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herbert anderson

This collection of letters from a father to his son after the son’s tragic and untimely death is a bold invitation to reconsider grief in several significant ways.

The experience of absence and the feeling of emptiness are common in grief. The loss of someone we love leaves a hole in the soul that can never be filled. “It would be nonsense,” Dietrich Bonheoffer once wrote, “to say that God fills the gap; God doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.”1 In the absence of someone we love, we tell stories of his or her past presence in our lives. The pain of this remembering includes an increased awareness of absence, the permanent “never-to-be-ness” of death. Eventually, as the grief diminishes, one becomes more accustomed to the presence of absence.

Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff is another account of a father’s grief over a son’s untimely death as a result of a mountain-climbing accident at age twenty-five.2 The book is testimony to a remarkable young man whose love of the mountains and hiking in solitude led to his death. There is no effort to relieve the sadness that accompanies remembering a young life cut off before a future filled with promise can unfold. As a father, Wolterstorff is baffled and hurt by his son’s tragic death and overwhelmed by the pain of absence.

The letters in this book presume an absent presence in which the invisible boundary between the living and the dead is permeable. Don Mayer, the father, often prefaces some activity report to his dead son Peter with phrases like “as you have seen” or “as you may know.” This awareness that his dead son lives close enough to see what is happening changes the emphasis of grief from absence only to absent presence. These letters were difficult for Don to write because they kept alive a relationship that will never again be what it was. “Your absence is an awful black hole which keeps sucking at your presence in our lives, so that we must keep talking about you, and holding to each other.” On one occasion, when Don had borrowed his son Peter’s shoes, the father imagines his dead son saying with a laugh, “Hey, Dad, need a little help tying my shoes?” The vividness of Peter’s presence in death is a continuation of the vitality and exuberance of his living. And the intimacy of these letters pulsates with the affection of a father for his son.

The death of a child is against nature. It is profoundly wrong for a child to die before his or her parent. It is difficult enough to bury our parents but our parents belong to the past. Our children belong to our future. When a child dies, something of our future dies. Over and over again, Don shakes his head in disbelief. “Six weeks ago at this time you were already dead and we didn’t know it. And I still don’t believe it.” Disbelief is about the struggle to internalize an unimaginable reality. Sometimes the father’s disbelief comes from the struggle to hold the joy of his life alongside the deep sadness of his son’s death. It is also the suddenness that fosters disbelief. “When everything was going so well for you, for the whole family, suddenly you are out of it. Forever.” When Don admits that he does not want to understand why his son is absent, disbelief turns to denial.

Grief happens without our intending it when we lose someone we love. We are often overwhelmed by waves of sadness or choked by tears that flow freely and unpredictably. But grief is also something we discover. The work of grieving is the intentional search for memories and meaning that accompany loss. “That is the reason I write to you,” Don Mayer confesses to Peter, “to find out what it is like to lose a son the way we lost you.” One of the gifts of remembering is the discovery of new stories of the deceased person or additional dimensions of his or her person. After hearing stories from friends and colleagues of Peter, Don Mayer writes this to his son: “It had simply not occurred to me just how much you lived a kind of calling which you may never have verbalized—a calling as a Christian businessman.” There were other surprises that were more difficult but the end of the remembering was a picture of a real person with remarkable gifts.

How people die affects how we grieve. Grief is certainly shaped by the nature and intensity of our relationship to the lost person or object. In recent years, however, we have learned to pay attention to the uniqueness of grief after violent death. Remembering has particular pain and particular importance when the death is violent. Three weeks after Peter’s death, his father wondered how he died. “One sleepless night I did have this image of your head encrusted with dried blood. I wanted to wash it away, cleanse the wound, hold your head.” Ted Rynearson, a psychiatrist who lives on the same island as Don and Lynnea Mayer, has written about “restorative retelling” of an individual’s living in order to find release from compulsive retelling of the dying.3 These letters to Peter witness to the healing and transformative power of telling and retelling and retelling again.

