Walt Disney once said it was no accident that Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White and so many other storybook heroes had to face the world without a mother.
“Everyone knows,” he explained, “that you cannot have danger when a mother is around.”
From the moment Princess Diana died last weekend, her two young sons have been showered with condolences and concern from around the globe. They have the formidable support of Britain’s royal family behind them, and a life of material comfort ahead of them.
Yet for all their guards and governesses, for all their royal riches, Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 13 next week, must ultimately draw on their own strength as they face one of life’s toughest tests. Certainly they will never feel quite so safe in this world now that their mother is gone.
“Men are what their mothers made them,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he might have added that mothers continue to shape their children long after they have left them.
So it is that a haunting vulnerability surfaces again and again in the lives and works of those who lost their mothers in childhood, from the poems of William Wordsworth and William Cowper to the songs of Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
For each of them, and innumerable others through the ages, the loss of a mother opened a chasm that they spent a lifetime trying, one way or another, to bridge.
In pop psychology the untimely death of a mother is explanation enough for a vast array of emotional ailments. Life is changed irrevocably and, it is assumed, for the worse.
Few of us, with or without our mothers, would disagree.
But in a quick scan of history, every example of a life damaged by such loss can be answered with an example of a life enriched by the memory, by a strength or energy that grew out of the darkest moments.
“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother,” Abraham Lincoln is said to have told his law partner.
Lincoln was 9 years old when his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, aged 36, died of a fever known as “milk-sickness.” The boy carved the pegs for her coffin out of green wood, and helped bury her in the woods next to a deer run, without the benefit of a funeral.
Pope John Paul II was 8-year-old Karol Wojtyla when his mother, Emilia, succumbed to a combination of illnesses.
“Karol demonstrated extraordinary self-control–at least in public,” wrote biographer Tad Szulc in 1995. “Deep inside the suffering was searing.”
A decade later, Wojtyla wrote a poem called “The White Grave,” a wounded plea that his “extinct beloved” would find eternal rest.
Yet Szulc and others have found in young Wojtyla’s loss the roots of the pope’s indomitable faith and his rich, almost mystic devotion to the Virgin Mary.
John Paul II’s reverence for mothers, his fierce opposition to abortion, his belief that the “special feminine genius” of women should play a different role in the church than men, “all may reflect the complex feelings and unmet longings that he carried with him from his relationship with his mother, as well as from her early death,” write Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi in their 1996 biography “His Holiness.”
A far less reverent response to the same kind of loss took shape in the budding career of Madonna, whose mother died when she was 5. In the years that followed, she developed a persona that flouted convention and glorified independence as much as any in mainstream culture.
Experts say that young girls who lose their mothers often experiment with different identities.
“They have a question mark about who they are,” said Hope Edelman, author of the 1994 best-seller, “Motherless Daughters,” which struck such a chord that support groups have sprung up nationwide. “Without a role model, it can be hard to know.”
Former New York Times columnist and novelist Anna Quindlen wrote in a 1986 column: “My mother died when I was 19. For a long time it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vestpocket description of my emotional complexion.”
It can be even more difficult, when–as in the case of Diana– death is unexpected or when adults are not open and honest.
Jane Fonda and her brother, Peter, experienced both. They were 15 and 10, respectively, when their mother, New York socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw, committed suicide. Their father, Henry Fonda told his children that their mother died of a heart attack. They later learned the truth from friends.
The year her mother died, Jane Fonda has said she developed bulimia, a demon she battled for the next 23 years. Peter Fonda’s drug use has been well documented. Some 47 years later, the incendiary combination of no mother and an aloof, inexpressive father remains a scab for him.
“We weren’t abandoned in a Dumpster,” he said recently, “But we were abandoned.”
It doesn’t have to be that way, said Laurie Olbrisch, executive vice president of Rainbows, a Schaumburg-based group that helps children deal with a death or divorce in the family.
Since its inception 14 years ago, 700,000 kids have participated in the program.
Olbrisch conceded that the Princes William and Harry’s situation is unique: not only because their mother was a larger-than-life figure–compounded by the fact that their parents were divorced– but because their every move will be watched so intently.
She cautioned against thinking that just because the boys are teenagers, they will be able to heal faster than, for example, the children of Nicole Simpson, who also died violently and unexpectedly.
“The worst thing for someone to say is, `You should be over it by now.’ Everyone grieves in their own way. . . . In Rainbows, we tell kids, `It takes time and you will be given all the time that it takes.’ “
One Chicago woman, who was exactly the same age as William when she lost her mother to breast cancer a decade ago, wishes someone had said that to her.
“I ached to talk about it, but after the funeral, my dad barely said a word–he just papered over it, like it never happened. I’d bring up Mom and he would just change the subject. Later, he told me that he didn’t want to make me sad. Well, hell, I was already sad.”
The woman, now 27, went through a period of rejecting the values of her mother, whom she adored. “By not having a mother, I was already different. So I thought, `OK, I’ll be really different.’ I did it all . . . drinking, drugs, dropping out of college. It was only later that I realized that my rebelling against my mom was my way of keeping her in my life.”
Thomas Merton, the American Catholic monk whose 1948 autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain,” a seminal work in religious literature, wrote in stark detail of the day, at age 6, when his father handed him a note from his mother.
“I understood what was happening, although, as I remember, the language of the letter was confusing to me. Nevertheless, one thing was quite evident. My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again,” Merton wrote.
“I took the note out under the maple tree in the back yard, and worked over it, until I had made it all out, and had gathered what it really meant. And a tremendous weight of sadness and depression settled on me. It was not the grief of a child, with pangs of sorrow and many tears. It had something of the heavy perplexity and gloom of adult grief.”
As he made his own life’s journey from hedonist to Trappist monk, his mother’s influence continued to act upon him, even if she might not recognize the end result.
Ultimately he saw his monk’s life as “that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfillment of my mother’s ideas for me–the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development.”
Literary critics have long linked the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s vision of nature, at once maternal and unattainable, to the early death of his mother. Indeed images of nature, motherhood and loss are frequently bound together in his poems, including his famous ode, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:
“Be now forever taken from my sight,/Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower,–/We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind . . .”
Poet William Cowper, in 1784, put it more directly, in words that may reverberate long after Diana’s funeral in the minds of the two young princes of England:
“Not a week passes . . . in which I do not think of her. Such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short.”