CHAPTER 8

Orphan

It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes.

—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Nadia seemed a bit older than she was, but a bit younger than she was, too. She seemed younger than her age because she smiled a lot and her toes turned in some when she sat. She seemed older than her years because, at twenty-six, she had met more adult milestones than many of her peers: She was a PhD candidate in art history and had now been married for more than a year. Dressed fashionably but casually in skinny green army pants and an off-the-shoulder shirt, Nadia was the kind of person who came across as effortlessly having it all. Looking at her, one would never guess that most of her friends had something that Nadia never would, or at least never would again: parents.

Nadia came to the United States when she was two years old. She does not know much about what happened before that time, but after that time, her upbringing had been an average and expectable one. She grew up in a happy home in Los Angeles—or to be more precise in a happy apartment, one that was just above the liquor store her parents owned. Life as she knew it changed forever, though, one afternoon during her first semester of college. It was 1997, and she returned to her dorm room, to these messages on her voice mail.

“Nadia, is it true?” asked one friend from back home.

“Are you all right?” said another.

“Oh my God, Nadia, call me . . .” pleaded her best friend of many years.

None of the messages were from her parents, so she called her best friend back.

“Nadia, oh my God, I’m so sorry!” she shrieked when she heard Nadia’s voice.

“About what?”

“Oh my God, Nadia. Oh my God, Oh my God… you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Somebody robbed your parents’ store and . . .”

“Are they okay?”

“No! They… they died.”

“Who died?” Nadia asked in disbelief. “The robbers?”

Her friend cried harder, having to say it: “Your mom and dad.”

When Nadia came to my office, it had been eight years since she had received those calls. She thought not having parents would be easier by now, thought it should be easier by now—“People expect me to be over this, you know”—but there was always some new way of feeling left alone. Nadia was unprepared for how much, even as an adult, she still wished she had a mother and a father. “People are nice but it is not the same. I feel bad saying that but it’s not,” she cried. “Not having parents never stops sucking.”

Most people recognize the death of a parent to be among the most fundamental tragedies of childhood. Few, though, realize how common it is. One in nine children will lose a parent to death before the age of twenty, which means that, in any given year, for every child diagnosed with cancer, thirty-five children will have a parent pass away.

Because it is an adversity that is difficult to keep secret, and one that typically carries no shame, much has been made of the fact that the death of a parent can be found in the biographies of many great men and women in history. In an often cited study published in 1978, psychologist Marvin Eisenstadt identified individuals whose accomplishments merited at least one column of space in the 1963 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica and the 1964 edition of Encyclopedia Americana. Of the 573 individuals he identified—from Homer to John F. Kennedy—nearly half had lost a parent by the age of twenty, a high percentage even for the times. Although Eisenstadt’s data has not been updated since the middle of the twentieth century, the list of public figures who lost a parent early in life goes on: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor; singers Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Bono, and Madonna; actor Julia Roberts; New York City mayor Bill de Blasio; Speaker of the House Paul Ryan; and US president Bill Clinton, to name just a few.

As with other childhood adversities, the death of a parent can bring opportunities for personal growth. Eight out of ten children who lost a mother or father say they are more resilient than other people, and six out of ten say they are stronger because of their loss. Some feel like they have to be. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor remembers being informed on the day of her father’s death, “Sonia, you have to be a big girl now. Your mother’s very upset; you can’t cry anymore. You have to be strong for your mami.” And in his autobiography, former president Bill Clinton points to the death of his father—the result of a car accident just before his birth—as the origin story of his life: “My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, I could make up for the life he should have had.”

Part of the heroic narrative has always been to take something bad and turn it into something good. But make no mistake: The fact that some—or even many—who suffer great losses go on to do great things does not mean that the death of a parent is a positive experience; nor does it lessen the magnitude of their grief. Nearly three-quarters of those whose parent died in childhood wish it had never happened and feel their lives would have been “much better” had they not. More than half of those who lost a parent at a young age say they would trade a year of their life for one more day with their mother or father. Yet they must learn to accept, even graciously, lives they never asked for. “I love the thing that I most wish had not happened,” said Stephen Colbert about the death of his father and two brothers in a plane crash when Colbert was just ten years old. Good adaptation does not mean the absence of heartbreak.

