Being Brett: Chronicle of a Daughter's Death • In the Wake of Death: Surviving the Loss of a Child • Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle With Alcoholism • The Stalking of Kristin: A Father Investigates the Murder of His Daughter

Every child's death is a tragedy, a gift to the world that is undelivered, a potential unfulfilled. Douglas Hobbie's memoir of his daughter's illness and death at age 27 from Hodgkin's disease lets us know with painful eloquence the unique spirituality and joy that was lost with Brett Hobbie's death.

Hobbie's well-written prose captures Brett's energy and relish for life as well as the nightmare of each phase of her disease. The author reports honestly, acknowledging the need he had as a parent to take control of her treatment even as Brett asserted her need for independence. In his desire to reassure and encourage Brett, he sometimes left her feeling unheard and alone. But in this book he wisely often lets Brett speak for herself, using her own witty, upbeat correspondence and comments.

Being Brett begins two and a half years after Brett's college graduation, when she moves to San Francisco in search of financial independence and selfhood. Soon she meets her partner, Beth Wilson. Six months later, just as Brett is to begin a new job, an enlarged lymph node is diagnosed as Hodgkin's disease. Brett, Beth, and the Hobbie family begin a four-year journey of disease and remission, fear and hope. But despite a 90 percent cure rate when Hodgkin's is found early, Brett's battle is mostly downhill.

After six months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, the cancer is gone, but five months later it is back. Brett says, "I don't want to be the sick person. . . I don't want to be the one who needs help and support. Now I have this wonderful [new] apartment . . . to be sick in."

Her father captures the years of treatments, her physical decline, and the importance of the medical staff as family and friends eagerly await reports of how she is responding. Each day Brett sets new goals for herself as she keeps her journal, takes walks, travels, develops her relationships, and expands her skills working in charcoal and pastels. In a postcard sent from a much-desired trip to Italy, she writes, "I feel light and full, surrounded by beauty."

Even when ill, Beth encompasses an awe-inspiring youthful passion for life and a sobering maturity. She is open not only with her father but with all the important people in her life, feeling that talking will keep them connected. At a gathering of family friends on one occasion that she was not really up to, she tells everyone what they mean to her. "Tonight has reminded me what pleasure life is—what pleasure."

Her father tries to keep up her spirits up when she gets discouraged. Brett becomes angry. "I don't need you to be positive all the time or to dominate the conversation or to tell me what I must be feeling. It isn't calming, you know, when you talk at me. I just need you to listen." But when her father breaks down crying, she says, "My sadness is so large. Your tears make me feel less alone." Brett eventually dies in her own apartment, surrounded by those who love her, her life and death a monument to her strength.

Despite the painful recounting of Brett's treatment and its failure, Being Brett is really about the need to fully live our short and precious lives, to engage fully in being, to love deeply while we can. And to see if we can emulate this young woman "with such a beautiful mind."

On June 1, 1991, Berlyn Cosman attended her high school senior prom and then, with 14 other students, rented three rooms at a nearby hotel for a post-prom party. At 6 a.m., while sleeping in the "quiet room," she was shot and killed by an intoxicated youth who was angry because the students in the quiet room wouldn't let him party there.

Haunted by anxiety attacks, troubled by the destruction of his concept of God and evil, and feeling responsible for his daughter's death, Berlyn's father, Mark Cosman, searches for a new interpretation of his life that will free him from the encompassing fear with which he lives. In his book In the Wake of Death we learn about Cosman's daughter and family, but the book primarily recounts his "inner pilgrimage."

Berlyn was an attractive, athletic, and graceful 17-year-old. Starting in seventh grade, her father encouraged her to play basketball, believing that if she was really good at something, she would be less susceptible to people who prey on those with low self-esteem. He gave her his love of sports, coaching her basketball teams, playing with her after school and on weekends. And Berlyn was good. Three times she was named most valuable player in high school, she played on several all-star teams, and she won an athletic scholarship to college, a source of pride and excitement.

Cosman writes, "If God is omniscient . . . then he had to have known Berlyn was going to be murdered. If he is omnipresent, he had to have been in the quiet room. . . . If he is omnipotent, he had the power to stop the murder. And if he is all loving, he certainly would have."

Always attracted to "larger religious experiences"—Cosman once spent two weeks in silence in a Trappist monastery—he believed that life always reflected back what he had done, that moral action produces predictable consequences. Years earlier his wife-to-be became pregnant before they were married, and the couple decided to give up the baby girl for adoption. Cosman always regretted that decision and wonders frequently whether Berlyn was taken in retribution for it.

After his daughter's death, Cosman searches for answers in the course of his job-related travels. He talks with a Russian psychologist responsible for the cosmonauts who while in space experienced contact with their ancestors, consults with a Buddhist priest, and explores Native American mythology.

Cosman has several quasimystical experiences, ranging from the superstitious to the surreal to the mystifying, for which he tries to find a pattern, to reinstate God's presence in his life. Ultimately, he decides that life is neutral. It is based on neither human-inspired nor God-inspired judgment.

After Cosman's clearly painful search, the answer he finds rings short and anticlimactic. The wisdom of the people he consults seems strangely lacking in content or profundity. However, in a few places, the writing is especially poignant, as when the author discusses his difficulties with stuttering, a problem he shared with his mother, and when he writes briefly about his older half-brother, who as a youngster caught a severe virus and fever from Cosman and became deaf.

It is difficult to acknowledge feeling so unmoved by this book, as if that somehow belittles the loss of this young woman, full of promise. But Cosman's inner search does not seem to take us far, nor leave us in a satisfying place.

