Mourning the Mother You Wish You’d Had
The day after my mom’s death, I dove into writing her eulogy. But why was I was putting myself through the painful rite? For healing? For hurting? To have the last word in a lifelong contest with my mother?
NOTE FOR READERS: This essay deals with challenging topics including death and suicide. Please use your best judgement in deciding whether this essay is for you.
When the sheriff called to tell me that my 96-year-old mother had died by suicide, his words shocked me, but I was not surprised. My mom had ended her life the way she’d lived it: in her own power, on her own timeline.
One of my mother’s questionable life lessons was “Don’t wallow; do something.” But what was there to do about this un-remediable loss? Writing is my medicine, and so, the day after my mom’s death, I dove into writing her eulogy. Typing and tossing draft after draft, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this painful rite. To heal myself? To hurt my mother? To honor my mother? To have the last word in my lifelong contest with my mother?
No. There would be no more of that. My brilliant, irascible, unstoppable mother was, incredibly and irrevocably, dead. And I, at 74, for the first time in my writer’s life, was typing words she’d never read. It felt like taking the toll road I drove every day and finding all the toll booths removed. Never again would I need to stop there and pay.
Love — neither freely given nor joyously received
Since I published my first poem at age 7, my mother had critiqued my writing and bragged about my writing and gone to therapy to cope with my writing and hired lawyers to muzzle my writing. Hours after we learned of her death, my fiancée, Denise, mused, “I wonder who you’ll be for the rest of your life without your antagonist.”
I could not stop visualizing my vivacious mother with her clock permanently stopped, blue and stiff in a mortuary drawer.
In fact, the rest of my life had not yet begun. I could not stop visualizing my vivacious mother with her clock permanently stopped, blue and stiff in a mortuary drawer. I didn’t know, then, that I’d feel this way for months: struggling to move forward with one foot in the before, one in the after. By day, I lurched, dazed and dizzied, across alien terrain. By night, I dreamed in languages I don’t speak.
My mother had made me and scarred me and taught me that love was neither freely given nor joyously received. Her oft-repeated words of the pain she suffered due to my chronic childhood bouts of croup said it all: “When you were in the hospital, I cried in public. I never wanted to care about anyone enough to do that.”
No wonder I lived my first seven decades with a burning ball of anger in my belly named “Mom.” Now, the object of my anger had died, and I was still on fire.
To say I yearned to love and be loved by my mother is like saying I yearned for air. It was nothing short of miraculous when, five years before she ended her life, I got to give and return that love as I’d always longed to do.
How many times before had my mother’s body and mine melded? How many times had we cried in each other’s arms? Zero.
We had Covid to thank. When my mom and I went into lockdown four hundred miles apart, our awkward monthly phone calls became nightly real-talk Zooms. My mother, the last person I’d ever called in a crisis, became the first. For the last years of her life she good-mothered me, and I good-daughtered her. When the vaccine came, she flew to my city to be with me. At the baggage carousel, the two of us, 93 and 70, held each other, weeping. How many times before had my mother’s body and mine melded? How many times had we cried in each other’s arms, in public no less? Zero. And now, here we were.
The eulogy
I told myself I was writing my mother’s eulogy to post on social media. People needed to know that she had died. But as I wrote and rewrote, begging God for one more hour with my mother while simultaneously thanking God for the peace her absence had already bequeathed me, I realized that my real motive was to tell my version of the story of us, without being corrected by her.
This is what I came up with:
My mother's 96-year battle is over. On June 9, 2025, she committed the ultimate act of control over her life by ending it.
The youngest of three, she was exempted from her father’s beatings, but witnessed them and their effects on her mother and older siblings. At 19, desperate to escape that household, she married her first boyfriend and launched a household of her own. The roles of wife and mother did not suit her. My mother managed our family with a curled lip and seething resentments that poisoned the air my brother and I breathed.
A few days before her suicide, my mother and I shared a picnic dinner that stretched long into the night. When I got up to go to bed, my mother said in the sweetest, smallest voice, “I don’t want this to end.” My heart sang. Better late than never. I sat back down.
The next morning, she turned on me as she hadn’t done in years. I was selfish and always had been, she said. I’d neglected my long-lost ex-wife — the wife my mother had scorned at the time.
Then she turned on my nonbinary fiancée, the only partner of mine she’d ever seemed to like. “I don’t know what you see in Denise,” my mother said. “You look like a movie star, and she looks like a man.”
But in the end — and this is the end — I am who I am because of my mother. Like my mother, I struggle to stop at “thank you” without adding tips for improvement. Like my mother, I struggled to build the family I’d never known except to want it. Like my mother, I loved humanity and couldn’t stand myself.
Three days into being your motherless daughter, Mom, I feel abandoned and stunned and grateful and unmoored. As you lived, Mom, you died. Strong, and in control, and alone.