Perhaps the most heart-wrenchingly honest description of the contradiction that one is left with when good things come out of bad things was expressed by Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the timeless When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a book about the loss not of his parent but of his child: “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I ever would have been without it. And I would give up all of those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forego all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy. But I cannot choose.”

A paper titled “The Painted Guinea Pig,” published in 1976 in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, tells a story about how children struggle to comprehend loss. The loss, in this case, was the death of a pet in a kindergarten classroom, a guinea pig named Guinny. The children are told quite plainly about the pet’s passing—“Guinny died and he was buried in the park,” the teacher said—but they struggled to understand it completely. After some time, the teacher brought in a new guinea pig for a pet, this one a different color. “Who painted him?” the children asked, unable to fully grasp that this new guinea pig was not Guinny; that Guinny was gone for good. Guinny was never coming back.

Nadia was no kindergartner but she was a young person who faced an unexpected, overwhelming loss, a loss she could not take in all at once. Unlike a very young child, she knew her parents were gone and were never coming back, but what this would mean for her life going forward could only be realized one new painful moment at a time. When she filled out forms and wrote “Deceased” in the blanks where her parents’ names used to go. Or when she needed to register for classes and started to dial her mother for advice. Or when she visited her hometown and drove past her old home, the building now sold to another owner. Losing a parent is a cumulative stressor, too, because, even though it happens in an instant, it takes its toll bit by bit. It is not just the event itself that is devastating; it is how it changes one’s life over time.

“Children mourn on a skateboard,” the paper about the painted guinea pig also said, meaning that young people grieve in an active way, that their lives do not stop when a loved one dies. Rather, they have friends to see and things to do, and their sadness comes along for the ride. Nadia mourned on a skateboard, too, as she rode hers around her college campus. She never left school, not even for a single semester. Nadia’s parents would have wanted it that way, and besides, where else would she go? What else would she do?

Continuity is incredibly important to any bereaved child, and perhaps nowhere could life be more continuous than college, a place where—no matter what is going on back home—meals keep being served in the dining halls and big lecture classes keep meeting and tests keep happening and football games keep roaring. Much of the time, Nadia was able to forget about her new reality altogether as she was surrounded by other young adults whose parents also were nowhere in sight. If she strayed too many blocks from school, however, the bookstores and coffee shops and tattoo parlors and pizza places gave way to neighborhoods with two-story shingled homes, lights ablaze and families inside. It was then she was smacked with her own homelessness, that she remembered that outside of school she had no front door to walk into, and not even anyone who was thinking of her as she rolled along and her skateboard went click, click across the seams in the sidewalk. The sound seemed loud and lonely in the void.

There were other painful moments that caught her by surprise.

The May that Nadia was set to graduate, she stepped into a favorite café only to find every table occupied by women, young and old, dressed in spring colors and some holding flowers. It was Mother’s Day, she realized, and for the previous few Nadia had done something special to remember her mom. While Nadia waited for her order, she watched the pairs of mothers and daughters like an anthropologist, an outsider wondering what it would be like to be sitting at a table with a mother, too. Maybe sadder than trying to figure out how to celebrate Mother’s Day was her forgetting it was even coming.

And there was graduation. Nadia spent the day with her three best friends and their families. “Everyone was so great to me. It really was a happy day. A lot of celebrating. But it’s the little things, you know? Whoever I was with, I was always the only one who wasn’t in the family so I’d wind up taking the family photos. And I’d look at them through the lens of the camera. There was a box around them, a group of people who came first for each other. Sometimes people picked up on that and they would make sure there was a picture with me in there, too, which was really nice,” she recalled, “but I know they were just trying to make me feel better, like things weren’t the way they were.”