The honest expression of anger toward his son is one of the prohibitions about grief that Don Mayer violates in these letters. This taboo has its origins in the cultural belief that the living dead (spirits of the departed) actively influence daily living. If the dead are actively involved in our living, one should not offend these spirits by speaking ill of them. The anger may be old—a residue of a conflicted relationship that preceded the death. Sandra’s mother had sabotaged every romance that Sandra had. Sandra stopped grieving for her mother’s death when she was invited to consider her rage at her mother for messing with her life. When anger that is part of grief cannot be expressed, all grief may be buried to keep the anger hidden.

Sometimes the anger is more recent and related to how someone died. Less than a week after his son Alexander was killed in a car accident in a terrible storm, William Sloan Coffin preached these words at Riverside Church. “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of frosties too many? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no street lights along that stretch of road, and no guard rail separating the road and Boston Harbor?”4 It should never be said when someone dies that it is the will of God. The younger brother of Alex said it accurately in front of the casket: You blew it, buddy. You blew it. Do not blame God for human carelessness.

Coffin’s sermon is a prelude to these vividly painful letters from Don Mayer to his son Peter. Both died much too young because they were careless about drinking and driving. It was not the will of God. There is no reason to be angry at God. There is reason, however, to be angry at Alex and Peter for how they died. The anger about Peter’s death is most vivid when Peter’s parents and his widow read the death certificate: “contributing cause of death: acute ethanol intoxication.” What a stupid way to die, the father laments. “I hate the way your drunk death twists our grief.” What is most remarkable about these letters by Don Mayer is that a father’s anger does not become a “bottomless pit” but the way to recover his intense love for his son. Anger will not bring Peter back but neither does it sever the bond between a father and his son.

The anger toward Peter does not last forever. The police report indicated skid marks on the road suggesting that he had not fallen asleep. Something else happened. Peter’s friends insisted that there was no sign when he left the party that he would have any trouble making the five-minute drive to where he lived. “So we are left again with sudden accidental death. And not knowing. And not blaming. Anybody. Not you either, Peter.” From that moment on, the anger toward Peter is mostly gone. What is left is simply grief.

One of the tasks for a family when a significant member dies is to acknowledge the loss of both the person and his or her role in the family and then redefine family roles accordingly. Whenever Peter’s brother and sister gather with his parents, it always seems to Don that part of the family is missing. What is missing in particular is Peter’s role as the “multiplier” in the family. “What we miss is not simply your presence, but what your presence created among us—all the interactions that you produced among us.” The family is quieter when it gathers without Peter. Sometimes families quickly elect someone to assume that role as a way to avoid the loss. Although Peter’s family did not seek to replace his “multiplier” role, his daughter grew to mirror her father in that respect.

Peter’s sister had the most difficult time grieving his death. She had given birth to her second child just a month before Peter’s death. It is difficult to live simultaneously with the joy of new life and sadness of life lost. To complicate matters, the child was named Peter.

Less than three months after Peter’s death, Don and his wife, Lynnea, celebrated her wedding anniversary with Peter’s widow, Linda. “We clinked glasses and toasted Linda’s 10th Anniversary of becoming part of our family.” Linda was now first of all a member of the family rather than Peter’s wife. “No more wedding anniversaries,” she said. Roles and family rituals had already been redefined.

There are a number of common truths about uncommon grief that we are invited to discover in these letters from a grieving father to his dead son.

 Grieving people feel transparent, as if the whole world can see a soul in sadness. As Don Mayer opens his billfold to pay for the wine, the flight attendant says “Forget it!” waving him off with a secretive smile. “How could she know?” he asked Peter. The painful paradox for grievers is that they want their grief heard without the messiness of being seen as grievers.

 It is tempting to varnish the story of a life or a death to fit our preconceived hopes or dreams. “The consensus in the family is that you swerved to miss one of the abundant deer in that neighborhood—but who knows?” The family was free to grieve fully when they determined to tell the truth about the role of alcohol in Peter’s tragic death.

