Hope Edelman

TWENTY YEARS AGO, THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR WROTE THE BOOK ON HEALING AFTER THE LOSS OF A MOTHER AT A YOUNG AGE. TODAY, SHE IS OLDER THAN HER MOTHER LIVED TO SEE, BUT THE GRIEF FOLLOWS HER AND VISITS HER LIKE A NEW, OLD FRIEND.

The conversation begins here:

I was taken aback a bit when I read in your book that a psychologist, maybe 50 years ago, questioned if children and youth are capable of being grief stricken. That seemed unbelievable. Human nature hasn’t changed so what made us, as a culture, finally decide to start taking care of our kids?

That’s a good question. We could say we’re going through a national trauma right now. There are  more than 750,000 people who’ve died of Covid to date and we’re not having the same kind of response that occurred after 9/11, when there was a surge of patriotism and everyone coming together against a perceived common enemy. Our perceived enemy now is a virus that a third of the population, or close to it, doesn’t believe is really as harmful as it is. 

I’m going to go back a little bit and talk with you about the history of grief theory, because I think that’s relevant. Back in the 19th century, grief was very much considered a social and communal experience. People came together, they mourned together, they supported the grievers. If you look at the Victorian mourning rituals they were very elaborate. The way people decorated the front door told you if a family was in mourning. Those people were handled more gently in the community. You could look at them and know that they were in mourning particularly by the way they dressed. The men wore black arm bands. The women went from black clothing to gray and purple, for high mourning and low mourning. We don’t have any of that today.

Part of the reason these rituals disappeared is because of the one-two punch of World War I followed by the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 to 1919. Too many people were dying very quickly. During World War I people were dying far from home. We couldn’t have funerals with a body because people were buried at the battlefields overseas.  And with the Spanish flu pandemic, there was so much death that if people adhered to the existing mourning rituals they would constantly be in mourning. They would’ve been mourning for two or three people at once. It also coincided with the rise of psychoanalysis and Freud’s work on mourning, where it was described as an individual interior process. This was also happening as modernism came along, which was all about progress and efficiency and getting people back to work quickly for productivity. And feminism, where women were saying they don’t want to be responsible for all of the family mourning rituals. And the medicalization of death where it was moved from the home to the hospital and taken out of the religious community and undertakers into more commercial and professional funeral homes.

So all of that happened at the same time. There wasn’t one reason, it was a convergence of events. We went through that sort of as a spin cycle. and got spit out on the other side with very truncated mourning rituals and the belief that grief happens in a sequence of stages. That it is an individual interior process. We really lost the sense of communal support. 

So that existed well into the 1960s and 1970s. But around the late 1980s, early 1990s, another shift started to occur. Grief began to be viewed again as a relational process. Meaning, in relation with other people, but also in relation to the departed loved ones. Part of the idea with the psychoanalytic model of grief is that we have to break bonds with the past. We have to detach from our loved ones. We have to get over it, we have to move on, we have to leave them behind. A huge movement started around the early 1990s, which was called “continuing bonds.” Psychologist began noticing that—especially because they were noticing it in children at the Harvard Children Bereavement Study, this is the work of Bill Worden and Phyllis Silverman—they noticed that those kids were staying attached to the parents who died. Internally, they were still having relationships with them. And then they noticed that the surviving spouses were also finding a way to stay connected to the loved ones who had died. And then other psychologists started noticing this among their clients and asking questions and discovering that pretty much everyone was doing this. They just weren’t talking about it, because they had been taught that was an aberrant way to grieve.

“Now in grief there are new ideas: let’s find ways to stay connected to our loved ones who died. We have to have a new kind of inner relationship with them that we can carry forward. All that was happening right before 9/11. ”

Coincidentally, I was working on “Motherless Daughters” from 1991 to 1993 and the book came out in 1994. So it was part of that movement, though I didn’t know it at the time. “Motherless Daughters” was also all about how you don’t ever get over the death of a mother. How we learn to integrate it and carry it forward. It was a radical position to take at the time. Because I really thought, because I’d been marinated in the five stages of grief myself, that I would write this book and tell them how to get over the death of their mothers. As I started interviewing them I discovered no one was getting over it; they were still carrying this wound decades later but they had learned how to live with it. Some of them had even figured out how to leverage it into a sense of individual personal meaning and purpose. But they still went through cycles where they would have these grief spikes years or even decades later. So that was described in “Motherless Daughters” and it became part of that movement. 