It was 2001, and Nadia felt twentysomething anomie in the marrow of her bones. With school no longer on it, the calendar had lost all meaning and rhythm, and there was always some new way of feeling alone. She felt adrift and apart, like there was no real reason to be anyone or anywhere in particular. No real reason to act one way over another. To Nadia, not having parents was like not having religion.

On the morning of September 11, Nadia was living in an apartment in San Francisco with four other girls, all of whom were asleep when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. It was not even six a.m. Moments after the second plane crash, their cell phones and their landline began to ring and ring, as parents called with directions and warnings. Wake up. Turn on the TV. Stay home from work. No one knows what will happen next. Do not drive across the bridge today. Like her roommates, Nadia spent the next days and weeks in a daze of disbelief and sadness, and of course she thought about the sons and daughters who lost mothers and fathers. Only later did she remember noticing that no one had called for her that morning. The whole world was coming apart and no one thought of Nadia. It hit her then, four years after her parents had died: Nadia was an orphan.

The essence of being an orphan is to be left without protection.

Commonly, we think of an orphan as being someone, like Nadia, whose parents have both died. This is the story of perhaps the world’s most famous orphan, Little Orphan Annie, and indeed many of our most beloved fictional protagonists were orphaned in this way, too, carrying their lives and the story forward in classics such as Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, and The House of Mirth, as well as in blockbuster series such as Lord of the Rings, James Bond, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. And of course, many of the world’s most popular superheroes were orphans, too. Like Nadia, Batman lost his parents in a robbery.

Yet there is more than one way to be an orphan, more than one way to lose a parent. According to the office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a child is an orphan if he or she has lost both parents for any reason: “A child may be considered an orphan because of the death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents.” The United Nations goes further still, recognizing as an orphan a child who has lost even one parent, with a motherless child being a maternal orphan and a fatherless child being a paternal orphan. And contrary to the notion that real orphans must live in orphanages, the vast majority of children who have lost one or more parents live with surviving parents, grandparents, or other relatives. Many of the world’s orphans do not look like Little Orphan Annie at all.

Were Marvin Eisenstadt, the psychologist who scoured encyclopedias for eminent individuals, to repeat his study today—and to be more inclusive in his definition of what it means to lose a mother or a father—his list would be far longer, and would include many other noteworthy figures such as Gerald Ford, John Lennon, Alex Rodriguez, Jon Stewart, LeBron James, Simone Biles, Shaquille O’Neal, Marilyn Monroe, Jay Z, Willie Nelson, and Barack Obama, each of whom was left as a child by one or both parents. Eisenstadt wrote that he chose his rather narrow view of orphanhood because information about death was more readily available and because “the effects should be more prominent and more easily noticed than other forms of loss.” With the latter, I would have to disagree.

Remember Sam, the boy whose father left and sent him torn-up ten-dollar bills and lottery tickets? As an adult, Sam confided lifelong complicated feelings about a childhood friend whose father died and left him a hefty inheritance. “I am ashamed to say this but I have always envied him. People know his story and they feel bad for him. And I feel bad for him! It is really sad that his dad died. And unlucky. But he is fortunate in a way to have a story that people can understand and sympathize with. What’s my story? That I have a deadbeat dad? My friend’s dad did not want to leave his family and when he did he provided for them. Mine left me by choice and never looked back, never made sure that I was all right.”

Sam continued.

“I confessed some of this to my wife before she was my wife, and what she said is probably why I married her. She said, ‘You lost a dad, too.’ And you know, I could not believe it. I did lose a dad, but honestly I’d never realized that until she said it. I mean, there was no funeral, no nothing. People just avoided the subject when I was young and by the time he did die—I was an adult, I hadn’t seen him in twenty years—I didn’t even care, which people did not understand, either. The way I felt was that I had already lost him a long time ago, but back then nobody seemed to notice.”

