An Introduction to "Designated Daughters"

When my mother became a widow, I became a Designated Daughter—the sibling who would try to take up the empty space that had always been filled by Dad. What I found in walking beside her was my own strong space. Designated Daughter is the story of what happens when a mother needs her daughter’s help and the daughter gets more help in return than she could ever give.

This is my mother’s story, too. She adds her voice at the end of each chapter. I’m glad you’ll get to hear the insight and wisdom that has been guiding me all these years.

Designated Daughters are all over the country, all over the world. We are a secret society of women, instantly recognizable to one another. We sit in doctors’ waiting rooms holding our mothers’ hands. We hold the coats, we hold the purses, we hold our mothers’ arms like suitors. We become so close, so bonded, we form a two-person silhouette.

My mother needed me, so I moved home to Ohio after twenty years away. Our lives began to merge and mesh. We had our glory days and our travels. I became a grandmother. She became a great-grandmother. We went to lectures, we went to lunch, we went to funerals, a lot. We have had a wondrous eight years together. Each year brings its own kind of change for my mother, and for me.

For the first five years after I came home, Mom was energetic and independent, running around like the active woman she’d been for eighty years. Then, three years ago, it was if we’d walked through a transparent door from health to sickness. She became frail, she fell in her living room, she fell in the Nordstrom parking lot. She hasn’t driven for a while and can hardly walk.

But boy, can she write.

Eight years ago, my uncle Al, Mom’s brother, called me in Nevada to congratulate me on my good decision to move back home. It never felt like a decision. It was the only thing my soul would let me do. I was being offered the chance to spend invaluable time with my vibrant mother, a gift of incalculable worth. Bonus years.

At my mother’s knee, at middle age, I learned to celebrate knowing what you have when you have it. Each day we have together is one of poignant exaltation—the last dip in the pool at the end of a late-summer day.

You learn to read between the lines in obituaries. “Suddenly” can mean a suicide or an accident or a murder. “Unexpectedly” tweaks the imagination. “After a long illness” sends the reader rushing to the bottom of the obit, where “In lieu of flowers” reveals what the long illness was. “After a long, courageous battle” depletes me when I read it. My life has not been combative. I do not want my death to be.

Today, for the very first time, I saw my demographic referred to in an obituary. It was not defined in so many words, but a Designated Daughter can recognize another Designated Daughter anywhere.

Mrs. Lennox, eighty-seven, died. “She is survived by four children, Edward, Mark, Kenneth, and Linda, who for more than the last three years provided constant and loving care to her mother,” the obituary read. There it was in print, akin to an M.D. or a Ph.D. after Linda’s name. Linda had earned her D.D.