When Dr. Nicolas Wolterstorff talks about grief, people listen. They should.
Wolterstorff has voiced illuminating insights about grief since the 1983 climbing accident that claimed the life of his 25-year-old son Eric. Many have read his 1987 Lament for a Son, which Wolterstorff calls his articulation of grief.
Perhaps ironically, Wolterstorff thought he should not publish the content of his new book, Living with Grief. Why? Because it departed in many ways from Lament for a Son. “My little book, Lament for a Son, was a cry of grief. Not a discourse about grief,” the retired scholar writes.
In contrast, the 2024 Living with Grief is, in his words, “overtly (theological). The style would be different.” The philosophy professor feared readers would find it too different.
However, Calvin Prison Initiative students persuaded him to publish the Living with Grief content after a friend taught it in class. This, too, is needed, the inmates said. Living with Grief is dedicated to these students.
Wolterstorff artfully notes, “Just as grief is particular, so too is living with grief; each life-with-grief has its own distinct contour, its own inscape.” So, he says, Living with Grief is about his learning to live with his grief—the perpetual absence of Eric.
He adds, “Loss and grief were not just new additional components in my life. I had to live a different life, a life for which I had neither preparation nor practice.”
A main question drives the slim book: “What is this intrusion into my life, this excruciatingly painful intrusion?”
To explore a full answer, Wolterstorff does careful and surgical work around the topic of grief. He creates a foundation by asking both what it means to grieve experientially and in our beliefs. Then he raises the scalpel to church fathers like Augustine and Calvin.
I especially relished chapter two, where Wolterstorff reveals ways people dismiss grief. He examines trite comments like “putting one’s grief behind one” or not including the loss in our life-narrative. He even studies Augustine’s shame over grief and suggests this infects our Christian culture too, along with “celebration-of-life disowning.”
What haunts me as I read Wolterstorff is the story my husband once told. Soon after his first wife’s death, he returned to serving as an usher. A congregant looked up at him and said, “Smile, Dave.”
Wolterstorff finds the new trends, like funerals as “celebrations,” to be troubling. He writes, “The celebration-of-life disowning takes the form of struggling to shape one’s emotional life in such a way that one’s feelings of grief are suppressed, replaced by feelings of gratitude for what was good in the life of the one loved.”
I hear this too often as crushed friends try to squeeze reasons to be grateful.
A focused section named “An Interlude” follows each chapter. I found them particularly helpful. For example, after the first chapter, an interlude titled “What to Say” equips readers to speak well into grief. Wolterstorff covers everything from “say something” to “accept the person’s immobility.”
The now 93-year-old retired professor taught for 30 years at Calvin University before assuming the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus Philosophical Theology at Yale.
Living with Grief contradicts notions of getting “around” a shattering experience. The title alone cues us thus. Instead, the title and content suggest this: our grief is our traveling companion. It ought to be. (Cascade)