Lament For A Son

This book was written more than twelve years ago to honor the author’s son Eric, who died in a mountain-climbing accident in Austria in his twenty-fifth year, and to voice Wolterstorff’s grief. Though it is intensely personal, he decided to publish it in the hope that some of those who sit on the mourning bench for children would find his words giving voice to their own honoring and grieving.

What he learned, to his surprise, is that in its particularity there is universality. Many who have lost children have written him. But many who have lost other relatives have done so as well, along with many who have experienced loss in forms other than the death of relatives or friends. The sharply particular words of Lament, so he has learned, give voice to the pain of many forms of loss.

This book, Lament For A Son, has become a love-song. Every lament, after all, is a love-song. Will love-songs one day no longer be laments?