Sam is describing what is called disenfranchised grief, or the sort of sorrow that follows from a loss that is not widely acknowledged. Though they may not typically be recognized as orphans, or even consciously think of themselves as such, those who have been abandoned by a parent also feel bereaved. They feel left alone and left behind, and deprived of the care and protection a mother or father might provide, though they may not feel entitled to their very real experience of loss. This is something that hip-hop artist Jay Z understood with his mega-hit, “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” in which he raps over and alongside the theme song from the Broadway musical Annie: “I found the mirror between the two stories—that Annie’s story was mine, and mine was hers. I felt like the chorus to that song perfectly captured what little kids in the ghetto felt every day: ‘Stead of kisses, we get kicked.’ We might not all have literally been orphans, but a whole generation of us had basically raised ourselves in the streets.” Like Annie’s story was Jay Z’s story, it was Nadia’s story and Sam’s story, too. It is the story of every child who has lost a parent to death or divorce or mental illness or jail—or to anything—and has been left behind to fend for themselves.

Sociologist and psychotherapist Lillian Rubin, whose own father died when she was five years old, made a career out of studying children who transcended trauma. One thing she found was that those who triumph over hardship—who overcome a hard-knock life—do so, at least in part, because they have a quality she called “adoptability,” or a knack for being taken in by others. When life is difficult at home, or parents are not there, many supernormal children find surrogate parents or substitute caregivers to make up the difference. Sometimes they have some sort of talent in sports or school or the arts—or even more often they have the sort of personality—that gets the attention of family members, teachers, neighbors, or friends. This is important because one of the single best predictors of good adjustment after adversity is having external support, and being adoptable attracts the attention of those who might help. Resilient children and teens are skilled at what psychoanalyst Stuart Hauser called “recruiting relationships.”

Think back to the decades-long study of the “vulnerable, but invincible” children of Kauai. Once grown, the children of Hawaii’s Garden Island said they had done as well as they had largely because, on the inside, they were determined and in control—but on the outside, they had something else going for them, too. By and large, these successful children were, in Lillian Rubin’s term, adoptable. They had, researchers said, “easy” temperaments and were “easy to deal with,” and this helped them attract both kith and kin. As infants, they were described as “active,” “affectionate,” “cuddly,” and “good-natured,” and these desirable qualities elicited positive attention from those around them. These sociable babies who slept and ate well had more positive interactions with their mothers by age one and with other caregivers by age two. In middle childhood, they were not intellectually gifted at school, but they were good communicators and were skilled at getting along with others, and already they were building a network of supporters. In adolescence, they were outgoing when they needed to be; ultimately, the higher the number of adults with whom the child liked to associate, the more likely that he or she would make a successful transition into adulthood. Every single “vulnerable, but invincible” child could name at least one committed adult outside the home who cared.

Nadia had adoptability. Her story was certainly compelling, and what most impressed people about her was that, after her parents died, she never missed a beat. She was a success story and an inspiration and that was why others liked having her around, because she was not falling apart. Intuitively, Nadia knew what researchers do, too: that when bad things happen, those who hide their distress—who are agreeable—are perceived as more resilient than those who do not. So as she made her way through young adulthood, Nadia was taken in for holidays and brought along on vacations with other people’s families. In return for these kindnesses, Nadia was careful to cause no trouble. She was quick to clear the table and to load or unload the dishwasher. She was, in her own words, “everyone’s favorite houseguest.” Many supernormals feel like everyone’s favorite houseguest.

When she was in college, paternal orphan and future poet and novelist Sylvia Plath worked summers to supplement her scholarships, many of which were supplied by wealthy benefactors. In the summer of 1952, Plath worked for a woman, Margaret Cantor, as a mother’s helper. Hear how Mrs. Cantor described Plath in a report to the vocational office at her school: “Sylvia is an exceptionally fine girl. Her manners and deportment are beautiful. Her consistently sunny disposition and her ability to express herself in vivid language make her a most interesting and welcomed person.”

