Motherless Daughters revisited

I discovered the book Motherless Daughters, by Hope Edelman, 10 years ago, in 1999. My mother had died 10 years before that, when I was 16. It took me til about 26 to open myself up and start the real work of grieving. This book, which I got from the library after reading about it in a Madonna interview, showed the way. It was a relief to finally see my experience reflected, the experience of being a woman without a mother sets you apart in so many ways that it's difficult to even start talking about it. I realized that it will shape my identity forever, and that's OK.
Then in 2001, pregnant with Maxine, I checked it out again, this time concentrating on the section on Motherhood. At the time I was coming into a new understanding of my mother through becoming a mother myself ("oh I was her baby once just like this... she must have loved me as much as I love my baby!"), I also had to newly grieve the loss of a grandmother to my child.

This past September was the 20th anniversary of her death. It didn't roll by unnoticed.
Now, post-surgery, I find myself reading yet another section of Edelman's book. The chapter is one I flipped through uneasily before, called Mortal Lessons. Talking about how a daughter has such a strong identification with her mother's body, and what happens to that identification when she (I) watches (watched) my mother dying young. First, there's such a strong unconscious need for connection even after death, that I have to continuously tell myself that I will live past age 46.
Anyone who has ever lost someone this close to them will tell you: they live on inside you, sometimes in ways that you aren't expecting.

Facing surgery, wondering if they would find cancer spread across my abdomen, I started thinking the unthinkable, the worst thought imaginable to me: How can I leave my children? I know this thought was unthinkable to my mom, too. She checked out of her brain rather than think it. (Would it have made a difference if she could have said goodbye?)
But they got the cancer out, and now my connection is a different one. I have to wonder at the irony of it. A month ago, I was at playgroup with my friends, talking about C-sections and the intensity of abdominal surgery. "My mom had five of them," I announced. "And that was back in the day when the incisions were vertical!" I would never have guessed that a month later I'd show up at the same park bearing an identical scar.
I guess, as far as connections go... I actually don't mind this one. Once you think that you might be dying, then have your life handed back to you, anything else is just... a wonderful gift.