Book Review of Companion

Light in the Darkness

The journey through grief.
by Suzanne St. Yves

Book Review: Companion Through the Darkness:

Inner Dialogues on Grief by Stephanie Ericsson. (HarperPerennial: 1993).

WHEN I DISCOVERED that Companion Through the Darkness was about a widow's experience, I almost put it back on the bookstore shelf, thinking it was not pertinent to my situation. Instead I became instantly mesmerized. Stephanie Ericsson has written pages stolen from my journal—how else could she know my pain, my darkness, my dark side?

Ericsson holds nothing back. She sorts "through the language of grief books that say all the same things but desert us by leaving the unsafe things unsaid." Her book covers the gamut—the obvious to the unspeakable. People who have never walked through the darkness may be shocked at her brutal self-disclosure. Her companions will find strength for the moment and hope for the long haul.

An excerpt from her heart-wrenching journal follows a brief, candid discourse. The truth in her writings cuts deeply. Her husband died unexpectantly while she was pregnant with their only child. She admits four months after her husband's death that she "fired God that day" and "still stubbornly thinks that God is a bumbling idiot." She addresses the frightening dark side of our thoughts. Somehow we are reassured, can even smile about it, and then move freely toward the Light again because we are no longer ashamed of our thoughts. (She does later reinstate God.)

Death rips through our lives, destroying all that is safe and secure. We are left totally exposed and emotionally raw. Few can journey into the darkness with us. Well-meaning people thrust us even further into despair.

"Mourning is a time when the cruelest things are said, sometimes by our most trusted." Ericsson reveals a surprising element of grief:

It shears away the masks of normal life and forces brutal honesty out of your mouth before propriety can stop you. It shoves away friends, scares away so-called friends, and re-writes your address book....Grief will make a new person out of you, if it doesn't kill you in the making....Grief is a molting where we shed the parts of us no longer applicable to the new parts.

These are the gems that are gathered in the darkness; these are the life-altering rewards that make the journey worth it. Rarely are they so powerfully stated in print.

These books help make transitions easier and ensure that the grief does not consume. A friend tried to console me with the cliché, "There's light at the end of the tunnel." I responded calmly, "No, there's light in this tunnel—otherwise I wouldn't be here."

The dark abyss that bereaved people fall into does have light—and the darkness will not overcome it. A book can be a luminous companion for the journey. —Suzanne St. Yves