange, Jesus points her beyond her grief and suffering to look beyond her heartbreaking circumstances. Jesus offered her more than just wishful thinking. He pointed the grieving sister to the one thing that would guide her grief that day and in the days to come. He pointed her to Himself because that is where new hope would be found.

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25-26) 

That was the real question for Martha. Her response was clear and immediate. "Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world." (John 11:27)

At that moment, did Martha know what that meant for her and her grief? Perhaps she did in a small way. So Jesus asks someone whose heart is aching from grief the same question: Do you believe this? 

Whatever the circumstances as a daughter grieves her mother's death, the most important thing she can do is find that the hope that Jesus offered to Martha that day is the same hope He also offers to her in her grief today.  

"Memory in the Mirror" is offered by New Hope Grief Care, a ministry of Christ Church Memphis Care Ministries.