Passings

February 1, 2010
In the space of just three years, chef Travis-Henikoff (Dinner With a Cannibal) lost five family members: her husband to leukemia; her 80-year-old father to kidney failure; her grieving mother to suicide; her daughter, Kim, to blood clots; and her daughter-in-law to blood disease. Travis-Henikoff's struggle to accept these painful deaths was helped by a number of paranormal experiences, including Kim's premonitory dream (dying in a pool of ice water) and, three nights after her death, the appearance of Kim's spirit in "a thin crackling rod of shimmering white light." After Kim's death, Travis-Henikoff sought out others with stories of loss and the paranormal, finding people who "know, trust and love the sciences, yet fly gracefully through the cosmos of the metaphysical." Travis-Henikoff mines the family lore surrounding her great-grandmother, who held séances, and her own history (including a near-fatal childhood asthma attack), for evidence that she (and her daughter) may have inherited psychic powers; she also considers what she witnessed in the moment of her father and her husband's deaths. Whatever readers believe regarding death and the supernatural, Travis-Henikoff's tender, wise memoir of love, grief and truth-seeking will help them accept death as an affirmation of life's value.