Christian Philospher Writes About Losing His 25 Year Old Son

A Christian philosopher, Wolterstorff wrote several scholarly books, but this memoir charted his grief and questioning in the first year after his twenty-five-year old son Eric died in a mountain-climbing accident. (From Lament For A Son)

The world looks different now. The pinks have become purple, the yellows brown. Mountains now wear crosses on their slopes. Hymns and psalms have reordered themselves so that lines I scarcely noticed now leap out: "He will not suffer thy foot to stumble." Photographs that once evoked the laughter of delighted reminiscence now cause only pain. Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard for me to look at? This one here, holding a fish longer than he is tall, six year old? Why is it easier to look at him as a grownup? The pleasure of seeing former students is colored by the realization that they were his friends and that wile they thrive he rots.

Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence something is finished, done. My life is divided into before and after. A friend of ours whose husband died young said it mean for her that her youth was over. My youth was already over. But I know what she meant. Something is over.

Especially in places where he and I were together this sense of something being over washes over me. It happen not so much at home, but other places. A moment in our lives together of special warmth and intimacy and vividness, a moment when I specially prized him a moment of hope and expectancy and openness to the future; I remember the moment. But instead of line of memory leading up to his life in the present, they all enter a place of cold inky blackness and never come out. The book slams shut.The story stops, it doesn't finish. The future closes, the hopes get crushed. And now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memory, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone.

So it is with all memories of him. They all lead into that blackness. It's all over, over, over. All I can do is remember him. I can't experience him. The person to whom these memories are attached is no longer here with me, standing up. He's only in my memory now, not in my life. Nothing new can happen between us. Everything is sealed tight, shut in the past. I'm still here. I have to go on. I have to start over. But this new start is so different from the first. Then I wasn't carrying this load, this thing that's over.

Sometimes I think that happiness is over for me. I look at photos of the past and immediately comes the thought: that's when we were still happy. But I can still laugh, I  guess that isn't quite it. Perhaps what's over is happiness as the fundamental tone of my existence. Now sorrow is that.

Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.

Bill Cosby and Pat Schweibert write about Loss...

Parents share a universal loss when their child dies. Though written as 'childrens' books, these messages are worthy for all ages. Bill Cosby also released a jazz album, Hello Friend: To Ennis With Love, to honor the memory of his son. The road to hope is filled with memories.

Tear Soup (written by Pat Schweibert), a recipe for healing after loss, is a family story book that centers around an old and somewhat wise woman, Grandy. Grandy has just suffered a big loss in her life and so she is headed to the kitchen to make a special batch of Tear Soup.

There she chooses the size pot that is right for her loss, and she puts on her apron because she knows it's going to be messy. And then Grandy starts to cry. At first she weeps, then she sobs, eventually she wails.

Slowly the pot is filled with tears as the old woman steeps away. To season her soup Grandy adds memories like the good times and the bad times, the silly and the sad times. She does not want to forget even one precious memory of her loss.

Tear Soup recognizes and reinforces the fact that every member of the family from the youngest to the oldest will grieve in their own way. Taking their own time and in doing so, find those things which help them best.

Essentially, we each make our own batch of Tear Soup when we grieve the loss of our child. Comedian, Bill Cosby, wrote a children's book called Friends of a Feather to honor the memory of his son Ennis. Ennis was murdered when he stopped to help a motorist on the side of the road.

Cosby wrote the book about friendship, loss and pain. He asked his daughter to do the artwork and wanted the bird, Feather, to have a 'smile' on it's breast to remind Bill of Ennis' smile. Artistically hidden, the smile radiates joy. -Marsha Abbott
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Reading: A form of bibliotherapy on the journey through loss and pain.

Rock Star Eric Clapton Talks About Losing His Son

We live our lives assuming the daily tasks, chores and encounters will be the high or lowlights of the day. Our personal challenges occupy our thoughts and convince us that these are the greatest difficulties we'll encounter. When the phone rings with news that our child has died those previous difficulties melt away and we realize we never knew the true meaning of difficulty or loss..... Musician Eric Claption discusses the loss of his son Conor.

ERIC CLAPTON has recalled the heartache of losing his son CONOR in his new autobiography, revealing he had taken the four-year-old to the circus the night before he fell to his death from his mother's New York apartment. Clapton, who penned classic ballad Tears In Heaven after the 1991 tragedy, spent the night before his son's death enjoying his first father-son outing alone with Conor.

