Only Spring: On Mourning the Death of My Son

A psychiatrist's account of the death of his six-year-old son documents the anguish and helplessness that he had to overcome before regaining hope, strength, and faith. National ad/promo.

Psychiatrist Livingston's earlier journals of the death from leukemia of his six-year-old son, Lucas, were first published in the San Francisco Chronicle's Image magazine, where they evoked wide and warm response. In those writings, he detailed the grueling regimen (including a bone-marrow transplant from the author) that Lucas endured, bequeathing to the family a lesson about the power of the human spirit. The current journal details the depth of Livingston's struggle with the loss of Lucas and the earlier suicide of an older son, and with his rage at the medical technology that failed his child. A poignant account of an anguishing life-changing experience.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gordon Livingston introduces this brutally honest diary as the story of the life and death of his son. It is that, focusing on Livingston's experience of losing his six-year-old son, Lucas, to leukemia; it is also an account of a process of mourning permeated by his gradual realization that "love is not lost even in death." The book focuses almost entirely on the experience of Lucas' death, but the suicide of Livingston's oldest son, Andrew, the previous year, is never far below the surface. It is to Livingston's credit that he speaks not in terms of a triumph over death but of a confidence, gradually won, that love is not lost. This sets the book apart from much of the popular literature of hope and makes it an important contribution to the tradition of tragedy that moves us to humanity in the embrace of mortality. Steve Schroeder