Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff

I shall look at the world through tears.  Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see. - Wolterstorff


In 1983 Nicholas Wolterstorff's son Eric died in a mountaineering accident at the age of twenty- five.  This intensely personal meditation on grief, loss, and suffering is a beautiful book for anyone who has cried their own tears of grief or walked beside another in their grief.  It is a mere 100 pages, a book that can be finished in one sitting but will linger in your mind and heart.  This is a book to be read, passed on to others, and shared as a community that we, as families and friends, might better understand our own grief and loss while comforting those who are in the midst of the 'valley of tears' (Psalm 84).

The pictures, letters, and books of the past reveal life to us as a constant saying of farewell to beautiful places, good people, and wonderful experience...in every arrival there is a leavetaking; in each one's growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss.
 - Henri Nouwen, "A Letter of Consolation"  


This week I sat beside someone who grieves.  I felt so helpless to know what to say, to know how to comfort, to know how to be present with her.  Jason passed this book along to me as something which encouraged him.  Wolterstorff doesn't offer any simple formulas or answers to the pain of death.  What he does is remind us that death should hurt, that it is not the way things are supposed to be. What we can do  is "be open to the wounds of the world."  Woleterstorff writes, "The Stoics of antiquity said: Be calm.  Disengage yourself.  Neither laugh nor weep.  But Jesus says: Mourn humanity's mourning, weep over humanity's weeping...but do so in the good cheer that a day of peace is coming."