In the late spring of 1992, poet Rachel Hadas's mother died of cancer. Six weeks later, a close friend died of AIDS. The Double Legacy is a moving sequence of essays on the aftermath of these deaths in Hadas's life.

A busy teacher and writer, wife and mother, daughter and friend, Hadas found her life dominated first by the two terminal illnesses of those beloved people and then by their two deaths - deaths startlingly close together in time and space. These experiences, which infused her thoughts and dreams, quickly became and for some time remained central to her writing.

Interweaving her emotions with wide-ranging literary references, Hadas explores in The Double Legacy the process of mourning, the changing faces of grief, and the ways in which she incorporates the memories of her mother and friend into herself. Without relying on religious tradition, The Double Legacy is a spiritual book. It is also humane, harrowing, poetic, and ultimately uplifting.