Regarding 9/11, I also think, as with any nation under attack, we rallied together and we thought of all those people as innocents. They all died at once and on the same day, so that was another big shock to the system. I am intrigued and mystified why we are not having the same collective response to Covid deaths because so many more people have died. It’s been over an 18-month period, but you would still think that a culture that had at least started to offer and understand the importance of grief support back in 2001 would be rallying to the cause in 2020 and 2021. We are seeing a lot of activity in the bereavement community itself, trying to get those services out there. But it’s a slow moving ship to get people to understand that grief is something they can talk about—that these uncomfortable feelings are important to process. and that doing it in a social setting is one of the most beneficial ways to be able to carry your story forward.

Would you agree that perhaps some of this attitude about this pandemic, maybe some minds would be changed, if the stories were told more publicly? Creating some empathy and making others think well maybe this is a little bit more than what I thought. 

It’s possible, you know, when we see someone on the news or on Twitter telling the detailed story of a loved one who suffered or died. Covid deaths have happened on such a mass scale, it becomes theoretical. We are still losing something like 2,000 people a day and you know, people are saying, “Well it’s less than last year.” What are we thinking? That’s 2,000 people a day! A Penn State study said that for every Covid death there are nine close loved ones who will mourn. So 2,000 deaths a day means 18,000 mourners are being created every day in this country. That’s a staggering number. I am utterly perplexed at why there hasn’t been a greater cultural movement to not just offer broad support to these people but to try to prevent 18,000 new mourners a day in any way that we can. 

In your studies, have you seen something that you can pinpoint what makes it inappropriate to share [personal stories]?

I think it requires a willingness to be vulnerable in public. And [it’s] particularly difficult for men. I think it has to do with just the taboo and the fear of death itself. If only we knew what happened after we died. We have different pockets, you know, in this culture that have different belief systems. And some are fairly certain that they know what happens next and others are insistent that nothing happens, that we just enter the void. It’s an existential crisis to even think about it. There’s no discernible or definitive answer. And so I think when we see someone grieving because someone has died the observers then enter a state of discomfort themselves. It’s not hard to imagine being in that state yourself or your loved ones feeling that way about you. Death is the great mystery. It may be an incredible adventure. I don’t know, I don’t profess to have any idea. It’s so uncertain and unknown and ambiguous. We’re not a culture that’s good with ambiguity. I think we often just push away anything that reminds us of the ambiguousness of death. 

So we’re not there to support each other as mourners. And a lot of people are uncomfortable because they feel like they’re inadequate. They don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to do. This is where we find so many people sliding into platitudes that are incredibly unhelpful to a mourner. Like “She’s in a better place now” or any sentence that begins with “at least.” Like “At least she didn’t have to suffer” or “At least you got to say goodbye.” These are not helpful statements. For mourners, it all about just sitting and listening and saying, “What would you like to talk about?” “I’m here to listen.” or “I wish that I could lessen your pain. If there’s any way that I can do that, let me know.” Or just companioning them through grief. Even if it makes you uncomfortable as a listener. 

I’ve often read about being so overwhelmed and unprepared in a traumatic event or witnessing one, it paralyzes your brain and you just don’t know what to say or do. So we don’t. We don’t do anything. We don’t know how to deal with it anymore.

Because we internalized it so well. That coincided with the medical position of death, when it was taken out of the home and put into the hospital. People used to die at home, they were cared for by loved ones. They washed the body after death and laid it out in the parlor. Children grew up accepting death as a natural part of family life, and when it was removed and institutionalized and put in the hands of hospitals, doctors, medical establishments, and funeral homes, we lost the interpersonal connection with the death rituals. I think that’s a big part of it. It became something distant and scary. 

