Merely a Tribute
It's a thin, unpretentious little book of poems and woodcuts done by two old friends, both of whose fathers died of Alzheimer's disease. It's purpose is merely (merely?!) to pay tribute to two fathers and to share their bitter and eminently human experience with the rest of us. The result is not only an affirmation of our shared humanity but an eloquent expression of the determination not to go silently into that good night. What seems most admirable about the whole exercise is that, though there's nothing we can do, there is something we can do--express it!

In the introduction to the book the authors state: "Discussing our fathers after their deaths, we were struck by the similarity of our experiences. There was the same mixture of love and pain as we watched our fathers' intellectual powers desert them, the same horror as their familiar identities disappeared.

"Everyone deals with mourning in her own way. We both needed to revisit the experience of loss over and over, examining it, shaping and reshaping it, only letting go when we could turn it into art and poetry."

Driven Deeply Home
What drives this particular art and poetry so deeply home is the fact that, though we don't all have Alzheimer's, we do all have fathers, and Milman's and Sullivan's views of theirs lead us inevitably to dredge up our own carefully-laid-away paternal recollections , shames and joys. Suddenly we realize that the authors have succeeded in taking us by surprise, transforming their own grief into a poignant asthetic experience which we can share. Homespun and familiar though their raw materials may have been, heartbreak and hardship, bedpans and restraining webs, Milman and Sullivan have lovingly rendered them down into something sublime: Art.

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