But contrast this with what we routinely expect from children, and especially from children of our own. “What is the normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly?” asked psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. “No, that is not what he is like. A normal child, if he has confidence in father and mother, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate.” Children like Sylvia Plath, or like Nadia or other supernormals, cannot have confidence in their mothers and fathers; nor can they be certain that their surrogates will keep them around. They know better than just to be normal children.

Let’s be honest. Lillian Rubin’s term adoptability is a misnomer. In truth, most orphans never are adopted, and neither are most supernormal children. It is easy, or maybe convenient, to imagine that those like Nadia have a surrogate parent—maybe a grandmother or an aunt or a coach—who steps in and does the job that their mothers or fathers for whatever reason cannot. Sometimes this happens. Consider the story of Simone Biles, four-time Olympic gold medalist whom many consider to be the greatest female gymnast of all time. Born to a mother who was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and to a father who had abandoned the family, Biles spent her earliest years in and out of foster care. As a toddler, she went to live with her maternal grandparents, who adopted her soon after. They are, Biles makes clear, her parents; they are her mom and dad.

Most supernormals, however, are fostered by a variety of good people. They piece together parenting—a weekend with this friend, a holiday with that relative, a week on this couch, a word of encouragement from that teacher, some advice from this mentor, an opportunity from that neighbor—like bricolage. Scrappers that they are, supernormals fashion whole lives out of the bits and pieces of the lives of others. Wherever they go, they take care not to ask for too much or to get too comfortable because they are entitled to none of it. Paula McLain, whose memoir, Like Family, is about living with foster families, had this to say about growing up in other people’s houses: “It’s like a hotel because nothing belongs to you. It’s all being lent, like library books: the bed, the toothbrush, the bathwater.”

Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” For Nadia, there was nowhere she had to go, and no one who had to welcome her. Because of this, she moved through the world differently than other people. Every moment of every day, she felt like an interloper, like she was expendable. Nothing would have hurt more than for someone to tell Nadia she was too much trouble, that she was inconvenient, and so, to protect herself, she made herself easy. Malleable and agreeable, she went along with whatever her host or her roommates wanted, never caring whether they stayed home or went out or ordered pizza or went to a movie. When some of the girls she lived with took long, poorly timed baths or ate other people’s leftovers, Nadia wondered what it would be like to be so unconcerned.

“Orphans always make the best recruits,” or so said Judi Dench as “M” in the James Bond movie Skyfall. With her icy, jaded remark, Dench captured something that researchers who credit resilient children with having a gift for “recruiting relationships” tend to miss: It is not always clear who is recruiting whom. The notion of recruiting relationships makes the resilient child sound like a little Pied Piper, holding a flute and all the power, gathering a stream of followers in his wake with his magic tune. But being an orphan, even an adoptable one, is nothing like that. If anything, adoptable orphans are the ones who feel they must cheerfully follow behind others.

If the resilient child is “vulnerable, but invincible,” invincibility and strength are what we see while vulnerability and powerlessness are what she feels. To have power is to be in a position to help or harm ourselves or others. Those who have it control resources—material and otherwise—like money, affection, supplies, or decisions. Those who do not have it pay close attention to those who do. Two people in a relationship, or in the same household, have different experiences depending on how much power they have. One of the most poignant differences, at least to the powerless, is that those in power are free to be themselves. They can feel what they feel and want what they want. They can be spontaneous and make choices largely without fear. They can be consistent inside and out. The powerless find it prudent to hide their true feelings and wishes—especially if they are not happy, easy ones.

Little Orphan Annie herself sang that “you’re never fully dressed without a smile.” But smiling means different things for different people, depending in part on how much power they have. Research shows us that, for high-power individuals, smiles on their faces correspond with internal states of pleasure or happiness, while low-power individuals smile to make other people comfortable; there is no correlation between their smiles and how they really feel inside. For the powerful, smiling is authentic, while for the powerless, it is strategic or obligatory. Those high in power smile when they want to while those low in power smile when they need to.

