Forever a Daughter: Reflections on Grief, Growth, and Motherless Daughters

When I was just 24, my mother died—and so much of who I was disappeared with her.

In the days that followed, someone handed me a book that would become my constant companion for the next 30 years: Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman. It gave me language for my pain, reflection for my grief, and a mirror that helped me see myself again when I was lost in the fog of loss.

This solo episode is my story—of what it means to still be a daughter, even after your mother is gone. It’s about the memory boxes she left behind, the music that still brings her close, the deep and unexpected relationship I’ve built with Katie (my dad’s wife), and how grief doesn’t end… it evolves.

If you’ve lost your mom—or someone who mothered you—this episode is a soft place to land. A reminder that you’re not alone. That your memories are sacred. That your mother’s love lives on in how you show up every day.

Whether you’re grieving, healing, parenting, or remembering—or helping someone you care for do the same—this is for you.

🎧 “Once you’re a daughter, you are always a daughter.”

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to The PIG Podcast
• 0:47 Discovering "Motherless Daughters" Book
• 2:06 Stories From Fellow Motherless Women
• 4:27 Letting New Love In
• 6:45 Music As Connection To Mom
• 8:45 Carrying Her Forward In Life
• 9:40 Gratitude and Closing Thoughts

Transcript

Kellie: 0:06

Welcome to The P-I-G, where we explore life, love, loss and legacy through real conversations and meaningful stories, with purpose, intention and gratitude. I'm Kellie, the older half of this sister-led podcast, and today I'm with you for a short solo episode that's been more than 30 years in the making. Some stories aren't told all at once. They unfold slowly through lived experience, through heartbreak and healing, through grief and growth. This is one of those stories, a story not just of profound loss, but of what it means to say goodbye to your mother far too early in life and still find a way to keep becoming the daughter she always knew you could be.

Kellie: 0:47

I was just 24 when our mom died, and in the days that followed, someone I don't even remember who placed a book in my hands that would become a lifelong companion. It was Motherless Daughters, the Legacy of Loss, by Hope Edelman. In its pages, I felt seen, understood. I didn't yet know how to grieve the death of the person who had given me life, but this book helped me begin, because Motherless Daughters isn't just a book about loss. It's a mirror, a map, a voice that offered language for my pain and light for the path ahead. Over the years, I've gifted the book to so many others, to women walking the same path, the same winding road, and today I want to share what it's taught me, not just about grief, but about love, resilience. And she will tell you that her life is irrevocably altered, that this one fact forever changes who she is and who she will be.

Kellie: 2:05

Gone is the caregiver, teacher, adversary, role model and guide to being a woman. Often whole parts of the mother's role transfer to the daughter. Grieving can be cut short, cut off or dismissed in order to keep the family going. A daughter's relationship with her father and siblings changes, and secondary losses can be overwhelming. As adults, a variety of relationship problems can arise as a result of this primary abandonment. Transition times in a woman's life—leaving home, getting married, having a child—bring up yearnings for guidance or company, and there is often nowhere to turn. There was never a book that examined the profound effects of this loss on a woman's identity, personality, family and life choices, both immediate and as her life goes on. Until now, Hope Edelman lost her mother when she was 17.

Kellie: 3:04

After searching for the book she couldn't find, she decided to write it herself. She traveled the country, speaking to motherless women of all ages, conducting original research, hosting focus groups and consulting with psychiatrists, psychologists and experts in grieving. What she found was a country of women anxious to share their common experience. A manual for navigating the landscape of loss, motherless Daughters offers powerful insights, not just for women, but for anyone who surrounds and supports her fathers, siblings, friends, co-workers and community, through honest reflection and shared experience. It reveals both the profound challenges and unexpected opportunities that arise when a daughter says goodbye to her mother. It's a book about grief, yes, but also about healing, identity, resilience and the enduring love that continues long after goodbye.

Kellie: 4:08

At the time Motherless Daughters came into my life, I had already faced so much loss, so much abandonment in my young life, but I'd never felt something so complete as losing my own mom. We had always been close. She was my protector, my teacher, my guide, and even when our roles shifted when, during her first cancer diagnosis especially, I became her caretaker, and even Erin's caretaker, I never doubted my mother's love for me, not once. I never doubted my mother's love for me, not once Ever. In her absence, September 12, 1994, I felt unmoored, but In the pages of Motherless Daughters I found something I hadn't found yet anywhere else a way to start making sense of the grief that was left behind. One of the lines I come back to over and over again is this: "there is no substitute for a mother's love, but there are ways to let that love live on.

Kellie: 5:19

I want to read a few excerpts and stories that are included in this book, stories from letters from daughters who, just like me, just like Erin, were also caught in the webs of their grief in the days, weeks, months and even the years following the loss of their moms: "No one in your life will ever love you as your mother does. There is no love as pure, as unconditional and as strong as a mother's love. When my mother died, I didn't just lose her. I lost the part of myself that she reflected back to me. I've spent years trying to find that reflection again in sisters, mentors, even strangers who remind me of her. Sometimes I see it in the way I brush my daughter's hair or the way I move through a crowded room. She's gone and yet she's everywhere. How do you ever get over it? Do you ever get on with your life? Yes, you do get on with your life, but it is always a part of your life and it does affect everything you do.

Kellie: 6:32

From a woman in Lakewood, Ohio, "I have reflected on the loss of my mother and tried to distance myself somewhat from the grief by trying to gauge its effect on my life as objectively as possible. This is effective when I am in my conscious self but, like most of us, a good deal of my time is spent in unconscious thought and choice. And there the grieving 14-year-old reigns. And there the grieving 14-year-old reigns, and from a daughter in Texas. I truly believe that the death of my mother has made me what I am today. I am a survivor, mentally strong, determined, strong-willed, self-reliant and independent. I also keep most of my pain, anger and feelings inside. I refuse to be vulnerable to anyone. The only people who see that more emotional or softer side are my children. That too is because of my mother.

