Reprinted from DansPapers.com, July 21, 2014, by Joan Baum
The slightly out-of-focus photo of a dandelion in its seedhead phase, dying but in the act of replenishing, nicely captures the theme of this readable, inspirational collection of short, personal memorials that the editors have assembled from 37 voices, several of whom are from Long Island. Titled The Living Memories Project: Legacies that Last (Little Miami Publishing Co.), the book owes its inception to the editors’ desire and need to deal with grief.
A few years ago, Meryl Ain and her brother Arthur M. Fischman lost their mother about a year after their father died, and Meryl’s husband Stewart Ain lost his mother while working on the book—that’s “when the project really hit home for me.” They know they’re hardly the first to put together such a volume, an act that proved cathartic, but they felt they had a special idea worth promoting—to integrate the “spirit and values” of those who died into the lives of those who remain, “not just once, but every day.”