Imagine being a young girl who doesn't have a care in the world. Suddenly, the young girl's whole life changes when she finds that her mother has a terminal illness. The girl's mother must face months of treatment that leaves her sick most of the time. Despite the treatment, her mother passes away leaving the young girl motherless at the age of ten. In the book, Motherless Daughters: A Legacy of Loss, Hope Edelman explores the effects women experience when they lose their mothers.
             This book is based on interviews with many mother-loss survivors. The author also discusses her own experiences with losing her mother. She discusses how a woman's identity is shaped when she she grows up in the absence of her mother and how present day relationships are defined by past losses. The author also gives an understanding of grief and how one is affected by it.
             The loss of a mother is significant to any child, but especially in a woman's life. A child may go through the grieving process for years following the loss of the mother. This process is not predictable, and many women think they are over the grieving until faced with a major event in their lives. This may cause her to grieve all over again. Examples of when this may happen include planning a marriage, a birth or a new job. The author discussed how she much she missed her mother in the book. She "missed her mother, terribly, when I graduated from college. I missed her when I got my first job promotion" (23). Edelman lost her mother at the age of seventeen. She has found that it has also been difficult to be close to the age her mother died and to realize just how young she was when she died. Another difficult thing Edelman has faced was having trouble remembering how her mother was prior to becoming ill. Most of her memories are related to the hair loss, weight gain and stress of her mother's il
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