 We often use negative images to describe the process of grieving. We will say someone “broke down” or “fell apart” when their grief was expressed in sobs and tears or in erratic and uncharacteristic behavior. Don Mayer has it just right. “Falling apart now and then (actually pretty often) is part of what will eventually put us back together.” It is often our fear of not being put back together again that keeps us from the “falling” that makes healing in grief possible.

 The end of intense grieving is a second loss. Don Mayer was aware of that change when he stopped writing to Peter for some time. People need to hold on to their grief because it may be the only thing they have left of someone they loved and lost. People are sometimes reluctant to share their grief with others out of fear that they would take the grief away or invalidate the sadness.

 Our culture discourages men from grieving. They must be strong and tearless. Tears are a sign of weakness and only women are permitted to be weak. While Don Mayer did not set out to write a countercultural account of a man grieving, his frequent references to sobbing uncontrollably or being held by his wife as he cried and cried present an alternative to male stoicism in the face of devastating loss. These letters also reveal a human struggle to maintain the thin veneer between the intense internal pain grievers feel and the façade the world expects from them. Don was able to write these letters because he was held by people who did not expect him to hide his sadness.

 Grievers often find it difficult to embrace moments of joy in their lives in the midst of sadness. The years following Peter’s death were filled with incredible abundance and joy. Perhaps because it does not seem right to have such rich life experiences while Peter is dead, Don did not write to his son for five years. Eventually Don writes that “your loss no longer shadows the glad times in the way that it did.” “I want to share with you the deep joy of this time, these times, this year marked not so much by your death but by celebrations of fifty years of marriage.” When sadness no longer cancels the joys of living, grievers know that the darkest part of the journey is over.

These letters chronicle a journey that parallels the biblical psalms of lament. Walter Brueggemann, whose epilogue concludes this collection of letters, had convinced Don Mayer that it was “very much ok to pour out my anger to God.” In these letters, the anger is more directed toward Peter than God but for similar reasons: abandonment and absence. Eventually, in the biblical psalms, angry complaints about God’s absence are replaced by quiet confidence in God’s enduring presence. Peter is gone, the hole his death left in his father’s life is still there, but the memory of this beloved son is constant and sweet. These letters chronicle that journey from sadness to sweetness. They are also compelling testimony to the necessity of taking that journey. Healing from grief is found where our wounds hurt most. We discover those wounds through persistent remembering and storytelling. Sometimes it becomes necessary to “write my way out of grief,” as Don did.

I have known Don and Lynnea since shortly after Peter’s death. The authenticity of their lives is reflected on these pages. So is the affection for them from people they have loved. The people that sustained them with love and hugs and accepting presence were people who had earlier received love from Don and Lynnea. I did not know Peter, but knowing Don I understand about the “multiplier effect” that he attributes to Peter. The same might be said for Don and Lynnea. While these letters have been written largely from a father’s perspective, their willingness to face the sadness together made it possible for each of them to live through their own unique grief. Their confidence in the promise of God’s understanding made it possible to take that grief journey, not knowing what they would discover on the way. I end with these words from Don that bear witness to the kind of faith that makes grieving possible. “Our own trust in God’s understanding and acceptance of our feelings gave your mom and I the permission to express without hesitation all the pain, shock, anger, all the ‘if only’s, the emptiness, brokenness and sadness which we felt in the aftermath of your death, all the tears, the whimpering, the earth-shaking sobs: you got it all in these letters, Peter, week after week, month after month. And so did God. We trust that God understood and accepted all that.”

1. Dietrich Bonheoffer, Letters & Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997) 176.

2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).

3. Edward K. Rynearson, Retelling Violent Death (Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 2001).

4. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. “Alex’s Death.” A sermon preached at Riverside Church in New York City, January 21, 1983. In The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, Vol. 2, The Riverside Years (Years 1983–1987) (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008) 3–5.