A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss

By Gerald A. Sitzer. Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids MI. [181pp.]

Reviewed by: Meg Wickes, Hospice Volunteer.

Initially, in this engaging and highly readable book, we are taken through the horror of the death in an instant of the author's wife, mother and baby girl in an automobile collision with a truck, its driver drunk.

The author, in order to gain perspective on his grief in the face of this sudden and overwhelming tragedy, starts by exploring a perspective which he soon rejects: One possible reaction to this horror would be to turn one's back on it and to search for easy pleasure wherever it might lie. In this way, the author suggests, lies a horror worse than all the pain and suffering - a virtual death of both self and soul.

Instead, the author takes the reader on his own journey through the dark night of the soul, to which God responds, working within the suffering and the struggle to help the author live through it, providing him with a grace which is not earned but given. Without the darkness, the "silent scream of pain," there can be no redemption, is the message.

A community of fellow sufferers is important as new roles are fashioned to take the place of the old ones destroyed. The author found his redemption in caring for his remaining family, in telling his story and teaching his faith to others.

The death of three members of his family did not, the author emphasizes, occur "in order that I might change for the better, raise three healthy children or write a book. I still want [my lost family] back, and I always will, no matter what happens as a result of their deaths." Grief, Sitzer believes, is permanent, as is the grace and joy it engenders in the process of embracing it.