This year, Mother’s Day falls on May 7, the same date on which, in 1983, Rosina Jaumandreu, mother of Mireia and Gisela Rosell, died when they were 14 and 11 years old. Her brother was thirteen. She “she died of lung cancer. Metastasis. Everything was very fast”, explains Gisela. “Every afternoon they came to pick us up from school and we went to the clinic to see her, but we were not aware of the seriousness until our father told us: ‘Mum has caught a virus and she is leaving us… ’”. Gisela remembers very few details of those moments, but she has not forgotten: “The three of her brothers went to say goodbye to her and, the next day, our mother was no longer there.”

The family, he says, was shocked. “And at home the subject was never discussed. Although I, at first, said that my mother was still in the hospital and that she was coming back. Her sister Mireia de ella, three years older than her, also does not forget the shock and thick silence caused by that death: “I grew up trying not to think about what happened: we didn’t talk, neither at home nor with friends. But we are left with the trauma of having lost a wonderful mother. And, by not having gone to any psychologist or receiving any other help, that trauma remains permanent ”, she assures via e-mail.

The actress Nuria Gago, also lost her mother early: “She suffered from breast cancer and died very young, at 38 years old. I was about to turn 12,” she explains. “Her name was Isabel and, despite the fact that I have an excellent memory, I am unable to remember either the date of her death or her birthday. But yes, yes, I remember her: images, her smells, her voice, what they tell me and… what I invent”. He is aware that so many years have passed “that a part of my memories may be altered by my fantasy and longing.”

However, if Nuria remembers something very well, it is the impact that loss caused her: “It was an amputation. A catastrophe ”, she describes. “Childhood is over. While your friends wonder what they’re having for snack, you wonder: why? Because?”. Among those who have lost her mother early, there is a deep sense of injustice: “The part of me that believed in God completely disappeared: it was impossible for it to exist if I had done something like that,” says Gisela Rosell. “I knew that Saddam Hussein was someone very bad and I wondered: ‘Why is he still alive and my mother is dead?’” adds Gago. Something like that, she sums it up: “It’s like an atomic bomb at home. For a while, it’s all over.”

It is true, before the premature loss of a mother —who also lived this chronicler—, the known world ends. You enter unknown land. She advances “unprotected by life”, as the psychiatrist Luis Rojas Marcos wrote; one of the few mental health specialists who has investigated this reality. And it is that, as he wrote in his book Antidotes to homesickness, in the United States alone, in 1997, almost a million girls under the age of eighteen lived in homes without a mother. The Covid-19 pandemic has increased these statistics: in October 2021, The Lancet estimated that there were at least 3.3 million minors worldwide who had been taken from their parents by the virus.

But, as Rojas Marcos pointed out, although the father’s death is traumatic, it does not inspire “so much shock, so much indignation” as that of the mother. Socially, this loss is more difficult to accept. It is shrouded in taboo, and not only at the family level: the lack of academic publications on this issue is striking. “There isn’t much bibliography, it’s true,” replies Dr. Rojas Marcos, via Zoom, from his office in New York. “For starters, it’s something we don’t like to talk about. Although there are also topics that we don’t like and are studied, ”he reflects.

This prestigious psychiatrist believes that in human history, fraught with conflicts, the loss of the father has been more accepted: “While that of the mother is harder: there is a biological factor, with emotional ramifications. The baby comes out of the mother and she takes care of it from birth. She is within what we expect. For this reason, her death, especially when the children are still small, is less acceptable ”. And although it is also very traumatic for boys, in the case of daughters, the trauma is accentuated: “Because daughters have that other factor, which is identity: they identify with their mother at very natural, physical and emotional levels, and this loss creates a vacuum that is unacceptable”, explains Rojas Marcos.

An emptiness that Queta Xampeny also feels, whose mother, Blanca Haendler, died when she was 11 years old and her sister, 6. “She died in a week, at the age of 41. She was a completely healthy person, with boundless energy, but she had a thrombus and was left brain dead. Queta has also experienced the feeling of injustice and the silence that surrounds this situation. However, she has always tried to talk a lot about her mother: “I think that if I do it and she is part of my life, she is not dead inside me.” Remembering her, she adds, seems to her a way of making peace with the past: “At first there is a maximum shame of saying, ‘I don’t have my mother’, and then you spend many years very angry: you think that, with the disgusting people who there is in the world, it had to happen to my mother… But, later, there is this kind of reconciliation. I talk to my kids a lot about her.”

