As Martha Hickman explains: “One bright summer afternoon, while our family was on vacation in the Colorado Mountains, my daughter, who by now had grown into a beautiful young woman of almost seventeen, fell from a horse and died.”

In the following excerpt from Martha’s writings, Martha talks about herself in the third person as she shares her experience:

“She is grown now and married, the mother of children – three sons and a daughter.  She is a writer, a maker of stories.  In the attic is her nativity set, the one her mother gave her when she was ill.  Every year she takes it down.  Her daughter helps her set it up.  It is something they do together.  One year her daughter cuts little shreds of paper to replace the thinning straw. They take turns holding the tiny baby Jesus. ‘Look at him,’ they say fondly to one another, smiling. 

“Then, one day, her daughter dies.

“Grief immobilizes her, nudges her awake each morning, numbs her into sleep, shades her dreams.  When she reaches for her husband, even then, she yearns for the child.  She looks in the mirror.  Her face is scoured with grief.  Behind her hollow, burned-out eyes, she reads another message: You have failed as a mother.

“She will rescue the child.  Resuscitate her, write her back into life.  She writes and writes.  Stories about children.  Memoirs of loved ones.  It is her way of keeping up with her child.  Her writing moves through her, saying what it must.

“Other young women come into her home – friends of her sons, lovers, in time, wives.  She loves them.  There is room in her heart for many loves.  But one room always remains empty.  In the center of that room is a keening sound, like a moan.  Often she goes steadfastly past the room.  Sometimes, off guard, she is drawn in.  Other times she opens the door herself.  Inside is a hollowness like the hollowness of her own body, where her dead child once lived.  But it is larger than that.  It encompasses the whole world where her child once lived.

“She writes and writes.  It is the best way she knows to reach out for her daughter, to make something of her hunger, to fill the empty room.

“Her sons marry, so she has other daughters.  She thinks of herself as a happy woman – perhaps happier than most. ‘I am blest,’ she says.  But in her mind there is always the significant exception.  She does not speak of it as often now.

“Every Christmas she puts up the nativity set…. She imagines the wise men approaching, searching the skies for a star shining in the east. She remembers how one night soon after her daughter died she stood on the veranda, looking across the valley into the high mountains, searching the skies and wondering, ‘Where are you?  Where have you gone?’  She saw a single star slip behind a mountain peak and re-appear on the other side.

“‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ she said to the child’s grandmother who stood beside her.  She knows that for the rest of her life she will be looking for her daughter.  She expects to find her.

“There is room in her heart for many loves, but one room always remains empty.”

~Martha Whitmore Hickman; American author (I Will Not Leave You Desolate)

Melanie Hack
Author of Who Killed My Sister, My friend
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