Quotes from Hope Edelman

I needed someone to tell me it was all right to feel the anger and despair, but I received only kudos for my synthetically mature, responsible behavior.

It's a way to include them in the day in spirit, and to honor the ongoing inner relationships we carry forth. More than saying You were important to me, it says, You are important to me still. Experience this with me. Be part of my special day.

We've been lucky," he said, rising from his chair with his palm pressed against his forehead as he heard the ambulance attendants on the front path outside. "We had her four months longer than she was expected to live." Lucky? I thought, as I stood behind an emergency room curtain an hour later, holding my mother's hand and trying to press ice chips between her cracked and bloodstained lips. Could someone identify the lucky people here?

The mother who abandoned her child or took her own life leaves a daughter with the most direct access route to anger--she left me--but even the mother who falls ill and dies can be an object of blame.

It's hard to understand how we can harbor negative feelings toward someone we love when the two appear to sit at such competing ends of the spectrum. But negative emotion does, which is why even daughters of abusive mothers need to mourn the loss.

While the daughter of a helpless father develops a hypercompetent physical self-reliance that encourages her to take responsibility for those around her, the daughter of a distant father becomes more emotionally independent. As an adult, she's wary of depending on others; feeling physically abandoned by one parent and emotionally abandoned by the other, she selects only a handful of people to whom she'll get close.

I couldn't chance failing in New York yet, letting the city fail me. It was the only place I knew I belonged. If I couldn't survive there, I would have no place else to go.