\”My childhood skidded to a stop on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of my 15th year, with my mother\’s first mammogram results,\” writes Hope Edelman in her moving new book, \”Motherless Mothers: How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become\” (Harper Collins). For Edelman, her mother\’s illness and subsequent death from cancer two years later in 1981 were the beginning of a journey of loss, self-exploration and eventual emotional redemption that has spanned nearly a quarter-century and spawned three well-received books on the subject.