After taking the boy home, the rocker admits he was swelled with confidence as a father and decided he wanted to spend more one-on-one time with his son when he was in New York. In Eric Clapton: The Autobiography, Clapton writes, "The following morning I was up early, ready to walk crosstown from my hotel to pick up (Conor's mother) Lori (del Santo) and Conor to take them to the Central Park Zoo...

"The phone rang and it was Lori. She was hysterical, screaming that Conor was dead. I thought to myself, 'This is ridiculous. How can he be dead?' and I asked her the silliest question, 'Are you sure?' "And then she told me that he'd fallen out of the window. She was beside herself. Screaming. I said, 'I'll be right there.'" Conor had fallen 49 stories from a high-rise window.

In his memoirs, Clapton also recalls the horror of having to identify his son at the morgue. He adds, "Whatever physical damage he had suffered in the fall, by the time I saw him they had restored his body to some normality. "As I looked at his beautiful face in repose, I remember thinking, 'This isn't my son. It looks a bit like him, but he's gone.'"
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Link to hear song: Clapton wrote the song Tears In Heaven in memory of his son.

Sportswriter Frank Deford Writes Memoir Of His Daughter

Sportswriter and National Public Radio and television commentator Frank Deford wrote Alex, a memoir of his daughter, who died at the age of eight. (From Alex: The Life Of a Child)

I am not a nihilist or sourpuss now that Alex is dead. I still laugh and love, marvel at the wonders of humanity and praise God for His. Neither, though, am I any wiser or stronger - and certainly no better - for what I went through. People assume you must be better for the experience, but I don't see why that must follow.

Neither must you necessarily abandon your Faith. However, you do lose something every bit as important, for when your child dies, you yourself are robbed of that childish sanity that makes it tolerable to accept growing old. I don't see the incongruity of life so well anymore, because my child's death is an incongruity in itself. A capricious world is much easier to deal with than the disordered one I have been forced to inhabit.

I do find one solace. Now that it is Alex who is dead (and not me), I really don't worry anymore about my own death. Oh sure, when the plane bumps about I gasp and grab the armrest and pray fervently that it will not plunge thirty-seven thousand feet and leave me in a number of charred little bits and pieces. I would not care for that at all. But you can have an adorable little girl, and she up and dies, then a number of rules seem changed, including those of death itself. I can't be frightened to follow Alex. I am not. I mean, first, strictly from a selfish point of view, dying is the only way I can possibly be with her again. But beyond that, Alex has, in her way, reduced all my normal maunderings about God and the hereafter to one terribly simple proposition. If there is a heaven - must be a heaven -great. If not, if this incredible little person spent eight years on this earth, only to completely disappear, poof, like that, then it is all quite pointless, all a gag, and it is of no great consequence to me whether or not I'm asked to participate in life as straight man or comic.

You lose a child and are brought to your knees. From that vantage point there is a lot to consider that you may not have considered before. And what better place to be than on your knees when you begin that process.

Death of Eisenhower's Firstborn Child

Eisenhower adored his firstborn child, Doud Dwight, nicknamed "Icky". When Ike was stationed at Fort Meade, Icky was a mascot for the soldiers When four year old Icky died, leaving his parents grief-stricken, Mamie once said, "It was as if a shining light had gone out of Ike's life. Throughout all the years that followed, the memory of those bleak days was a deep inner pain, that never seemed to diminish much." Ike sent Mamie flowers every year on Icky's birthday. Thirty-five years later, Ike wrote the following in a letter of consolation to his brother Edgar when Edgar's forty-year-old son Jack died.

From the Papers Of Dwight David Eisenhower: The Presidency

It is, of course difficult to understand why so often the oldsters go on and on into their eighties and nineties, while the younger more vigorous men are cut down in their youth. There is no way to explain it except that is is one of the accidents of living. It happens with the trees and the birds and everything that grows. No individual can have any possible explanation, and therefore it is one of those things which must be accepted and absorbed into the philosophy that a man develops as he goes along.

In spite of all this...I know this it is hard for you to take, yet you owe it to those still around you- your wife, your daughter and your grandchildren - to provide an example that is characterized by hope, faith and optimism. Pessimism, cynicism and defeat will destroy Jack's legacy.

This sounds like preaching - and possibly it is. My justification is that I lost a son of my own many years ago - then only one we had. To this date it is not an easy thing to deal with when it come fresh to my memory but it is something that I had to learn to accept or to go crazy.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower.