Landscape without Gravity: A Memoir of Grief

In July 1989 Barbara Lazear Ascher learned that her brother, Bobby, had died of AIDS at the age of thirty-one. With an older sister's efficiency, she notified her parents and arranged Bobby's cremation; then, almost against her will, she began to grieve. This extraordinary book is a record of what she encountered in that "landscape without gravity."

Here is a bold account of a sister coming to terms with her brother's death and with the type of grief that arises only when one sibling loses another—a grief that is all too often unacknowledged and borne in silence. Here too is a map for that "hero's journey" we call mourning. Ascher locates the moments of healing inside the kind of hurt that seems to last forever, making this profoundly comforting, invaluable reading for anyone—especially brothers and sisters faced with loss.