Letting Go Audiobook

All deaths are hard to bear. But losing a son is the hardest.

Memory of war always loomed large for Dwight Bogdanovic. After all, his immigrant grandfather volunteered to fight in World War I and his working-class father joined up with the Canadian Army to fight the Nazis early in World War II. Yet it is only when Dwight’s soldier son, Bertrand, is killed under mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan that he really tries to understand why men fight and die.

Dwight Bogdanovic enjoyed a golden childhood in his idealized vision of 1950s America—freely riding his bicycle in the streets, pick-up ball games in the park, and earning pocket money by shoveling snow or raking leaves for neighbors—but coming of age proved difficult for him. After dropping out of college during the height of the Vietnam War and after receiving a medical deferment from the draft he travels the Midwest selling encyclopedias door-to-door to people who don’t want them, then returns to his hometown of Indianapolis. There he lands a series of temp jobs and hooks up with a hippie girlfriend before meeting the good woman who will become his wife. All seems right again until, one by one, all his beloveds succumb to their own fates—disease, old age, and war. Especially his son, especially war. Dwight struggles to overcome the loss of Bertrand and constantly replays letters from him in his head before realizing, with the help of yet another woman in his life, that the greatest challenge is not merely to survive, but to let go.

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“How do you measure a life? Is it simply the sum of events, relationships, decisions? Will it finish too late or too soon, like a book badly written? And who will value the life? In the first chapter of Abe Aamidor’s Letting Go, a bereaved father quotes a friend of Bertrand Russell saying, ‘Your life matters because you did live it.’ But his son Bertrand has died in Afghanistan. Will the father’s life still matter? Reading like a gorgeously written memoir, Letting Go retells the son’s life together with father’s and grandfather’s, through snapshots of people from different worlds, drawn together in America’s melting pot, sent to fight for great causes, and coming home again. Except the father sold encyclopedias and the son didn’t come home. Convincing first-person narration brings to life, and vividly contrasts, teenage days of cycling and the present-day voice of an old man viewing his ‘fitness goal.’ The ‘black blooming smell of soil after heavy rain,’ is contrasted with city streets where ‘buildings have…personalities,’ the regrets of the past with a desire to matter in the present, and the certainties of official voices with the nuanced nature of relationships. Birds are evicted from their trees, tribes from their land, and a man from the life he thought he’d built for himself. Small actions have large consequences, in life and in this novel, like concrete filling the space between wooden blocks to keep an old building standing, or memories tucked in the cracks of a sacred wall. Meanwhile a man, not yet so old, seeks a way forward that’s not so tied after all to the past. Only then can he truly look back and value those memories for what they are, proof that ‘life is for the living.’”

— Sheila Deeth, popular book reviewer and blogger