Mourning became pathologized at the same time. When my great grandmother lost her mother in the late 19th century, it’s hard to imagine that people told her she was grieving right or wrong. There hadn’t been studies on what was pathological or not. But starting around the 1940s and moving forward in the U.S. and in the western world—and most of what I’m talking about is in Western culture—there began to be studies on how people mourned. We started seeing terms like “absence of mourning,” “pathological mourning,” “abnormal.” These were terms that had not been applied to grief or mourning before. So when you have someone who is in aberrant or abnormal grief, that implies there is a normal way to grieve. But the normal way to grieve in this culture was to get back to work quickly. Not show your emotions. To soldier up and press forward. There’s nothing normal about that behavior. It’s normalized in the culture so that those who were really having a hard time and really missing their loved one had to hide it, suppress it. They were labeled as a pathological mourner and that’s where things got really screwy. I thought that with Covid we might see some changes. I and a number of people I know in the bereavement world have been doing our best to try to contextualize what we’re seeing so that it’s not considered abnormal. I see small, small pockets of progress. But a very slow moving ship this culture, especially when they’re dealing with uncomfortable feelings. 

You were 14 when your mother passed?

I was 15 when my mother was diagnosed with cancer and it was late stage breast cancer. It had already spread far beyond the breast at that point and she lived for another 16 months. She died soon after my 17th birthday. It was the summer before my senior year in high school. Although she was dying for 16 months, the children in the family – and she – were told that she was getting better. So we all thought that this was a temporary state of being and that we’d go back to normal. It was a big shock to the children when she died. Her decline was a very, very steep decline. It happened in the course of about a week. And so it was traumatic in that respect. Even though it was a long-term illness, the kids experienced it more as a sudden death. So there was a lot of trauma around that, especially at the end, and as a result I barely remember anything from the fall semester of my senior year in high school. 

“I always wondered, Why do I have so much white space? Friends show me photos of parties I went to and things I did and I have no memory. It’s like looking at a stranger. I realize only now that that was a trauma response. ”

That I was traumatized and I probably wasn’t storing memories properly, which happens when you’re going through trauma. I can start remembering things more in the second semester and then towards the spring of my senior year. She died and it was 1981, and there was no grief support available in the community – nothing for children at all. My extended family was not particularly well-versed in how to handle three children who just lost their mother. We were living with our father, my parents were still married. but he had had very minimal input into child-raising. It was very much a traditional division of labor. Mom took care of the house and the kids, and dad went to work every day and earned the income. So it was a very bumpy adjustment period. 

My father also drank heavily, which created a complicating factor, and was very frustrated and angry about the position that he was in. That alienated him and us from other family members because he was very volatile. So we really had to struggle through this alone. A year later I went to college. I didn’t start doing grief work for about another six or seven years. I wound up in a writing program and I started writing essays about losing my mom and then decided to write a book about it. 

It’s funny, I was reading a journal the other day, and I’m not a consistent journaler, but I’ve had spurts where I have recorded long periods, months of my life. I was going through some journals in my office recently looking for something from 1985. And I decided, I’m gonna put all my journals in chronological order. There were around 20 notebooks. And I found one – I want to show it to you just because it’s fun, right? I just found this notebook, it says, “May 18, ‘91 to August 1, ‘91 plus some 1992.” I was journaling very extensively. But in 1991 I was in Iowa city in graduate school when I was visiting my mentor, my advisor. We were talking about me potentially writing a book. I was reading this [entry] where they all want me to write this book and  it says: 

“I said yes I want to do it but the amount of work it’s likely to entail completely freaks me out. At first I went around tasting the idea as it rolled off my tongue: I’m thinking of writing a book! A book! A book! But as I speak with more people and make more contacts, I feel myself gravitating closer and closer to it as a reality. Other people get excited [and] they start counting on me; that’s a part of it, too. It’s a little like breaking my engagement [which I had done a few years earlier]. Once I told so many people I was going to do it, I felt committed to doing it like a psychological set up to turn a difficult decision into an eventuality.”

