"I believe it was from kidney disease," explains Hailstock, a Plainsboro resident. "I can't really be sure of it, because nobody really told us. I guess it wasn't talked about in front of us. She was just sick, and she had been sick for a long while. . .

"At 10 years old, sick is just sick."

Hattie Hailstock, a mother of six, was only 29.

Hailstock, an accomplished romance novelist, writes about the experience of missing her mother in an essay called "I Remember Mama" in a new book, "Chicken Soup for the Soul: A Tribute to Moms" (Health Communications, Inc., $14.95). In it, she recalls the slow, painful process of grieving for her mother.

"Grief is a hard thing to work through, especially when you're a child and don't understand the intricacies of life and death or why God decided to take away the person you loved more than anyone else in the world," Hailstock writes in the book. "Like the smell of my mother fading and mine taking up its place, the pain went away one day at a time, one layer at a time, and I'd passed from girlhood into an adult woman."

The author says learning to accept her mother's death occurred over a period of time.

"It took a long while to say that she was really dead, that she wasn't coming back," Hailstock acknowledges. "It was like, I just didn't want to believe. I just didn't want to believe it, so I wouldn't. But after that while, I think I kind of realized that this is the way it was going to be for the rest of our lives. She was never going to come back."

She recalls a conversation she overheard one day at church between adults who did not know she was present.

"They were talking about us and saying how hard things must be and all of that," she explains. "We didn't know they were hard. They were normal to us."

Normal partly meant chipping in more with chores. Being the second-oldest child, Hailstock took on many more adult responsibilities.

"My older sister and I had to cook and clean and wash clothes and iron and do all of that stuff," she says.

Although she only knew her mother for a fraction of her life, Hailstock learned things from her that she has used to mother her own children — Ashleigh, 25, Christopher, 24, and Ayanna, 6.

"(Hugs) say a lot without saying a lot," she says. "And always going to whatever functions the kid has. Whatever is important in their lives is something that you need to be there for, even if it's not important in yours . . .

"My mother was always there. My father was working, but my mother would always make some kind of way to get there, even if she only waved at you from the back of the room so that you knew she was there."

Apparently, mothering is never far from Hailstock's mind. In addition to her children, she is nurturing several new books, including one with a Mothers Day theme scheduled for release in April 2009.

"It's about a surrogate mother — a woman who's being a surrogate for a guy whose wife has died," she explains. "This is his last chance to have his own child, so she's the surrogate for that.

"Of course they fall in love, because it's a romance."

The author admits her writing is imbued with elements of her mother and the experience of losing her.

"Is my mother in any of those books?" she asks. "One of them. She's in a book called "Mirror Image.'

"I used the emotions of her death in there."

Although many years have passed since her mother's death, Hailstock finds that it isn't the grandiose things that she remembers so much as the small, quiet moments.

"(My mother) was talking to some other women who were her friends," she recalls. "I don't remember what they were talking about. She was sitting down on something low, like an ottoman or something. I came in, and she just hugged me until she finished talking to them."