"Silin achieves a rare balance between clarity and immediacy, universality and specificity, and this is a supreme work, a searingly precise investigation into the times when ambivalence must coexist with love."

"…his story reinforces the importance in making every day, every second count, especially when those days are spent in the precious presence of the people who raised us."

"...an exaltation of family, of love, and of life."

"Jonathan Silin offers a series of valuable reports from what might be called the country of farewells, using his raw experience to explore important questions about childhood, education, parenting, privacy, control, mental health, old age, death, and forgiveness. This is a rich, careful, honest book, both nakedly personal and coolly philosophical. I've never read anything quite like it."

"Primarily a search for the ethics of caretaking, and the boundaries that waver between parent and child when death looms, My Father's Keeper is also a book about a gay Jewish teacher who loses his own life partner while his parents are falling apart. Rich with the strange parallels between coping with young schoolchildren and 'the frail elderly,' Silin's conscientious analysis only makes the rocky decline of his two very real parents all the more moving. A wise, insightful book."

"Jonathan Silin's story is uniquely his own but it could be yours and mine. Precious human documents like this prepare us for what lies ahead. They teach and they heal."