Before posting my eulogy, I read it to Denise, who suggested, gently, that I write a gentler message. I accused Denise as I often do, of trying to censor me. And then I took their advice and posted this, instead:
Until my mother died at 96 on June 9, 2025, she dedicated her considerable energies to the worldwide movement for human rights, while struggling to be the best mother, grandmother, great grandmother, professor, and friend she could be. She showed me, and the many younger women whose lives she touched, that it's never too late to change the world. Mom, I salute you.
A double loss
Writing my mother’s eulogy left me wondering how other women had coped with the death of a mother — a bond reported to be the strongest among all parent-child pairs, according to an oft-cited study in the journal Neuroscience.
I reached out to Anne Silva, the director of communications at the University of Southern California, who, according to a common friend who introduced us, had a difficult mother-daughter tale of her own. When we spoke, Silva described her relationship with her mother, who died when Silva was 33, as “a lifelong game of tug of war.”
“I was afraid of her,” she said. “Her moods were very up and down — depressed, then laughing. As a child, I had no one to count on for emotional connection. Honestly, I mourn the mom I wanted versus the one I had.”
Silva’s wasn’t an uncommon reaction, according to Dominique Elston, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles. “Daughters who had difficult or emotionally inconsistent mothers frequently grieve not only the loss of their mother, but the loss of the relationship they never had,” Elston said. “The finality of death can reopen wounds because it makes repair impossible.”
That feeling of double loss can make the death of a difficult yet loved mother not only painful, but confusing. That was true for Lena Rudnick, a 43-year-old Los Angeles filmmaker whose last decade with her declining, “challenging” mother was, in her words, “really tough.”
“Toward the end, my mother didn't have much motherly love to offer. After every visit, I’d rush back to my car and cry, vowing that when it came time for her eulogy, I’d tell it like it was. No sainthood for my mother!”
“Toward the end,” Rudnick said, “my mother didn't have much motherly love to offer. After every visit, I’d rush back to my car and cry, vowing that when it came time for her eulogy, I’d tell it like it was. No sainthood for my mother!”
But just like me, Rudnick found her “no sainthood” vow hard to keep. “The night before my mother’s memorial, I was staring at a blank page. I couldn’t tell it like it was,” Rudnick said. “I couldn’t tell it at all. I started thinking, ‘What’s a memorial even for? Is it for her? For me?” Then I realized that I needed the eulogy to loosen the big knot of feelings that still twisted in me. So, I wrote my mother a letter and read it at the memorial, sobbing all the way through. I told her that her death had left a huge hole in my heart.”
Rudnick also poured her grief into her art, starting work on a new film.
“Is it helping?” I asked.
“The longer I work on the film, the more in touch with my mom I feel,” she told me. “After decades of feeling silenced by her, now I feel that she actually has my back. I miss her. I forgive her. It’s like she can finally show up for me.”
MP Dunleavey
A eulogy by any other name
Dominique Elston, the family therapist, sees particular challenges for her Black and brown patients. “Black women are frequently socialized to be strong, composed, and self-sacrificing, which can suppress expressions of ambivalence or vulnerability in grief,” Elston told me. “Privately,” Elston added, “many daughters feel relief, anger, numbness, or even a sense of emotional freedom alongside sadness. Publicly, however, they often feel pressured to perform a version of grief that aligns with social expectations of reverence and gratitude toward mothers.”
As a result, Elston said, “delivering a eulogy, attending a funeral, or speaking with extended family can feel like emotional labor, requiring daughters to edit their truth to avoid judgment, conflict, or [risk] being labeled as ‘ungrateful’ or ‘cold.’”
“Many women of color grieve alone, holding grief, anger, and relief simultaneously without culturally safe spaces to process the full truth of their experience,” she told me.
As an antidote to the public pressures faced by daughters of all backgrounds, Elston prescribes private rituals. “Writing unsent letters, journaling, or holding personal memorials — all of this can allow a daughter to honor her full emotional reality without performing for others.”
The memorial
Six months after my mother’s death, we finally held her memorial. On a sunny December morning in my brother and his partner’s flower-adorned living room, I faced a room of my mother’s colleagues, friends, and three generations of her progeny. As I approached the rented dais, inhaling the scent of lilies in the air, I was still deciding what to say. Should I acknowledge her suicide? Disclose her troubled relationships? Reveal what she’d never said about her abusive childhood? Or…not?
And then, I opened my mouth and began:
“Loving and being loved was the hardest thing for my mother to do.”
In the audience, eyes went big. Mouths fell open. My teenage grandnieces looked up from their phones. My baby grandniece gurgled and cooed.
“I was and always will be my mother’s daughter. Her first and her more troublesome child. I’ve had 74 years to think about this, and here’s the most amazing thing about my mother. She grew up in a horror show of a family. And yet she did all she could — more than she could — to make a family in which she and we could love and be loved.
“After a lifetime of fighting to love and be loved by my mother, I can stand here and say, she did it. Because here we are, in a room together, thanks to my mother, who did the best — more than the best — she could.”
Tanya Mozias
If you are having thoughts of suicide you can call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can find further resources here.
