Phantom Limb: A Meditation on Memory

A phantom limb is flesh become memory Sternburg uses the phenomenon as a metaphor for the loss of our loved ones, who remain intimately with us even after they re gone. Los Angeles Times Book Review Phantom Limb is a wise and courageous memoir that moves between past and present, chronicling an adult daughter s journey through the final years of her parents lives. A story of discovering love through adversity as well as an inquiry into contemporary neurology and spiritual life, Phantom Limb is a moving meditation on the struggle to make peace with physical and emotional ghosts of the past. Janet Sternburg write with such warmth and honesty that loss itself becomes luminous: This is the grace of the last years, the children coming to understand the contradictions in their parents, not to reconcile them but encompass them in a larger love. Janet Sternburg has found the perfect metaphor for the tragedy of pain and loss, the ultimate inevitabilities of life. Bill Moyers [Sternburg is] every one of us who has cared for aging parents She has faced the crucial questions: What do we owe to our parents? What do we owe to ourselves? The Orange County Register A mosaic of understanding, reconciliation, and ultimately acceptance. The Bloomsbury Review Sternburg is so skillful, so acute in her descriptions and so filled with a useful sense of the absurd that the painful becomes transformative. Jewish Exponent Sternburg s prose is powered by imagistic accuracy and psychological immediacy two horses that lesser writers let run wild. She holds their reins in a firm hand, and gently guides this book with intelligence and humility This is a book for anyone not afraid to look. Liana Holmberg, Manoa