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questioned whether this is even possible, let alone beneficial. When Phyllis Silverman, Ph.D., Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions and the author of Never Too Young to Know , studied eighteen college-aged women who had lost parents during childhood, she found that instead of detaching from their parents completely, these women were trying to remain connected and find a place for the lost parent in their current lives. Especially for women, who are socialized to maintain relationships rather than break away and seek emotional autonomy, ongoing connections to a lost parent may be a more natural and comfortable response. Asking them to sever ties to the past, Silverman says, may only confound their bereavement.
    Many of the 125 children interviewed in the Harvard Child Bereavement Study, all of whom had lost a mother or father, also found ways to remain connected to the deceased parent. In fact, children who could not construct an internal image of the dead parent, or maintain a relationship with him or her, seemed to have the most difficulty over time. It seems that a child’s memory of the missing parent, and the ability to maintain an ongoing, evolving inner relationship with that parent, is vital to the child’s healthy development. We’re finally moving, Silverman explains, to “a relational view of grief,” in which maintaining connections to our lost loved ones will be valued more than disengaging or cutting the ties to minimize pain and suffering.
    When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, prepared to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn’t pathological. It’s normal. It’s why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother because she died when you were seventeen.

Chapter Two
    Times of Change Developmental Stages of a Daughter’s Life
    MY FATHER BOUGHT the raccoon jacket for my mother in 1973. It was mid-thigh length with a sturdy brown zipper, and she wore it through the suburban New York winters of my childhood. She didn’t really need a fur coat, of course—wool would have served her just fine—but in the mid-1970s in Spring Valley, New York, a fur fell somewhere between the Cuisinart and the Cadillac. A few years after my mother started wearing the raccoon jacket, my parents put a swimming pool in the backyard. That was the order of things.
    A raccoon jacket didn’t make quite the same statement as a full-length mink, but it was a fur coat nonetheless, and my mother wore it during the day and to informal social events at night. She was a tall woman, with wide, square shoulders, and she carried the jacket well. Its fur was the color of a graying brunette, almost exactly the color of her short, frosted hair, and against this monochrome, her splash of red lipstick always looked like a surprise. When she drove, I liked to sit in the passenger seat and rest my hand against the soft fur on her arm. Late at night when my parents came in from the movies or their bowling league or dinner parties at the neighbors’, my father drove the babysitter home and my mother came into my bedroom to say goodnight. I stood on the bed and pressed my face into her neck. The cold still clung to the fur collar, and I could smell the last traces of Chanel No. 5 on her skin. Chanel was her night perfume. She wore Charlie during the day.
    A few of my classmates wore rabbit jackets to school, but all other furs were reserved for adults. Some of the women in our subdivision wore ankle-length coats of fox and mink that their
husbands had given them as anniversary gifts. These were usually the women who drove four-door Mercedes sedans. My mother drove an Oldsmobile station wagon. It was big