So I see the genesis of this book. I obviously was ambivalent about doing it and I was right, it was a hell of a lot of work. But clearly I decided to do it. I sold “Motherless Daughters” when I was a graduate student and the very first edition came out spring of 1994. And that’s what launched my career. I have always wanted to be a writer. I didn’t set out to be a spokesperson for early loss. I was not intending to stay in the bereavement field. I just wanted to write a book that I thought would help women. I had a Master’s in Nonfiction. I thought I would teach writing. I was in love with the personal essay and short memoirs. But the response to that book was so enormous that it swept me away and I’ve been working in the bereavement field ever since. I’m fortunate to have, I think, the most passionate and grateful and generous readers that an author could hope for. I have made many, many friends within the community over the years and worked with thousands of women. Now I lead retreats and really get to know women in a very intimate fashion. I’ve been doing that since 2016. In 2015 I became a coach so that I could work one-on-one with women and anyone who has experienced early loss. The majority of my clients are women who lost their mothers because that’s what I was known for. I am still writing and I still teach writing, but that’s more my side hustle now. The bereavement work is really first and foremost, especially post-Covid because there’s such a need for it now. I feel like with the knowledge that I have and the experience that I’ve accumulated, how can I not be out there trying to reduce suffering in the world when there’s so much more of it than there was only a few years ago? 

When you were putting it out into the world that you were potentially going to write a book, did you know what the subject was going to be?

I did, yes. I was in a writing class at the University of Iowa with Mary Swander, who is a visiting professor. She has since become the poet laureate of Iowa. She is a novelist and a poet, a non fiction writer and now a podcaster. She was teaching a course on portraiture. We would spend the entire semester researching a writing about one person. It could be a creative portrait, it could be someone we know, or someone we didn’t know. If it was someone we didn’t know, it was more of a challenge but that was completely legit. We read Gay Talese’s “Portrait of Frank Sinatra,” Joan Didion’s “Portrait of John Wayne,” you know, we were to just pick someone who you wanted to spend some time with, someone who had had an influence on you. So, because his music had been the soundtrack of my adolescence growing up in New York, just over the New Jersey border, I started writing this portrait of Bruce Springsteen. But my high school boyfriend kept showing up in the stories and then I just started writing about our relationship. Then what came up was that I had started dating him about 10 months after my mother died and my attachment to him was very much a result of still being in active grief about the loss of my mom. Having no one to talk to about it, I started writing about my mother dying. I remember going to Mary’s office and saying, “Look I’m not even writing about Springsteen anymore, he’s barely a part of the story. Should I drop the class? Should I just write about Springsteen? What should I do?” She said, “No. You just keep going, you’re writing really good material. Just keep going.”

“I said, “This is the first time I’ve written about losing my mom. I’ve been looking for a book about mother loss but every damn book out there assumes that you’re in your 30s or 40s or 50s when your mother dies. Why don’t any of them write for those of us who were children or teenagers when our moms died? I’m getting to a point where I’m so fed up I think I should just write it myself!””

I’m not even sure I really meant it. But Mary said, “If you decide to do that, I will help you because I was 21 when my mom died and I took care of her myself.” I thought OK. I have my first advocate. 

Also, my mentor and my advisor, who is a man, had been orphaned at a young age so he understood the lifelong effects of losing a parent when you were young. He helped me write the book proposal. I went to the bookstore and literally bought a book called “How to Write a Book Proposal” and I just followed the guidelines. I wrote some sample chapters. Also, my boyfriend in grad school broke up with me that summer before Mary’s class, so I just holed up in my house so that I didn’t have to keep running into him and his new girlfriend in a small town and I wrote a book proposal. So, yeah, I knew what I wanted to write about. I was clear on that from the start and the original table of contents changed a bit, but it’s pretty close. 

Mary said, “Take your tape recorder and just go out and start interviewing people. Here’s how you can find people to interview. Here’s how you put the word out.” Women were so eager to tell their stories because no one had asked them. They had been silenced. Their stories have been suppressed. I remember that summer I was teaching high school students at the Northwestern University campus and I put up – before the Internet, which makes me feel like, you know, a relic – but I put up, on a bulletin board, sheets of paper with little pull tabs at the bottom. I put one up in a café and one up in a feminist bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. “I’m writing a book about women who lost mothers when they were younger. Share your story.” I biked back the next day and every tab had been pulled on both of those bulletin boards, and then the phone calls started coming in and loading up the answering machine, because we had answering machine tapes back then. This is like a historical document! And I biked all over Evanston that summer interviewing women. I went to peoples’ backyards and in cafés and in their living rooms, and I would just push play on my tape recorder. I didn’t even have to ask questions, the stories just poured out of them because they’ve been thinking about it and they’ve been living with it for so long and no one had given them permission to tell it. And they would say “That was so cathartic; thank you so much for listening.” and the stories were beautiful and detailed. So then I would transcribe them and read the stories and use inductive reasoning. I started saying, OK well you know here is a common theme, that should be a chapter, right? hat happens when you become a mother? That should be a chapter, and how it affects your female identity, that’s a chapter, and what age you were when your mom died – that’s really important, that should be its own chapter. And that’s how the table of contents came into focus.

