Head down, shoulders hunched against the February wind, I moved in the direction of the church's side entrance. Behind me, distant as Mars, were the squeals of girls and boys lobbing snowballs at each other and sliding along the icy sidewalks.

I'd missed a week of classes at St. Hyacinth's grade school for my mother's funeral and had returned impregnated with hopelessness. My classmates were clearly avoiding me and I had no ability to communicate to them what horror I'd been through.

Eve had shared her apple with me and purchased my passage from innocence into the barren landscape of death. Watching the other kids on the playground living and enjoying life with such careless joy was agonizing.

For the next four months of the school year, no one knew or cared that I spent recess time huddled beneath the brilliant stained glass windows of the church. I kept a daily vigil before the statue of the Holy Family praying they would fill the hole in my heart with their love for each other.

And I had another reason for hiding out in the church. My younger sister had taken to going into the school bathroom and screaming until I could be found as I was the only one that could calm her down. I'd take her hand and lead her back to her desk and, to my shame, wish  she would just shut up and quit making things worse.

After numerous episodes of this behavior, the school principal, Sister Nadine, called my father in for a conference and told him sternly that what my sister needed was a 'good' spanking. My father, who always insisted the nuns were right no matter what the circumstances, admitted to me recently his faith was severely tested by this insensitivity.

I recall very little about the Christmas that followed my mother's death in the bleakest, coldest part of winter. There's a gray pall over the memory. I made no list for Santa and what gifts I received seemed ridiculous in the face of what God had taken away.

In the fifty years since my mother's death, I've never ceased searching for a substitute for her lost love. And I think I have finally accepted that a part of me has withered in her absence. These years of trying to mother myself, anxious to follow solid advice from my therapists and others, and I still don't know how to really do it.  

The prevailing attitude in the 1960's was that children as young as myself and my siblings - seven, five and two - didn't understand or feel the same as the adults. Because of our limited comprehension, it was assumed we would shrug off the trauma and return to 'normalcy'.

Although the psychiatric profession now understands how ludicrous such thinking is, there still remains the fantasy grieving children will be nurtured into wholeness by the remaining family members. In fact, many of these motherless children end up in prisons, mental institutions, re-hab facilities and as victims of violence.

Self-punishment is a common thread among abandoned children and death IS an abandonment.

Because of my insistent need to understand why I was resistant, even terrified, of forming healthy bonds with others, I searched out clinically-oriented books on the issue of abandonment. Through the writing of a beautifully perceptive young woman named Hope Edelman, I found solace and honest understanding of my mother loss in the pages of her books: Motherless Daughters and Letters from Motherless Daughters.

I sat in my recliner, stunned by the wisdom I found in her books and had instinctively hoped for many decades before during my vigils in a cold church. 'We'd all like to believe," Miss Edelman writes, "that mourning is magically contained within those first six months after a loss. I felt lousy enough when my mother died in 1981, I didn't want to hear that I'd still miss her in another ten years...how can I write a book telling women that mourning for a mother never really ends?"

For decades before finding my way to Hope Edelman's books, I did not think about my mother at all. I did not recall any of her physical attributes and had few memories of real intimacy with her. Time's ravaging of my memory had been relentless and pitiless. And I felt I had betrayed her by not doing everything I could to hold onto her.

I often told my husband I thought something was wrong with me. But he had no frame of reference for my suffering and, therefore, was unable to comfort me. I went through a series of specialists in the area of grieving and found a few genuinely helpful folks. But, as Sheryl, a thirty-seven-year-old woman whose mother was killed in an automobile accident when she was fourteen, writes:

"I realized I needed some help to get through this...I wasn't prepared for the depth of my pain, though. When you cover a wound like this and try to live, you forget that the wound goes to the very core of your being...I'll never 'get over' the death of my mother, it is a stone that will always weigh heavy on my heart. I like to think of therapy as the process of turning that stone from dense, heavy granite to a light porous pumice. The stone will never be beautiful or smooth to the touch. But I can use that pumice to grind down the rough edges of my life. I can learn to live with this loss."

My mother wasn't able to see me graduate from high school or pick out my wedding dress or, even, to meet the great guy I married. She doesn't know I write about her or I wish I could pick up the phone and tell her I'm hurting. But I do - I must - believe there is something of her in my smile and something of her in my love for my sisters. And I hope  someday I will get to tell her I never stopped needing her.