The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

My son Elliott took his own life at the age of 15. He did so on my 35^th birthday. He showed no signs of depression or mental illness. There were no drugs or alcohol in his system. No one saw it coming.

I was plunged into deep grief, shame, guilt, self-blame, panic attacks, existential angst, and a clinical depression that required therapy and medication to break.

In an effort to understand, I read (or tried to read) everything I could find on bereavement, suicide, death of a loved one, and loss of a child. With one exception, they all left me cold. The one exception was Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son, written after his son Eric died in a mountain climbing accident. Lament is just that – it is a lament. It does not attempt any answers; it is a cry of a broken heart.

(Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology Emeritus at Yale University. He also taught at Calvin University, the Free University of Amsterdam, and the University of Notre Dame. He is considered a foremost analytical philosophers and has a strong background in the Dutch Reformed tradition of Christianity. His spouse is an ordained Episcopalian priest.)

I wrote to Professor Wolterstorff who was then teaching at the Free University of Amsterdam thanking him for his little book that touched my heart so deeply. He wrote back (a longhand letter), and since then, we have been sitting side-by-side on the mourner’s bench. He’s 20 years my senior, now in his 90s and as lucid as ever. He’s my friend. I call him Nick. 

Nick recently wrote Living With Grief, which explores grief from a philosophical and theological perspective and is informed by his work with incarcerated men. Every bereaved person, and most especially, every bereaved parent will benefit from reading Lament for a Son and Living With Grief.