Book Review: A Life Lost...and Found

My mom recently sent me a book. It's called A Life Lost...and Found. It's intended for those who are enduring grief, but the reason I requested the book was not due to some recent loss, but because one of the co-authors of the book was the father of one of my classmates. Ten years ago today his son, Adam, died in a car accident. We were juniors in college.

The book was an interesting insight into the grief of a parent, one I hope never to experience. I had known Adam since we were in first grade and we were classmates through the beginning of college, before he transferred out of state. I have a lot of memories of him, from the playground, his really cool crayons in fourth grade, Mrs. Romagnoli's English class, and the day in college that I told him I thought I'd met the man I was going to marry. Perhaps even more ingrained in my mind are his parents the night of the visitation. His dad, a man who still loomed larger than life, tall with broad shoulders, despite the fact that I was now a grown woman and not the little girl looking up at the PTA president, reached down and grabbed my best friend from growing up and me together in a welcome hug. Then his mother looked at me and laughed recounting that she had purchased a wedding gift for me during the summer. I knew that it was a duplicate, but I had assumed Adam had misread the registry. I was wrong--it was his mom's error. And to make it even better he caught it on the registry sheet when she came home with it. I still think of him when I pull out that iron (I returned the other one because it had meant quite a bit to get a gift from a bachelor classmate), and that it made his mom laugh on what must have been one of the most difficult days of her life. I still think back to their family any time I hear Green Day's Time of Your Life, which his brothers had played at his funeral.

David also shares in his book about the loss of his beloved wife about five years later. His co-author, describes loss through divorce as well. I have been blessed at this point in my life not to have experienced divorce, the death of a child, or the death of a spouse, but the stories are poignant and the advice based in scripture. It is very firmly Biblically grounded. I would recommend this book to anyone experiencing loss, especially one of these three.