Fatherless Sons: Healing the Legacy of Loss

Fatherless Sons is much more than a self-help book for guiding us through our grieving process. It is poignant memoir, a celebration of both the gift and the intense pain of parenting and being parented. From one page to the next, we join Jonathan Diamond's journey with his own father and with fathers and sons in his practice as a psychotherapist. It is no armchair journey and it becomes your own as his eloquence brings you to laughter and tears with each story within the story. These become touchstones and beacons that guide us through our unique personal process, giving us tools to experience much more than a legacy of loss, it is a testament to love and its power to move inner and relational mountains. It is a book I would gift to anyone, whether grieving their own father's death or sitting Shiva with another's loss. We are given a rare and sacred glimpse of the process of mourning ~ and of celebrating our fathers, their darkness and light.

Jonathan Diamond has written a gorgeous book, "Fatherless Sons," a meditation on the son's ongoing relationship with his father--even after death. This book, filled with wisdom-packed, thought-provoking prose is a godsend for men who are grieving the loss of their fathers. Diamond, a gifted psychotherapist and teacher, describes his own journey in healing from the death of his dearly loved father to cancer, not long after he became a father himself. His father, Malcolm Diamond, an attentive parent and beloved Princeton professor, had a darker side as sometimes physically and emotionally abusive, which renders his son's grieving more complicated. Diamond punctuates the book's self-help lessons with reflections on various scenes of his life with his dad interspersed throughout-- by turns tender, joyous and violent. Diamond takes on the tough and complex issues of fatherloss: dealing with the death of fathers who have been absent or abusive, the influence of race, class and sexual orientation and the profound spiritual questions that the death of the father raises. The author also draws upon the stories of many men who have lost their fathers. He weaves their narratives with his own to make his central point: "To those whose fathers are already gone, the book illuminates the possibility for a second chance--an opportunity for rediscovery--for men to feel compassion and forgiveness for their fathers and thereby free themselves from the emotional bonds that keep their present tied in knots, their future out of reach, and their past chained to a wounded soul." Besides gathering knowledge from his own and other men's stories, Diamond taps into the vast collection of insight across time and culture from writers and thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber and Anne Lamott, Sigmund Freud and Bob Dylan, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alice Walker. "Fatherless Sons" is definitely worth buying and reading if you have lost your father to death or love someone who has. Diamond's book is a beacon to navigate by in the confusing waters of grief.