Finding Happiness in the Ending

AN UNCERTAIN INHERITANCE Writers on Caring for Family Edited by Nell Casey Harper Perennial. 282 pp. $14.99

When Susan Lehman moved her mother -- an infirm, doughnut-loving smoker known to her grandchildren as Doodles -- into an apartment upstairs from her own, she became more than a daughter; she became a caregiver. It was a role she took on reluctantly, and it was only after her mother's death several years later that Lehman came to appreciate the value of the experience. "Never in a million years," she writes, "could I have guessed how oddly rewarding the project of caring for someone who is nutty and sick might be for my three children."

Such hard-won wisdom is characteristic of the 19 essays in An Uncertain Inheritance. "Seeing a family member through a health crisis is an experience nearly everyone must face," explains Nell Casey in the introduction. Despite this universality, these essays demonstrate how different are the particulars. Jerome Groopman balances the clinical and the personal when a friend is diagnosed with cancer; Julia Alvarez copes with her parents' decision to spend their final years in their native Dominican Republic; Julia Glass learns to accept help during her bout with breast cancer. This is a difficult book to read in one sitting, but taken individually, many of the essays are bracing, moving and in their own way comforting.

GRAVE MATTERS A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry To a Natural Way of Burial By Mark Harris Scribner. 205 pp. $15

After learning that her cancer was terminal, Sharyn Nicholson chose the grounds for her own burial in a clearing near her cabin in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. "I really like it here," she told a friend upon seeing the spot, and her wish was honored. In her rural Rappahannock County community, private cemeteries are both legal and part of a long tradition, Mark Harris explains in Grave Matters, an informative and surprisingly uplifting look at the trend toward do-it-yourself, natural burials. (If you live in a more populated area, don't try this at home.)

Harris, a former environmental columnist for the Los Angeles Times syndicate, approaches his subject with curiosity and care. Traveling around the country, he examines a variety of end-of-life choices that eschew the traditional (and costly) norm for "more meaningful, more fitting, and, ultimately, more natural alternatives." One family chooses to scatter a loved one's ashes over the Pacific; another encases a relative's cremated remains in a "memorial reef" -- a hollow concrete ball used to help create fish habitats -- in the waters off southern New Jersey. Weaving together personal stories, reporting and a compendium of resources, Grave Matters offers an intelligent look at a delicate subject.

From Our Previous Reviews

· Set on Maryland's Eastern Shore a decade before the Civil War, James McBride's novel Song Yet Sung (Riverhead, $15), the story of a runaway slave with prophetic powers, "provides a new slant on an old subject," wrote David Anthony Durham.

· People of the Book, (Penguin, $15) by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks, a multilayered novel that centers on a book conservator's work on an illuminated Hebrew manuscript, "tells a believable and engaging story," wrote Jonathan Yardley.

· After reading about the philandering politician and his sacrificing spouse in Sue Miller's novel The Senator's Wife (Vintage, $14.95), "one can imagine most wives shaking their heads and mumbling, 'At least my marriage isn't that bad,' " commented Connie Schultz.

· Ron Charles likened Molly Gloss's novel The Hearts of Horses (Mariner, $13.95), a quiet tale about a young woman horse tamer in 1917 Oregon, to the works of Kent Haruf and Ivan Doig.

· This Republic of Suffering (Vintage, $15.95), by Drew Gilpin Faust, a 2008 National Book Award finalist that examines how America coped with the enormous death toll of the Civil War, "is a powerful corrective to all the romantic claptrap that still envelops" the war, noted Stephen Budiansky.

Nora Krug is Book World's paperbacks columnist.