One woman talked about how she stopped in the middle of a crosswalk and it hit her again and she couldn’t move. 

That was me. That happened in Knoxville, Tennessee. I had just ended an engagement to a man that I really loved and wanted to marry, but couldn’t. I was too young and there were complicating factors. But I was crossing the street and I remember the sun shining on the glass building in just the right way that it blinded me, and something about that moment just made me break down in the middle of the street sobbing. I was so sad about the end of the engagement but it brought up this resurgence of grief from my mom which I had not been willing to touch for seven years. And then I went to therapy for the first time to talk about losing my mother. 

So that was your moment. How many of those have you had in and as you go through milestones in your life. Those blinding moments? 

That’s a good question. I call those episodes “new old grief.” Which is when we experience an old loss in a new way and in that moment I think it was the break up of my engagement – at the end of my engagement where I felt I had a loss of a love relationship and felt abandoned and alone. Even though I was the one who made the decision, I felt so bereft. I had had  this love attachment and it was going to unravel now. And that was so reminiscent of how I felt when my mother died that it sent me back to re-grieve a huge piece of that loss. 

Another episode of new old grief I had was when I was shopping for my wedding dress. I was driving back from a doctors appointment and I was just passing a bridal store and I thought, I’ll stop in and see if they have any dresses there. And I went in and I found my dress and I tried it on and I was all alone and there were other women in there with their mom, and their aunts, and their sisters. And I was all alone. Another moment is when I became a mother. After my daughter was born, I looked at her through the eyes of a mother and I could feel maternal love. My mother’s first child was a girl and so is mine, and she’s named after my mother. I just felt so sad,  not for me – although I was kind of sad and angry that I didn’t have a mom to help me because all my friends in my yoga class, all their moms came in to help them and I had to figure it out on my own – but I was so sad that my mom didn’t get to meet her first grandchild and that my daughter would never know her grandmother in the physical world. So that was a big grief episode. 

Another episode of new old grief, a big one for me, was turning 42 The age that my mom died. That was hugely impactful. A lot of women will delay making plans or getting married or having children until after they pass that age because they want to make sure they’re going to survive beyond their mother’s age. I was really concerned that I would get breast cancer and die at 42 like my mom. So, turning 42 and then in that year, you know, being so vigilant and feeling so fragile and  vulnerable that whole year. Then turning 43 and passing her age and becoming older than her, that was big. Because you know when I was 17, 42 seemed old. I was like oh my mom, she went to college, she got married, she had children, she did all these things that seem so distant to me I didn’t have any concept of how incredibly young 42 is. How old are the two of you? Are you older than 42? Yes? It’s a freaking baby! To me she was so old and it’s so shifted my perspective, you know? I’ve lived 15 years past my mom now and it’s incomprehensible that I’m 15 years older than my mom got to be and I’m getting to have the female experiences later in life that she never got to have. Including divorcing, which was something that I think might have happened in her marriage had it continued because it was becoming troubled toward the end. I turned 42. I had a five-year-old and a nine-year-old. She also had a nine year old when she died. It made me so sad to realize how much life my mom had missed out on and how she  really only got to live half a life. That was soul crushing for me. So, that might have been my last big “aha” moment.

One of the women in your book who pulled that little tab said she spent so much time in her childhood being the girl who lost her mother in the town she lived in. The first time she went away, she lost that identity. 

