by Nicholas Wolterstorff

Simple and elegant are two words that come to mind after reading Lament for a Son. This small, easy book does not overwhelm therefore counterbalances the impossible loss of one’s child. One of the universal changes in grief is the loss of concentration. In losing a child I am not sure this improves dramatically. It took two years before I could read more than a few pages at a time.

In the genre of grief, I found the author’s reflections to be specific, descriptive and without a lot of explanation. When grieving a child, this can be of great comfort because there is in fact, no explanation. All that is left is the narrative. Any analysis is exhaustive and circular.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is an esteemed professor of philosophical theology. He regularly teaches lecture courses in philosophy of religion and aesthetics, and seminars in epistemology, hermeneutics, and philosophy of religion.

He lost his son, Eric, 25, in a mountain climbing accident and wrote Lament for a Son 12 years later. In the Preface he hopes that his words give voice to this, our special brand of grieving. In graceful candor he wonders aloud how it is he answers the question, “Who are you?” Eric’s loss, he writes, determines much of his identity, and that “Lament is part of life.”

I am committed to writing strangers who put into words this suffering. The painful weight is lifted up briefly in finding others who know without my having to explain what is unexplainable. I contacted Dr. Wolterstorff who was generous enough to respond. Finding one further along can offer a nugget of hope in store for a possible future.

Wolterstorff’s response to my email confirmed that the early years of this grief are when the life flame is gone and we feel like doing nothing. He called his experience “living around the gap.” I think his supporting and honoring the open wound in its remaining state is comforting.

Sparse and stark, but marked by his individualized hope, I include some quotes from the book I suggest you own. Whether you are a parent with this hole, or know a parent, it will open up new ways of considering the experience.

In making notes while reading, the funny thing was, I could have quoted almost the entire book….

DARKNESS, ABSENCE

“Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark – not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence?”

“Noon has darkened. As fast as they could say, ‘He’s dead,’ the light dimmed. And where are you in the darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness, I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is not your absence in which I dwell, but your elusive troubling presence?”

“It’s the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us – never to sit with us at the table…. All the rest of our lives we must live without him. Only our death can stop the pain of his death.”

REGRET

“We took him too much for granted. Perhaps we all take each other too much for granted. The routines of life distract us; our own pursuits make us oblivious; our anxieties and sorrows, unmindful. The beauties of the familiar go unremarked. We do not treasure each other enough.”

“He was a gift to us for twenty-five years. When the gift was finally snatched away, I realized how great it was. Then I could not tell him.”

“I didn’t know how much I loved him until he was gone. Is love like that?”

“Death has picked him out. Death has made him special. Now I think of him every day; before I did not”

“Regrets.. I shall live with them, I shall accept my regrets as part of my life, to be numbered among my self-inflicted wounds. But I will not endlessly gaze at them. I shall allow the memories to prod me into doing better with those still living.”

REMEMBERING

“I lament all that might have been, and now will never be… It means not forgetting him. It means speaking of him. Do this in remembrance…”

“It does not console me to be reminded of the hope of resurrection. What consolation can there be other than having him back?”

“There is a hole in the world now. In the place where he was there is now just nothing, a center like no other, of memory, of hope, of knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth, now is gone. Only a gap remains. A perspective on this world which once moved about within this world has been rubbed out. Only a void is left. There is nobody now who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembers, loved what he loved.”

“Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone. So it is with all the memories of him. They all lead into blackness. All I can do is remember him, I cannot experience him. Nothing new can happen between us.”

“From such innocuous things my imagination winds its way to my wound, Everything is charged with the potential of a reminder. There is no forgetting.”

LOVE

“The heart that speaks is heard more than the words that are spoken.”

DEATH

“With these hands I lifted him from his cradle – tiny, soft, warm and squirming with life. Now at the end with these same hands I touch him in his coffin. For though we aren’t our bodies, yet of nothing on this earth do we have more intimate possession than these. Only through those do we dwell here. I knew Eric through his body. Greeting and leaving-taking go best, I think, when we can do them with our hands.”

“To fully persuade us of death’s reality, of its grim finality, our eyes and hands must rub against death’s cold, hard body, body against body, painfully.

I pity those who never get a chance to see and feel the deadness of the one they love, who must think death but cannot sense it.”

“I buried myself that warm June day. It was me those gardeners lowered on squeaking straps into that dry hole. What does it mean? Eric dead, removed from out presence, covered with earth, inert? Or is such shattering of love beyond meaning for us, the breaking of meaning-mystery, terrible mystery?”

“Books on grief offered ways of not looking at death and pain in the face.”

CONNECTIONS TO OUR PAIN

“I must struggle so hard to regain life that I cannot reach out to you. Nor you to me.”

“Doubting Thomas… if you want to know who I am out your hand inside my wound.”

“Suffering is for the loving. If I had not loved him, there wouldn’t be this agony. Suffering is down at the center of things, deep down where the meaning is.”