The deaths described in this moving and thought-provoking collection range from the sudden and untimely, as in Gillian Slovo's account of the murder of her mother, and Peter Martin's of his mother's suicide, to the awaited and gradual but nonetheless momentous, as in the deaths of Bruce Kent's aged parents while long-term residents in a hospice. These deaths are met with reactions that reveal much, from Susha Guppy's desolation when told of her father dying far away in Iran, to Sally Vincent's bitter relief in "Nothing but contempt."

Along the way, issues of aging, disability, terminal illness, abandonment, remembering, and caring are explored in moving and enlightening ways. And perhaps most powerfully, in each case, the parent's death leads to a reevaluation of the writer's adult identity, the establishment of a new self that must go on in the world without the comfort of being someone's child.