You know it’sinteresting because we talk about this at the retreats. In my case, I didn’t want to be the girl who lost her mom, so I went to college and I didn’t even tell anybody that I lost my mom. At that age I wanted to be like everyone else. You don’t want to be an object of pity or be treated special. But there is also a subset of women for whom having lost her mom and gotten all that attention makes them feel very special, and it’s hard for them to let go of that feeling of being different, and because of that, it can often shape into feeling special and like you’re deserving of special treatment. When we leave Motherless Daughters retreats—and I say “we” because I always have a co-facilitator. Claire Bidwell Smith and I did the first eight of them together and then I’ve always had co-facilitators for the others,but when a motherless daughters retreat begins, in the past before Covid, we would have 23 to 26 women at a time. The story that they’ve been carrying for a long time was often: I’m all alone, nobody understands me, nobody knows what I’ve been through. That has become part of their identity—that they are different from other women in some way. And that when they walk into a room they are always the odd one out. Then they sit in the circle the very first night, and we go around and we do very light introductions, and then the next day we get into much  deeper story sharing. But you can watch their faces and their bodies change as they discover Oh, my story is going to have to change. I’m not gonna be able to say that nobody understands me anymore because now there are  25 other women in the room who actually do understand me. Their countenances  change and you can see  relief flood their bodies— and it’s beautiful to watch. They feel like Finally, I found my tribe. One woman at a retreat burst into tears and just said, “Where have you been all my life? Where have all of you been? I’ve needed you so much.” I get teared up even thinking about that. But we share with them or we impress upon them “your story is still unique. Nobody else shares your exact story.” But yeah, it’s an identity shift when they realize oh I am one of a group now. I’m not all alone in the world with my story and my pain. 

Once you realize this is part of my identity, what do you do with that? 

It’s a good question. Well, right before Covid we were starting to create continuation programs so that these women could continue getting to know each other, and a lot of them will go into volunteer work [for organizations that] may need this kind of personal support in order to be better mentors to young people or group leaders for young people. When you do the work on yourself, you process your own emotions and then you can be much more present for the children that you’re working with. So a lot of [the women] will go volunteer at bereavement centers. Some of them choose to write their stories. Every retreat group gets its own Facebook page where they can stay in touch and they often continue meeting. They do retreats together, they do reunions, they support each other in various ways. They go to each other’s weddings, they go to their baby showers, they send gifts. They still remain a support network even if it’s not on a daily basis. 

I’d like to rewind a little bit. You spoke about going from a clinical to a more emotionally supportive transition for kids these days, and now you think of it as more than just medical support. When did that change? And are they doing it right? 

Well, I’m not well-versed in how hospice is handling bereavement services because it’s so varied, it’s so different from place to place. But I can talk with you about grief centers, which started in the 1990s. The Dougy center in Portland started in the 1980s and that is still considered the flagship grief center in the United States. But it didn’t start helping other centers grow until I think about 8 or 10 years later. I did a really interesting podcast with the current Director of the Dougy Center, and she was about 12 when her mom died, and her father brought her to some of the first children’s grief groups at the Center. I believe her mother died the same year as mine, so we had an interesting conversation about what it was like to be a teenager who had gotten that grief support and then what it was like to be a teenager who hadn’t at the same time. She had gotten so much more right with her grief and had met other kids who were grieving the loss of a parent. She didn’t go through that intense period of feeling like she can’t talk about it and she’s all alone and that made a huge difference in her world. 

There still aren’t enough [grief support centers] because there isn’t one in every town. But now they’ve had to go virtual during Covid. They’re able to reach kids who are maybe a little bit outside of their geographic perimeter and who wouldn’t be able to come to in-person groups.  A lot of these places really do a good job training facilitators, laypeople to lead the groups—people who have been through grief themselves and understand the experience. [There’s] good supervision of those volunteers in many cases. I did a training at Our House , which is the big grief  center in Los Angeles. They did an excellent job with their training and helping the kids be in a group with other kids and see that they’re not alone. The programming is often very good – the way they ease the kids into talking to normalize and validate experiences for them so that they don’t feel marginalized, at least for one hour a week. All of that, I think they’re getting right. I think what still needs to happen [relates to] our services that extend beyond the first couple of years after a loss. Most of the centers are there for you if your loss is within the past two years. Beyond that, they don’t typically have the resources to have continuation groups for very long. If you were to call a bereavement center and say, “I’m about to get married, and I’m really sad because my dad died and he’s not here to walk me down the aisle.” one of the first questions will be: How long ago did the death occur? And if you say 15 years, there’s no group for you. What you really want is to sit with other people who understand what it’s like to still be grieving a dad after 15 years and be told that that’s normal and it’s OK. Generally what they’ll give you is a list of private therapists. Even private therapists who are trained to do grief work are often very well-versed in how to handle the acute phase of grief, which is typically the first year or two, and not [the] very long arc of it. Someone may need 20 or 30 years before they feel safe enough or they’re ready enough—or they get new information—that makes them really need grief support for the first time. Grief centers are not offering that right now. I’m working on it. But it’s not there yet

