ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a child mourns the death of a mother—someone who is essential to one's identity—and arrives at a place where mother is remembered with love, but without the daily ache of her loss. For many years, child therapists have debated whether young children have the developmental ability to grieve the loss of a parent, with some child therapists maintaining that mourning is possible in childhood, and others believing it is not possible until late adolescence. For a child who loses a parent, there is a continual sense of disequilibrium, an ongoing feeling that the world is not the safe place it had been just days earlier—calamities may strike at any moment—a nuclear bomb, a meteor, a tornado. The psychoanalyst, Francine Cournos, described her own family's experience after her father's death and their desire to protect one another from pain.
