“Love and Loss,” a trilogy of videos by Neil Goldberg, currently at the Jewish Museum, constitutes, in a sense, several chapters of autobiography, spoken in the third person. Or persons, as the characters in these pieces — which require only 17 minutes of total viewing time — are Goldberg’s parents.

The videos proceed with lulling simplicity. Indeed, the three works employ such a meager repertoire of means that one doubts that any one of them, seen alone, would make much of an impact. As a trilogy, though, they form an elegiac and ultimately beautiful document of familial love.

They do not begin auspiciously. In “My Parents Read Dreams I’ve Had About Them” (1998), each of Goldberg’s parents do just that, reading from hand-written sheets of paper bearing descriptions of dreams in which one or another appears. But other people’s dreams are among the most boring fillers of literature and art one might be forced to endure.

Goldberg’s parents, to their credit, seem almost to recognize this fact. Goldberg’s mother, Shirley, wears a striped shirt buttoned to the collar, her silver hair blown out to helmet-like proportions, her nugget-sized earrings gleaming, her librarian’s glasses attached to their chain and perched on the bridge of her nose. She reads — fluently, yet impersonally, as though she’s not terribly happy about having to do it — about a dream the artist had about, among other things, a party for him during which he flirts with a boy while in line for the bathroom. She gives the moment no special emphasis, yet we, the audience, learn Goldberg is probably gay. What else might we learn from these dreams? Later in the video, Shirley reads dreams in which Goldberg has a baby, imposes on the baby’s mother 20-odd rules for carrying the child, then worries about seeming officious.

Goldberg’s father, wearing a yellow golf shirt, his thinning hair gray, looks like a typical middleclass grandfather, though he, like the mother, appears to be well educated. He, too, reads fluently, first of a dream in which he owns a personal EKG machine, which prompts Goldberg to consider that he’s not ready for his father to die. Or, Goldberg decides, he is ready, if his father needs to die. Goldberg’s father then reads of dream in which Goldberg looks out across a great distance at his father, who is perched high up in a building; and then of yet another dream concerning Goldberg’s father and death. The dreams are not independently interesting, but as they accumulate one realizes they establish a narrative: Goldberg’s sexual orientation wobbles when he thinks of his mother, and he conjures death when thinking of his father.

We soon learn that the narrative is of the ironic variety. In the second video, “My Father Breathing into a Mirror” (2005) — a brief interlude, only a minute long — the father sits outside on a bright autumn day. Bordering the green lawn behind him, the foliage forms a parti-colored screen. Wearing a gray cap and a coat, the father holds a small mirror under his nose, and we can see the condensation of his breath on the mirror. Despite the autumnal allusion to death, he proves he is alive. But he is alone.

Furthering the suspense, Goldberg, in the title of the third video, “A System for Writing Thank You Notes” (2001), avoids any direct mention of death. Here the father, again alone, and wearing the now somewhat faded yellow golf shirt he wore in the first video which was shot several years earlier, explains the system he devised for writing thank you notes after his wife’s funeral. Accounting for his fastidiously rationalized approach to the problem, he tells us he is an engineer, a detail emphasized by the home office where he sits — on May 8, 2001, he tells us — among stacks of papers and a computer.

Shirley died in November of 2000. Presumably it was she who wrote the couples’ thank you notes prior to her death; hence his need of devising a system for thanking those who attended the service in her honor, sat shivah with him, went to the cemetery, donated money in her name, and who sent food, not to mention the hospice workers and doctors who cared for her. Speaking in a matter-of-fact tone, he recounts how he wrote out 18 sentences that he would use in various combinations in the 97 thank you notes he sent. Wanting to add something personal, he included a photo of Shirley in each.

After rehearsing all 18 sentences, he chooses several recipients to introduce, perhaps in order to give us a fuller sense of him and his wife. For instance, to a man named Alan, who belongs to the local Y and with whom he swims most days, he sent a note containing two sentences: “Thank you for your visit during the shivah period,” and, “We hope you will remember Shirley as she was in the photo attached.”

His near-deadpan is at once humorous because of the earnestness with which he describes the precisely devised system and, of course, melancholic. At the end, he explains that he tried to find the most appropriate sentences for each recipient, and that he hopes they appreciated his effort.

One imagines they did, just as, after watching the trilogy, it would be difficult not to appreciate the sincerity, subtlety, and cleverness that went into making this affecting portrait.

Until October 14 (1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd Street, 212-423-3200).