Customer Reviews

Singing Mother Home: A Psychologist's Journey through Anticipatory Grief

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In reading Singing Mother Home, it quickly becomes evident that Donna Davenport has poured herself into writing this book as she shares sadness, frustration, humor, and heartwarming memories concerning her mother and the process of her mother's death. It reads very easily and is divided into subchapters so that I was able to pick it up and put it down as time allowed. I found however, that I read much more at each setting than I had originally planned. I was able to resonate with many of her memories of her mother, the feelings of the anticipatory period, and desire to keep elements of my own loved ones alive in my present life.

This book provides a very well-written account that left me feeling as though I had lived a bit of both Donna's and her mother's lives. There is a fullness to their lives and their relationship that comes across very clearly, and I believe that anyone would connect with this account and feel a sense of commonality and renewed hope.

This book was a wonderful purchase and I would recommend it for anyone who has experienced or is experiencing grief. I plan on buying one for a family member who lost her husband a few years back. I believe that readers will surely feel the sense of connection to it that I did.

In "Singing Mother Home" we have the unusual privilege of a watching a highly qualified practitioner of two of the "helping professions," teaching and counselling, come to very personal terms with the kind of situation she teaches and counsels about. Dr Davenport's gentle telling of the story of her mother's death, and the openness with which she shares her inward struggle, serve both to humanize "the experts" and to validate the anguish of the rest of us, "non-experts" all, whose guilts and fears can be considerable as we face the necessity to allow beloved parents to take their leave.
A couple of chapters at the end of the book allow Dr Davenport to offer her professional insight into the dynamics of grief. Considered with her remarkable self-revelation in the narrative of her story, the reader's sense of her is that she is not merely a highly skilled professional but, under the circumstances, a companion of uncommon humanness along an inevitable and inexorable road, one we all must travel.
Those of us who have attended parents during their last years, months, days and hours know that there are a myriad details both of heart and body, to deal with. Dr Davenport shares with us many such in the thought and behavior of the pricipals of her story, but it is quite a tribute to her literary skill that the tale never becomes merely a chronology preoccupied with "events," whether physical and psychological, but uses them only as tools to enhance the real issue of relationship with oneself and others as death intrudes on well-ordered lives with its threat to make a mockery of human devotion.

Most people are so uncomfortable with the concept of death they spend their lives ignoring it as completely as possible. This book is a fascinating read because it does just the opposite -- and it does it in an original and intriguing way.

Written by a psychologist about the death of her own mother, Singing Mother Home tackles the subject matter from two mutually cooperative angles.

The author not only comes to terms with the permanence of death as a reality in her own very personal world, but explores it as a professional too, by giving us an up-to-the-minute look at death and loss from the perspective of modern psychological theory and applying it in her particular case.

Fortunately, the theory doesn't bog down the writing. It's a surprisingly quick read despite its elegant prose and almost immediately compelling -- who among us hasn't wondered what it would be like to lose a parent and how to cope during the process?

Alternately, if this is a situation you've already struggled with, you'll no doubt resonate to the universality of the author's trials -- with her expectations of herself at such a difficult time, with her family, with death generally.

I'd recommend it to anyone interested in any of these topics.

Davenport doesn't just talk the talk of a therapist discussing the grief process.... she walks the walk, and her readers walk with her, side by side. Whether dealing with the terminal diagnosis or decline of an aging parent, coping with a loss, or just anticipating the inevitable, Davenport's journey is one we will all take. However, for many of us, while we may feel deeply, we are unable to put words to the feelings, at least not with such accuracy, poignancy and honesty. The sibling interplay, the need of the adult child to be special, the power of emotional resistence... it is all here. At times lyrical, at others stark, the author manages to share her journey on several levels.... intellectual, psychological and pragmatic. This is a book that I read when facing the impending death of my father from Alzheimers as I began the process of home hospice. I gave my copy to my sister-in-law to read after her mother died. She read it in a day. It is on my shelf to use with my clients (I'm a therapist too) when issues of grief arise. It is rare to find a book that is both clinical and deeply personal.