My New Best Friend.

My new best friend sits with me, curled up in this freezing hotel lobby in Asheville, North Carolina... And no, it's not one of my roommate here with me, or the cute baseball boy who's staying down the hall... It's a book. A book that walks and marks this woman's soul with empathy that only it and the given perspective, insight, and healing it gives.

It's Motherless Daughters: the Legacy of Loss. An Amazon shipment I ordered for me, after picking it up at Barnes and Noble a few weeks back and thinking, wow, this is exactly what I've been needing to read. When you add that half a million copies are in print, and was a New York Times Bestseller, you know and understand the sprawling need for woman to have this new best friend. Because it's not just me grabbing it off the shelf, but it's thousands of woman grappling for any kind of knowledge, insight, relief, and moreso, genuine understanding of someone who has walked this road and speaks into it.

Shall I add that I'm only on page 5? :)

Already back that first weekend in April, a constant string of words was like a thread stitching through me: I am the "Girl Without A Mom." And its all I could see myself. It's label was stamped on me and seemed to bounce around the inside of me like the old screen savor one-liners I remember friends having in neon in college.

And then I read A Grace Disguised, and found that truly, one whole chapter was devoted to Loss of Identity, and how the person you were seems misplaced. Ie. You are no longer a husband, a daughter, a spouse, a best friend... Because though that insignia has it's roots, its humanly, stripped from you in reality and leaves you dangling and wondering and recalculating, and no longer assuming. And that who you were, what the sign of your identity was, is now removed and it leaves the survivor reeling with what is lost and what is supposed to be, as regards to identity. The opening paragraph of this chapter was like fresh water, water-fountaining over me with relief in it's direct empathy... and that I wasn't crazy for feeling the depression and confusion of this new label, this consuming loss of identity. Who I was, was no longer. How I lived and spoke, was no longer... No longer was it mom as my best friend, mom as my daily phone call, mom as my "she is..." because now "she was..." Which left me, the Girl Without A Mom... Empty and misplaced.

And now, a pencil lies in my hand and traces lines on every page, communing with her words and story and research. And wishing everyone who knew and loved me would also pick it up and read these chapters, because then, maybe, they would 'understand' they would 'get it' they would be able to see that this grief isn't over for me. It cycles. And it's going it. My whole life. It's seasons of joy and sorrow. Both laced with the covering of who is the new Me.

As I always deeply love my real best friends and share about them so the others I love, also learn to love and know them, I also do so with this book... inviting you in with just a few of the lines and phrases that warm and extend to me. That put words in a form that proves them. And that in it, I'm not the only one.

"I feel guilty about this unhealed wound I carry..."

"How do I convince my daughters that I will always be here for them, that I won't die before their ready?... I know it wasn't true for me."

"My mother died when I was nineteen. For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion: 'Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes -- I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.'"

"When someone asks about her parents, she tries to answer without using the words 'mother' or 'died.' Putting those two words together, she has learned, is a guaranteed conversation stopper."

"....dividing [life] into a permanent Before and After."

"You have to learn how to be a mother for yourself. You have to become that person who says, 'Don't worry, you're doing fine. You're doing the best you can.'"

"Tragedy was supposed to pass over a home such as ours, not burst through its door."

The book tosses out the stages of grief, remarks on its cyclical motion, messiness, and unpredictability.... And remarks how others still live on "time... But mourning requires a certain resignation to the forces of time... It's impossible to undo fifteen or twenty years of learned behavior with a mother in only a few months time. If it takes nine months to bring a life into this world, what makes us think we can let go of someone in less?"

I love her, I love my new best friend. I love being able to write about her and share her and know her this morning. Her words are a way of empathy, a way of reaching through pages and holding my hand.