Phantom Limb (American Lives Series) - Softcover

"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.

"[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.

"Sternburg accomplishes in a phrase what usually takes pages, even books, to describe. . . . [She] moves from resistance to profound love; her memoir honors the challenges of being a care-taker."—The Jewish Week.

"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.

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 writes 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."