Long before Edna St. Vincent Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923, she and her mother and two sisters lived like four orphans. After Millay’s father deserted the family, mother and daughters moved from home to home, nearly vagabonds were it not for extended family members who opened their doors. “The girls were now their mother’s ‘little women,’” wrote Millay’s biographer, Nancy Milford. “She cautioned them again and again against being or causing anyone trouble. She told them to be tidy, clean and responsible, and they took her admonishments seriously. They were careful among their relatives, mostly aunts, not to reveal how they felt or what they in fact desired.”

Differences in power make for a lopsided, complicated relationship between orphans and the world, and even between orphans and their benefactors, although the benefactors themselves may not realize it. While more powerful people move through their day thinking in terms of rewards—“What do I want and how can I get it?”—the less powerful are most mindful of punishments—“What am I afraid of and how can I avoid that?” What orphans are most afraid of is being cast out by whoever is currently allowing them in, so to stay in good favor, they feel obligated to smile and fulfill the needs of others. They earn their keep. They sing for their supper. They step and fetch. They go along to get along. The result is that, too often, supernormal children feel like anything but heroes; they may feel like pets, trick ponies, maids, or even prostitutes, kept around as long as they cause no trouble and provide comfort or entertainment or a service of some kind.

This may sound harsh, but differences between the powerful and the powerless are not necessarily malicious ones. Often they are structural, automatic, sometimes inevitable differences, and excruciating all the same. To point out these differences may sound ungrateful—which is not fair because supernormals like Nadia are grateful—but that is the point. Part of the disenfranchised grief that many supernormals feel, but never reveal, is the unacknowledged loss of the full range of their feelings: They lose the luxury of being able to be unappreciative or difficult, even for a moment.

Actress Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson in 1926, never knew her father. She was raised only briefly and intermittently by her mother, who was in and out of mental institutions—mostly in—due to what was probably schizophrenia. As a result, Monroe lived off and on in an orphanage, the Los Angeles Children’s Home Society, and in between was sent to live as a boarder with families who were paid five dollars a week to keep her. “The families with whom I lived had one thing in common—a need for five dollars,” Monroe recalled in her autobiography. “I was, also, an asset to have in the house. I was strong and healthy and able to do almost as much work as a grownup. And I had learned not to bother anyone by talking or crying… I learned also that the best way to keep out of trouble was by never complaining or asking for anything. Most of the families had children of their own, and I knew they always came first… Everybody had the drop on Norma Jean. If she didn’t obey, back she went to the orphanage.” Monroe never would shake this feeling of being vulnerable, of not truly mattering to someone, and she would spend her life, shortened by suicide, trying to be more than, as she put it, “a sort of stray ornament, like some stray cat, to invite in and forget about.”

Nadia was one of the first of her friends to get married. Like many supernormals who feel like orphans in one way or another, what Nadia wanted most in the world was to come first for someone. She wanted to be on someone’s mind. She wanted a family and the comfort of a home of her own. Nadia was quick to say that, since her parents died, many kind and generous people had cared about her and taken her in, but only in my office was she also able to say that it was not the same.

Whether or not to have a wedding had been difficult to decide. It often is. Weddings, like graduations and holidays, are social celebrations that tend to be driven by social norms. By definition, however, supernormals have lives that do not fit the norm. What this means is that occasions that are supposed to be about communality can remind them of their differences. Days that are supposed to be happy can also be complicated.

For many supernormals, weddings force questions about what to do about a difficult parent or sibling, and too often arrangements feel dominated by the past rather than inspired by the future. Weddings are for people who have families, it seemed to Nadia, and she had trouble envisioning who would walk her down the aisle or who would sit watching from the front row. Weddings are for people who are becoming a family, her partner reminded her, and it was the twenty-first century: They could do this in any way they chose. They talked about going away on a trip to get married but Nadia’s partner loved her, and he understood her, and he wanted her to let something be all about Nadia.

It was not always easy.