Maternity is another way of reconciling with this loss although, at first, as Rojas Marcos points out, it accentuates it. “Because of course, there is that identification with the absent mother and the phenomenon of being a mother brings to mind that emptiness that you already carry.” Daughters without a mother, he points out, learn to be mothers on their own, although they have that absent figure very present: “In raising them, I have remembered my mother a lot,” says Queta Xampeny. “I have pulled a lot from the archive, as if we were to say. I enjoy my children a lot, I trust them and I am a fairly relaxed mother, as she was.” She is convinced: “That she would have been a great grandmother, although perhaps there is a risk of idealizing her… I don’t know.”

Undoubtedly, we daughters without mothers idealize these missing figures. As there is also an “almost uncontrollable” impulse, as Rojas Marcos points out, to recount a loss that becomes part of oneself. “From the experience I have had with daughters who lost their mothers early, I can tell you that they are women who have a very acute sense of mortality, who speak of empty interior spaces and incorporate this loss into their identity.” The latter caught his attention: “If I asked them to tell me about them, they would tell me: ‘I do this, I study this’, but they almost always added: ‘And my mother died when I was a child or an adolescent.’ This loss is fundamental; it is part of their identity and that has always impressed me”.

Growing up without a mother, all the interviewees assure, is not easy at all. “You see yourself with a hodgepodge of questions, of anguish, that you have to learn to manage without it. You force yourself to take care of yourself, because nobody takes care of the emotional part”, says Nuria Gago, who points out that, fortunately, today there would be professional attention in a case like this. “It’s very hard not to have her by your side at an age when so many things happen to your mind and body,” agrees Mireia Rosell. “Yes, you find her missing every day, no matter how many years pass,” her sister Gisela reiterates. Despite the fact that the sisters had the unconditional support of her father, Gisela mentions “her brutal insecurity, for not having her by her side” that sometimes still assails her. Rojas Marcos points out the danger of transforming the death of the mother “into an obsession”, which can affect self-esteem.

However, this specialist emphasizes that: “It is very important to point out that the majority of motherless daughters overcome this loss. In the cases that I have had the opportunity to work on, I see that there is a very evident improvement and that they are very self-confident women, in general”. In fact, he adds: “When I researched the subject, I discovered that there are many women known for their social, artistic, intellectual or scientific work, who are motherless daughters.”

The list includes Jane Fonda, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Madonna, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. All of them lost their mothers in childhood or adolescence. Coincidence or causality? Rojas Marcos does not doubt: “I believe that in this early struggle to overcome the loss of the mother, the woman discovers important qualities. That loss, which is a trauma, gives them the opportunity to use these qualities to overcome it and use their energy and her creativity in their day to day ”. They are women, he describes: “That they discover that fear does not work and locate its control center. And locating the center of oneself is a very important step when it comes to living, fighting and overcoming barriers ”, she concludes.

“Yes, I am brave, I push forward, and if my mother’s death caused me anything, it was being aware that it is not known how long we will be here and that, at least, I had to try to be an actress. I did it with all my might”, says Nuria Gago, who has not only managed to be an actress but also to write two novels and win an important literary prize. Queta Xampeny has three children and, with her husband, they founded the Barcelona real estate agency Keli. She does not doubt that her experience of losing her mother: “she made me braver; even a little punkier. Since you have such a strong blow at such an early age, you relativize everything more: if you think that the worst that could have happened to you has already happened to you, at eleven years old, well, you tend to move forward ”.

The Rosell sisters also pushed ahead. They grew up, studied, traveled and both work in what they like. Mireia lives in Norway with her and Gisela’s family, after living in Paris and London, she works in the publishing world, in Barcelona. “Despite everything, my life has followed a good path. Surely, you become brave having to face many doubts and situations without their help”, reflects Mireia. “The blow was very hard but I felt my strength. And in life I also did it ”, Gisela contributes.

The interviewees are very aware that “there is only one mother”, but on an affective level they have all found their female references. Friends of mothers, older sisters… Sometimes, the new partners of their parents and, of course, grandmothers and aunts. “My maternal grandmother and I had an enormous bond but, after that, even more,” explains Nuria Gago, who also cannot stop quoting her aunt, Luisa Gago: “The first summer, my father sent me home, in Menorca. She had four children, a garden, dogs… I started going every year”. Today, her aunt writes to her every morning and continues to be a pillar in her existence. And yes, when Nuria saw Summer 1993, a film in which another creative woman, the director Carla Simón, recounts her experience with being an orphan, she cried like a madeleine: “When it was over, I couldn’t get up from my seat,” she still remembers. moved.//

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