A Music I No Longer Heard: The Early Death of a Parent

Designed like an oral history and reading like the transcript of a very long talk show moderated by an insightful but occasionally gratuitous host, this is an excellent resource for anyone who has lost a parent early or anyone attempting to understand someone who has. What makes this stand out is the broad range of stories that Drantell (Healing Hearts) and Simon (Collisions and Transformations: New and Selected Poems) have managed to incorporate--including their own. The ages of the contributors range from late teens to 87, and that breadth is also reflected in their ages at the time of their loss: one woman's mother died giving birth to her; others had both parents through most of their teens. Causes of death include illness, accident, suicide and murder. Some parents were divorced when they died; some were alcoholic or abusive, others supportive and loving; many fit somewhere between. The stories told by their surviving children are alternately fascinating and heart-rending, and only occasionally touchy-feely. Some are redundant, but no matter their shortcomings, the themes will resonate with anyone who lost a parent before adulthood: denial; fear of intimacy, forgetting and idealizing; fear that the loved one who isn't home on time is dead in a ditch; superiority at having survived; and perhaps the greatest fear, that life may be better for the loss. (Mar.)