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spending Mother’s Day alone. “When I was working at a gift shop, I once worked on Mother’s Day for a co-worker who wanted to be with his mother,” she recalls. “All day long, mothers and daughters came into the shop together. I hated it—I felt so angry and sad. Cheated. I went home that night and cried for at least an hour. Just this past year my therapist helped me to see I needed a way to still honor my mother. So I decided to garden on Mother’s Day. I made a ritual of planting flowers and praying for strength, life, and light. It fits for me because I’m honoring my mother and nature, and celebrating the
life-giving aspect of myself—which was truly the gift my mother gave to me.”
    Birthdays also activate grief responses, not only because they remind us of the phone call or card that never comes but because each one we celebrate brings us closer to the neon number: the age a mother was when she died. Because we identify so strongly with our mother’s body, and because our fate was once so intertwined with hers, many of us fear that the age of her physical demise will also be our own. To reach the year is a milestone; to pass it becomes one of our most glorious achievements.
    “I see this over and over again,” says Naomi Lowinsky, Ph.D., a Jungian analyst in Berkeley, California, who frequently counsels motherless women. “As some women approach the age their mothers were when they died, they just start going bananas in one way or another. They have weird symptoms, they’re depressed, they’re suddenly having heart palpitations, or other things there’s no medical explanation for. It’s a very, very powerful connection.” Vanderlyn Pine, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and one of the country’s leading experts on death and American society, found this grief response to be so common that he created a name for it: the “parental trigger.” Dr. Pine, who was nineteen when his father died, says that reaching a same-sex parent’s age at time of death suddenly catapults a child into an awareness of personal mortality and a type of mourning for the parent that he or she wasn’t capable of experiencing until that point. “As I was approaching the age my father was when he died, I realized I was getting very focused on that date,” he explains. “His death was triggering my reactions at the time, but it didn’t trigger me back to being nineteen. Instead, I was getting ready to look at the death of a forty-eight-year-old man through the eyes of a forty-eight-year-old man. It was like, boom. My father had pulled a trigger inside me. When I woke up that morning, I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘I’m forty-eight years old. But I look pretty good for forty-eight.’ I sort of looked myself over and thought, ‘How could you have been so young? How the fuck could you have died? There I was at forty-eight, judging my father’s death in a way I wasn’t capable of at nineteen. I was suddenly a forty-eight-year-old
man looking at a 48-year-old man dying and thinking, ‘How shocking!’”
    And then there are the subtle triggers, the ones that sidle up to you without warning, emerging from around a corner, tapping you on the shoulder when you thought you had other things on your mind. These grief responses are often related to transitional times in a woman’s life—graduation, a wedding, childbirth, a new job. As maturational steps, these transitions involve added responsibility, which calls up fears and indecision that leave us longing for protection and searching for a safe haven. “In a general sense, these responses have to do with the danger of growing up,” says Benjamin Garber, M.D., the director of the Barr-Harris Children’s Grief Center. “If you grow up, bad things happen to you. You die.” On a more personal level, he notes, “Transitional times come with heightened expectations. More will be expected of you. Each time you