Tell us about the new book that’s coming out in March. 

It’s called “The After Grief” and it’ll be released in paperback in early March. It’s going to come out on  the two-year anniversary of the Covid lockdowns and the rise of the Covid pandemic which is good timing. I believe that after grief begins when you move out of the acute phase of grief, which is full of distress and longing and confusion and disorientation. And so much emotional pain. Then you start feeling like, OK I’m reentering the world. I can find laughter again. I think joy is going to be possible. I’m learning how to integrate this loss. But it’s still there. The cultural message has been: you should be able to move on or get over it. I have people coming to me saying “I’m having trouble letting go, I can’t get over it.” So my first question is “What makes you think that you should be letting go or getting over it? And what would that look like to you? What does that mean to you?” Then we can talk about what they think grief should look like as a cultural construction. That there’s nothing in the world that says that’s the only way it can be or that that is even right or correct. 

The [book] talks about the long arc of loss and how grief is likely to keep showing up in your life decades after the loss itself. It’s about the echo effects and the long-term ramifications of losing someone you love, especially if you’re young.

I have community calls where women can join a  whole community online, women all over the world who come every Tuesday to talk about a different topic. We have a guest speaker and they share what’s going on in their lives, and if they’ve got an anniversary or birthday or a big event coming up. It’s an opportunity to let the group know and get some support. There’s an open discussion at the end where women can talk about whatever is on their minds.  It’s 90 minutes a week, every Tuesday evening and four Tuesdays a month. It started during Covid, but we’re gonna keep it going because hundreds of women signed up and [it’s a] really vibrant community that’s really getting to know each other across the miles. It’s beautiful. [I’ve] actually got to figure out a way for them to meet in person as soon as it’s safe to do that.

All over the world? 

We’ve got women joining us or signed up from Chile, Australia, Russia, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Israel, and Switzerland. A woman in Puerto Rico just joined. 

I find so much comfort in hearing you talk about how these women are supporting each other just by having the open ear to be able to say it out loud. 

Right?! Permission to talk about it. We talk all the time about breaking the silence. Some women will be with us for months before they even raise their hand to talk and others just jump right in. What they really crave is to meet, not just other women who’ve lost their mothers, but women who’ve lost mothers the same way. Women who lost moms to suicide really want to meet other women who lost moms that way, because they feel so marginalized and so stigmatized. Women who were too young to have memories of their mom, it’s a very specific kind of loss because you’re mourning the absence of someone you don’t remember having time [with]. We get testimonies from women saying, “These calls are a lifeline.” “They’ve become my anchor.” “They’ve changed my life.”  And that’s why we’re doing them. It’s an absolute joy and an honor to be able to offer that to these women. I know what it’s like to be alone. To provide it for those women and to know that they’re not going to  have to suffer for as long as other women have had to is  really gratifying.

Hope Edelman has been writing, speaking, and leading workshops and retreats in the bereavement field for more than 25 years. She was 17 when she lost her mother to breast cancer and 40 when her father died, events that inspired her to offer grief education and support to those who cannot otherwise receive it. Her work has been read by more than 1 million readers and  nearly 20K followers on Instagram @Hope_Edelman and Facebook @HopeEdelmanAuthor. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She is a certified Martha Beck Life Coach and has also done certificate training in narrative therapy.

Hope’s first book, “Motherless Daughters” was a #1 New York Times bestseller and appeared on multiple bestseller lists worldwide. Hope’s most recent book, “The After Grief,” offers an innovative new language for discussing the long arc of loss. She has published six additional books, including “The Possibility of Everything” Her work has been translated into 14 languages and published in 11 countries.