Terry McGovern wrote in her journal, "If someone looks too closely [at me], I freeze like a chameleon— ready to change color [identity] to protect myself. Better to freeze. Who can hurt me when I'm frozen?"

Ironically, in December 1994 Terry, the daughter of former senator George McGovern and his wife, Eleanor, stumbled out of a bar in Madison, Wisconsin, in an alcoholic stupor and fell into a snowbank. She went to sleep and froze to death. She was 45 years old.

In Terry Senator McGovern chronicles his daughter's long years of alcohol abuse from four to five beers a week at age 13 to 68 detox center admissions in the last four years of her life. He wrote this book, he says, partly because it is impossible for someone in his position to be silent, but partly because he wants Terry's life and death to be understood and appreciated. Sadly, McGovern feels that in preparing this book, he has learned more about alcoholism and his daughter than in all the years she was alive.

McGovern comes to share the belief of some professionals that depression, mood swings, and personality problems are caused by alcohol rather than that alcohol covers up such psychological issues. Terry's depression and internal conflicts were not what most people saw, however. She was good, funny, smart, honest, and deeply caring. He says, "We loved her and she loved us, but she could not love herself."

By Terry's junior year in high school, she had added drugs to her alcohol intake. Her parents watched her declining academic performance with confusion. As she entered college, her use of drugs and alcohol lessened, and at age 19 she helped her father campaign for reelection. But after an arrest for marijuana possession, her shame at letting her father down led to increased guilt and depression.

However, in counseling, Terry began to see herself as the misunderstood and injured child whose needs had not been met. Her depression later shifted to anger. She often saw her father as someone whose public life made him both self-centered and obsessed with public concerns. For his part, McGovern felt that Terry's counselors frequently allowed her a self-pity and a preoccupation with the past that kept her from moving forward.

McGovern says that he frequently had trouble separating the sin from the sinner and that Terry knew how angry he could become with her. Still, through everything, they had a positive relationship. When they spoke on the phone, he would ask her, "Who's ahead today—you or the demon?"

McGovern reveals a family history of alcoholism for some of his siblings and his son Steven. He describes Eleanor McGovern's first postpartum depression, and her subsequent episodes of depression. He recounts the many therapeutic interventions arranged for Terry in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., all unsuccessful in bringing about lasting recovery.

The major issue with which McGovern deals is the sense of guilt. Could he and his family have done more? Should they have handled things differently? About six months before Terry's death, a counselor suggested that her parents have less contact with her for a while, a suggestion they partly followed. Did this situation increase Terry's sense of abandonment, or make her parents less likely to pick up on her deterioration? "No amount of assurance from friends that you were not responsible for the outcome is entirely persuasive," McGovern says. "You are going to suffer a thousand regrets and seizures of grief no matter how many times you intellectually argue that it is not your fault."

McGovern says he cannot accept the idea that perhaps it is better that Terry died, considering her painful struggle. "Death is never better. It is final, agonizing, and devastating for a parent."

Kristin Lardner was the daughter of George Lardner, Jr., a reporter for the Washington Post. When Kristin was stalked and then killed by her ex-boyfriend after a relatively short relationship, Lardner decided to investigate his daughter's murder. The identity of the assailant was clear, but he wanted to understand how such a crime came to happen to his bright and lively 21-year-old daughter, whose "smile, bounce, and exuberance made life sparkle."

In the process Lardner has put together a poignant picture of a young woman who trusted too much along with a frightening account of a fragmented justice system whose segments cannot communicate with each other and whose laws do not have enough teeth to protect victims.

Kristin was a loving and basically sound young woman who liked to test boundaries and to learn for herself. In January 1992, as an art student in Boston, she met Michael, a nightclub bouncer who was putting his life together, and she quickly became attached to him. Michael was charming, attentive, and affectionate. He acknowledged some minor criminal problems in the past, implying they were resolved. But in between the presents and flowers he gave her were warning signs. On one occasion he slapped her, and on another he caused the death of a pet kitten.

As their relationship deteriorated, Michael would plead with Kristin to stay with him: "You are the only person who understands me." Kristin encouraged him to get counseling and gave him names to contact for help. After Michael beat her severely in April, she obtained a restraining order. He then began to stalk her, following her to school, peering in at the store where she worked, and asking friends about her whereabouts. In May he shot her twice in the head as she left work and shortly afterward killed himself.

Lardner subsequently learned that Michael had a criminal record three pages long and that at the time of the killing he was in violation of parole. Before meeting Kristin, he had been in prison, convicted of brutally beating a former girlfriend despite the restraining order she had against him. He was released early for good behavior and even though there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest on another charge.

Lardner intersperses Kristin's story with interviews with police officers, lawyers, counselors, and prison guards and with striking statistics that provide a damning picture of escalating domestic violence nationwide and the justice system's inadequacy to deal with it. Even Massachusetts, a relatively progressive state, seems helpless to prevent violence. For instance, virtually no one convicted of a misdemeanor serves jail time, and fewer than half of those convicted of a crime are sent to jail.

Lardner feels that inattention to minor crimes allows serious ones to happen. From his view, it is the equivalent of a doctor saying, "Come back when you're really sick." Lardner notes that a restraining order is the first weapon of defense women have to protect themselves against domestic violence and that it is useless.

The Stalking of Kristin is a testament to Lardner's skill as an investigative reporter and a writer. He is able to combine statistics, material from a wide range of interviews, and Kristin's personal history to create a moving indictment of a failed system.

Ms. Brandzel is a social worker living in Worcester, Massachusetts.