THANKSGIVING An AIDS Journal <i> by Elizabeth Cox (Harper & Row: $18.95; 230 pp.) </i>

In “Thanksgiving,” Elizabeth Cox chronicles the devastating experience of losing her husband, Keith, to AIDS. With unwavering honesty, Cox describes the stages of her grief--shame, anger, nostalgia for lost innocence, fear for their son, Luke--as she confronts the stages of Keith’s illness, down to his final decision to end his life. Miraculously, the book is not self-pitying or sentimental, for Cox’s account is more than a description of a descent to doom.

With her minute scrutiny of the daily ebb and flow of emotions, Cox manages to map that constantly fluctuating distance between soul and soul, that constant tension in a couple between independence and unity. What emerges is an inspiring story of a couple who found the strength in each other to face the brutal trials of this terminal illness.

She describes her hyper-awareness of everyone’s mortality: “As people approached and walked past me (in the street), I would look at them and decide if they were dying or not, and I could really tell--I knew. By the time they had passed me, their fates were sealed.”

On the process of writing, Cox explains: “My journal helped me grieve my husband. But it did not help me resolve my anger.” Her book ends with her difficulty explaining Keith’s death to other parents at Luke’s nursery school and her efforts to protect the boy’s memory of his father from the prejudice that surrounds the disease.

But the strength that the couple found saves her--and the book--from despair. When one of her friends suggests that Luke need never know the truth about his father, she writes: “That seemed wrong to me. I said, ‘I will never lie to my son.’ I am done with deceptions.”