The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

The Eleventh of February 

Anno Domini Nostril 

MCMLXXXVI

Wednesday, February 11, 2026, will be my 75^th birthday and the 40^th anniversary of my son Elliott’s suicide. He would be 55-years-old. Valentine’s Day will mark the 40^th anniversary of his burial in Memorial Gardens, Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

Everything changed forty years ago. A weak genetic link snapped. Depression descended like a thick wet quilt. Sorrow erupted from some unconscious crypt and washed over me time and again like relentless brutal surf and murderous undertow. 

The cosmos went cold. Meaning and purpose died. Theodicies collapsed. All of life seemed like a cruel joke. Absurdity ruled the day. I was living in a Kafka novel. 

They say losing a child is the deepest grief. 

• Losing a child to suicide adds layers of guilt, stigma, and shame. 
• Losing a child to suicide who had no history of mental illness, depression, or substance abuse added unanswerable enigma. 
• Losing a child to suicide who showed no symptoms of mental illness on my 35^th birthday left me assuming he hated me so much that he purposely hurt me in the deepest way possible.

Relentlessly pursuing answers. Teenage impulsivity? Parental blindness? Mental illness so deeply hidden no one saw it? Demonic influence? 

There were Christians who told me God killed my child to punish me for sin. There were other Christians who told me Elliott was in hell. Scores of Christians abandoned me, simply disappearing out of my life. 

The wisest people never tried to give me any answers. Instead, they sat with me and said nothing. 

The most loving cried with me and held me.

I read book after book on grief, loss, death of a child, suicide – with one single exception, they left me cold. The exception was Lament for a Son by Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. His son died in a mountain climbing accident. He lamented. He sat with the grief. He sat with not knowing. He owned his grief redemptively.

And that is what I’m learning to do with all my griefs and sorrows, my disappointments and losses, including this defining one. Rather than ignore sorrow and grief, or fight them, curse them, or deny them, I seek to own them, invite them in.

But I try to not just own them but own them redemptively. God caused none of it; God willed none of it; yet those griefs and sorrows, those losses and disappointments have something to teach me, some message from beyond, which, when heeded, lead me more deeply into the heart of divine love where I discover a grieving God who offers few answers, but sits and weeps with me on the mourners’ bench. 

And that is a great gift.