Kellie: 7:27

As Hope herself says about grieving as an adult daughter, grief doesn't end, it evolves. We don't just get over the loss of a mother. We grow around it, we carry it and, if we're lucky, we learn to let it shape us into something softer, something stronger. In episode number nine, you met Katie, our dad's wife and the woman who gently walked into our lives after our mom was gone. She never tried to replace her, she just showed up patiently and lovingly, and over the past 27 years we've worked to build a relationship that is rooted in mutual respect, love and trust. It hasn't always been easy, it hasn't always been seamless and it Motherless daughters help me understand that letting someone else into that sacred mom space doesn't erase the past. It actually helps heal it, because once you're a daughter, you're always a daughter. That role does not vanish with loss. It simply transforms and in Katie's case that transformation became a gift we never expected, but to this day is a gift I treasure. Every single moment of my living Hope stated in the book in a reflection on letting new mothering love in Many women who lose their mothers early in life never allow another woman into that space. But those who do often find that their grief doesn't deepen, it lightens, because love in its many forms multiplies, it does not divide.

Kellie: 9:15

In episodes 10 and 11, you also met our dad, Pop, the keeper of the boxes. Pop actually adopted Erin and I. I was adopted when I was legally 18 years old, so I graduated from high school with one name and went to college with a new name, a new driver's license, a new social security card and even a new birth certificate. Our biological father had stepped away. He'd left our lives. That was his choice. But Pop never once treated us as anything less than his own, even and especially after the loss of his own daughter, Laurie, in a tragic car accident. When our mom knew she wouldn't be here for our biggest milestones graduations, weddings, the birth of our children he delivered, at her request, the boxes with handwritten notes and the carefully curated gifts she had chosen to leave behind. Through him, she actually kept mothering us even long after she was gone, and through us we now continue that legacy. In talking with Katie, we heard how she carried forward a mother's heart into her own parenting. And with Pop we learned how the intentional love for our mom through the boxes lived on even after she was gone and created a space where she could be present in our lives. And the excerpts I shared earlier shows us that it all comes full circle. Losing a mom does change everything, but it also leaves a sacred inheritance of presence, care and memory that lives on in our heartbeat, in our everyday lives.

Kellie: 11:32

For me, music has always been a thread connecting me deeply to my mom. After all, I was just four years old when she started me in piano lessons, and I can't even begin to count the number of times that I sat down at the piano to play and she simply sat with her eyes closed and listened. She attended every recital, and it was her love for my fingers on the keys that brought both of us so much joy. From our days listening to public radio, through her work in founding KPRN Public Radio in Western Colorado, to spearheading the Colorado Public Radio Network and her involvement with National Public Radio, to that final Sunday, we spent laying in bed side by side, listening to Cristofori's Dream by David Lanz, over and over and over again, knowing though never saying out loud what we both knew that we were nearing the end of our time together. I never expected that that would be the last time that I saw her, and I never expected that the last time I heard her voice would be that evening when she called to give me my last lecture after I had shared with her that I planned to take a leave of absence to spend what remaining days we had together. We hung up the phone that night and I went to sleep, and the next phone call I received was in the morning that she had turned herself over in bed after staying up and talking to our dad all night long and seeing one last friend for a final goodbye in the morning, surrounded herself with all of her beautiful fluffy pillows and took her last breath. But even now, when my fingers touch the piano keys, she's with me.

Kellie: 13:32

And in Dr Matthew Arau's episode we learn that music is more than a memory. It's actually medicine. It's a bridge between what was and what still is. It's created in silence. Music gives a voice to grief when words fall short, and music is something I know I've leaned into in my life to not just help me process grief but to give me a pathway to healing and to hope.

Kellie: 14:05

Motherless Daughters reminds us that the absence of a mother reshapes everything, but in that reshaping there is growth. Today I am a mother, a stepmother, a grandmother, and in every role I carry her with me, in how I nurture and how I listen and in all the ways that I love. This isn't an episode just about grief. It's about what it means to keep loving even in the absence. It's about remaining a daughter forever, because, again, once you're a daughter, you are always a daughter. That never ends. So if this episode reminded you of your mother or someone who stepped into that space when you needed them most.

Kellie: 14:56

Be purposeful, Reach out, say thank you, express your gratitude or, if you need it, just be still in the memory Because, as we've shared so often in this podcast, legacy isn't just about what we leave behind. It's how we love, it's how we listen and it's how we show up each and every day, and it's how we carry those who shaped us into every step of the life we keep building. As a final note of gratitude to Hope, thank you for the language, for the light and for the mirror you gave me all those years ago. And to every woman who's walked this road, know this you are not, you will never be alone. Your mother will always, always be with you. Hearing the stories of others helps us create a more meaningful connection to our own. We hope today's conversation offered you insight, encouragement or even just a moment to pause and reflect on the story you're living and the legacy you're creating.

The Sisters: 16:27

If something in this episode moved you, please consider sharing it with someone you love. A small share can make a big impact. You can also join us on Instagram, facebook or LinkedIn and connect further at thepigpodcastcom.

The Sisters: 16:41

And if you're enjoying this podcast, one of the most meaningful ways you can support us is by leaving a five-star rating, writing a short review or simply letting us know your thoughts. Your feedback helps us reach others and reminds us why we do this work.

The Sisters: 16:56

Because The P-I-G isn't just a podcast. It's a place to remember that, even in the midst of grief, life goes on, resilience matters and love never leaves. Thanks for being on this journey with us, until next time. Hogs and kisses everyone.