FULL MOON AT NOONTIDE: A DAUGHTER'S LAST GOODBYE, by Ann Putnam.

Anne Putnam's memoir of the slow decline and final years of her parents and her bachelor uncle should become a classic text on love, loss and grief. There have been countless books written about this subject, I know, but her story seems unique, and not just because she was an only child, but because of the closeness that existed between her parents, Homer and Grace Cunningham, and her father's identical twin brother, Henry. Ann cannot remember a time when her uncle had not been an integral part of their small family, and his story is an important part of this wrenchingly stark and honest look at aging, sickness and death.

Homer and Henry were raised as Free Methodists. Their father certainly loved them both, but their mother was a dour unhappy (perhaps even clinically depressed) woman who withheld her love, which had a lasting and detrimental effect on Henry, who never married, but supposedly engaged in numerous affairs and consorted with prostitutes, although he was for many years a respected school teacher and administrator. The twins both attended Greenville College, a Christian school in Illinois, where Homer met and married Grace, an independent free thinker, somewhat unusual for that environment. Grace obviously understood the close connection between the twins, and those ties remained. Henry was always closely tied to their small family, which soon included Ann, and when Henry retired from his school administration job in Michigan, he moved to Washington state to live with Homer and Grace, and there he stayed until the end of his life.

Putnam takes us through the difficult stages of the last years of these three people who were so dear to her, from their three-story family home (all those dangerous stairs) to an assisted living complex, through the various falls, illnesses, and hospitalizations, to that last stop in a nursing home. And then, lovingly, through those final, wrenchingly sad days.

Having lost my own mother just a couple years ago, Putnam's story resounded with truth for me, and brought back those achingly sad final months in a nursing home, with her admissions about the "guilt for all the days I had not managed to visit, for all the times I did not stay long enough ... And worse, that feeling of claustrophobia, that unspeakable feeling that I couldn't wait to leave."

And Putnam's description of the old people gathered by the home's activities director, trying to get them to sing "You Are My Sunshine," brought back the final hospital days of my wife's father, listening to a tape of our small daughter singing that song, struggling for breath as tears ran down his face.

And, as her father's death grows ever nearer, Putnam reflects sadly on the "many things that will never be known to us now, that we should have been more vigilant, asked more questions, written down more." Reading this I thought again, as I have so many times, of all the things I don't know about my own father, gone now for over twenty-five years. All the questions I never asked.

But Ann Putnam has done a tremendous service to her much loved parents and uncle with this book. She has gathered everything she could from their lives - all those years of teaching and service (her father was a college history professor), lives that definitely mattered - and she has written it all down. For people who continue to feel the grief of losing a loved one, this book will be a tremendous comfort. It was for me. Thank you, Ann. This is such a brave and beautiful book, filled with love and sadness, as well as a redeeming wit and humor. Your beloved parents and uncle would be so proud of you. My highest recommendation. ( )