My mother’s death has unmoored me. How can this be? It’s not precise to say we weren’t close. But the terrain between us was marked by lapses and lies as much as by love, its prosperity thwarted by bad history, by temperamental differences, by my mother’s stunted life, by the looming and distorting presence of my father–and by my need to keep all of this at bay.

My mother was my first, my oldest, love; I knew her breath, her smells, her sighs, and the swish and thrub of her heart, before I knew anything else. For all the damage of my childhood, for all the distance of my adulthood, for all my ignorance of what really formed her marrow, there was still after my 49 years as her daughter such a vast lot that I did know of my mother, of her quirks and habits, of her thwarted ambitions and brimming heart.

My grief for my mother started many years ago. Her death, though, has brought the whole arc of my mother’s life achingly front and center in my own. But that’s only part of it. The feeling of being unmoored … The searing years of childhood coming back into view, and the arc of my own personal history thrown into bas relief. That … and the loss of the original thread, the core connection, the groundnote.

Can I find my mother? Melody asks. The promising new theories of physics, the old ones of Eastern philosophy and lyric poetry. Her body committed to earth in a gleaming oaken casket in a plot disconcertingly close to a freeway; her soul or energy released to the ether but somehow, somewhere still of the world.

And so I keep searing for a sense of connection with my mother–or perhaps for some semblance of what Melody calls grace.

Last week, leaving a cafe where I had quietly wept for my mother twice while listlessly eating a sandwich and reading the New York Times, I was moved to drive a few blocks south to the cathedral, a copper-domed Beaux Arts pile on a hill, and to light a candle for my mother.

Only after the wick had stuttered to a steady flame did I look around to notice that I was in a side chapel devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. My mother’s candle glowed just a few feet from an oddly affecting stone statue of one of time’s most celebrated mothers, Mary, holding—and gazing with loving concern upon—her legendary infant.

For a moment, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. This Mary cradling her child to her ivory gown—the sweetness of it!—nudged loose stray motes of memory: A three-year-old me in a red sweater, sitting on my mother’s lap in a graceful wide-runnered rocking chair made by my mother’s grandfather. My plaid-pantsed mother gently kissing awake my three- or four-year-old pajamed self to come sit beside her on the living room sofa to watch a crooner—Shari Lewis? Ella Fitzgerald? Doris Day?—sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in fuzzy black-and-white on the boxy Zenith television.

I wanted more of these memories, but none came. Trying to summon them only brought less idyllic pictures: The cupboard-slamming ones, my mother’s desperate rages against the consuming needs of her children, the superciliousness of her husband, the mounting pains and unrelenting losses of her life.

I had feared that the candles I recalled from childhood might have been replaced by some sort of digital device. But there they were, skinny metal stands crowded with votives, with charred bits littering the amber glass bases and a narrow tin of long matches at the side. Amid a few dozen glowing candles, I had set my sights on an unlit one toward the middle, setting it ablaze after depositing in a slot the “suggested donation,” which was a dollar. (Were they once a nickel?)

Symbolism, if not religiosity, stirred in me. After being momentarily transfixed by the granite Mary with her infant, I turned back to the votives. I lit a second candle from the first—from mother to daughter, I thought. I knelt on a padded kneeler before a statue of Mary. I thought of my mother, of her afflicted life and the slog of her dying; I welled up again, softly. I summoned up some prayers from my early years in the pews: “Hail Mary, Full of Grace.” I mustered a small, hopeful approximation of fervency: Did Mary, in a heavenly place or in the universal ether, see my anguish? Was there a presence—a current of energy? an angel? my mother?—I might have pulled toward me for even a moment, with my candles and attempted prayers and tears?

I think I hoped a spritz of grace would waft my way, like the fragrant curls of incense the bizarre, possibly drunken, but pastorally effective priest had dispensed at my mother’s funeral mass. My feckless tries at prayer tacked effortlessly toward poetry, lines and stanzas running together willy-nilly in my mind. Mary Oliver: “What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me?” Emily Dickinson: “But most like chaos, stopless, cool,/Without a chance, or spar,/Or even a report of land/To justify despair” (Emily Dickinson).

I felt adrift. All of this felt somber; it had meaning. But I didn’t feel reborn, and I felt only marginally closer to my mother than I had earlier at the cafe with my tears falling onto the New York Times, or in the car at an intersection, where my heart ached as a white-haired woman with a walker navigated around a small bank of dirty snow outside a shop.