Nadia’s best friend and maid of honor lived far away, so one Saturday, Nadia struck out alone in search of a wedding dress. At store after store, she tried on one after another, realizing in the process that she did not know anything about choosing a wedding dress, or which one looked best. She looked around and saw other young women there with their mothers, who helped their daughters pull big white dresses over their heads. When the stores began to close, Nadia came home in tears, and her partner said he would go shopping with her the next day. “You’re not supposed to see my wedding dress!” Nadia protested. Another social norm. “That’s dumb,” he protested back. “This is about me and you, and I’m going with you.” Nadia can still vividly recall the two of them smiling and laughing together in the fitting room, and deciding on a dress—it is one of Nadia’s happiest flashbulb memories.

A few months later came another happy emotional memory. Nadia was putting on that same dress in a room down the hall from where the ceremony would soon take place. She heard the festive din of the many dozens of people who had come to be there with them—friends from college and childhood, relatives from far away, friends of her parents who were so happy to see that her life was turning out well. At first, Nadia thought she must be overhearing another event happening nearby: a cocktail party maybe? But then she realized that those were her wedding guests. It was stunning, she thought, that so many people had come all that way just for her.

Now that she was married, Nadia’s memories of her parents were not fading as much as they were becoming outdated. She remembered quite clearly how her parents felt about her doing her homework or cleaning her room. It was difficult for her to imagine, however, what they might think of her life now or of the man she married. It had been easier almost to be without a mother when she was in her late teens or early twenties, when she and others her age were separating from their parents and making their own way in the world. Nadia had “mourned on a skateboard” and busied herself with young adult life, but now a grown woman, she was unprepared for how much she still longed for a mother.

She noticed herself watching older women and the things they did like tiny miracles. When her mother-in-law placed a wooden spoon across the top of a boiling pot of pasta, to keep the water from boiling over. Or when her boss at work said simply, offhandedly, “Don’t drive in the snow, Nadia. It’s not safe.” Or when a woman on an airplane quieted a young mother’s crying baby, holding the squirming bundle up to her shoulder: “You’re good at that,” the young woman said; “I’ve had a lot of practice,” the woman said back generously, taking care not to undermine the new mother’s confidence. Nadia felt like she was stealing moments of mothering like bread crumbs to nourish her—or maybe she was storing them up like acorns so she would know what to do when she became a mother herself.

Nadia suspected she came to therapy to be mothered in forty-five-minute increments. She needed an older woman to care for her, one she could learn from, but sometimes her sessions seemed as agonizing as they were helpful. One of the constraints of therapy is that there are start times and stop times, and bills in the mail. Perhaps unavoidably, it was a lot like being a houseguest again in a home where she wished she could live, with one important difference: She was able to tell me so. “I want a mother I don’t have to schedule an appointment with,” she sobbed. Some afternoons, when sessions were over, Nadia cried some more in her car, and I felt like crying, too. The one thing I did not do was try to talk Nadia out of her feelings. Yes, it was true that she had a partner and a therapist and friends and family members who cared, but it was also true that no one would ever be able to fill the void left by the death of her parents. No matter how many years had passed, she was entitled to her grief.

Before long, Nadia’s thoughts turned from whether she could ever have a mother to whether she could ever be a mother. It was difficult, and sad, for her to imagine having a baby without her own parents there. Yet her mother and father had loved being parents, and one way she felt she could remember them and honor them was to be the kind of parent they had been for so many years. We took time to talk about the happy memories from Nadia’s childhood: the chocolate candies her mother made for holidays, the science projects she had done with her dad, the books her mother used to read to her at bedtime, the homemade ginger ale she mixed up when Nadia wasn’t well. Yes, it was true that Nadia’s mother would not be there to help Nadia be a good mother, but she had already shown her how.

As they had done with the wedding, Nadia and her partner talked about creating their own family in their own way. Sometimes Nadia thought about adopting a child because she knew a lot about what it felt like to long for a home. She went online to research the process, and was soon clicking through the webpages of an agency. There were photos and short sentences about “Featured Children,” each one dressed in their Sunday best and described as liking jokes or school or ice cream or biking. Their smiles were so big it hurt to look at them.