In a tragic instant in 1998, my relatively normal world as a mature man, family provider and wage earner, Christian, husband, and father changed drastically, but also, my God changed (or at least my perceptions and expectations of God and life in general were severely shaken). The world I went to bed with was not the world I awakened to early the next morning to learn that my only daughter was dead! The emotions that engulfed me were then and are to this day unfathomable--emotions, pain, doubt, anger, and many other religious and interpersonal struggles that I've called bitter grief.
The faith and religion that I had depended on and expected to provide strength, understanding, and comfort for most of my fifty-four years in such a situation were now very quickly major parts of my problem. Simplistic efforts to console and explain, to ease my pain, to answer my questions, just angered me and aggravated my bewilderment. Eventually, this book emerged at first from the relentless conflagration of emotions and distress that first started their expression as a journal stressing my need for meaningful support and empathy following the open surprise, bewilderment, and guilt-ridden feelings of divine betrayal that gripped me after my only daughter was killed in a tragic one-vehicle accident. The total impact that my daughter's death had on me was finally confirmed sixteen years later following the unexpected death of my eldest son.
This book recalls and reflects my personal experiences of dealing with bitter grief and, as a whole, describes my feelings, actions, and even my very questionable thinking from that traumatic beginning (the sometimes dark and unthinkable emotions and reasoning that followed my child's death)--not as I had expected that I should have or would have felt or thought, but as I actually did feel and think--triggering the overwhelming need to ask endless questions and then seek to understand. I had to ask and continue to ask why until I understood well enough to again be at peace with God!
Why is perhaps the most fundamental question of life? Why does anything exist? And especially, Why does life exist? If there is a Creator God who loves us, why do pain and suffering exist? And I now realized that if one's religion and faith don't satisfactorily address the problem of severe human suffering and horrific tragedy, then they must lack the capacity to interpret the human experience or to provide a realistic or adequate world view. Thus, I had to ask why questions that reached well beyond the deaths of my children.
For the first time, I had to step outside of my now crumbling former religious comfort zone to consider my tragic and bitter losses and God's role in my losses and His role in all the other terrible pain, suffering, and death that exists in the world. I had to ask myself very difficult questions and try to understand Why? the harsher and horrific things of life happen, but more specifically Why Jodi? Why me? and Why now? I've tried to honestly consider why life often seems so unfair, but this was a surprisingly difficult thing to do--to seriously question the things I had come to believe and to expect from life and from God. And then sixteen years later by God's sovereign choice, I got a second chance to look at and reassess Why? following the death of my eldest son (Brian).
This book is also in some sense a lament and a chronicle (though somewhat topical and not strictly chronological) of my life as a distraught bereaved parent transitioning by means of bitter grief and sorrow to some new more stable normal under the sovereign leading of God as must others who also suffer bitter grief. This book is the story of my life since April 23, 1998, my experiences, successes, and disappointments; and I hope they will be of value to you as you deal with your own bitter grief and/or try to help others cope with theirs.
