¶ … Lament for a Son, Wolterstorff talks about how a Christian worldview can help coping with grief and loss. Wolterstorff's perspective corresponds with Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief, even though the narrative is not formally about those stages. The stages of grief provides a model for the ways human beings process death and loss, not to show that there is a "right" or "good" way of experiencing grief but simply to illuminate the reality of suffering and help people to come to terms with death. As Axelrod (n.d.) points out, the stages of grief do not necessarily unfold in chronological order, either. They are not stages of growth, necessarily, although the final stage of acceptance is a desirable outcome. Each person experiences grief and loss differently, and some people may linger longer in some stages and others may not experience that stage at all ("Understanding Grief and Loss: An Overview," n.d.). A Christian perspective enhances the stages of grief model because the narrative of Christ leads a person from a state of doubt and denial to a state of love, acceptance, and joy in God. The five stages include denial/isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Wolterstorff's narrative shows how Christian scripture is uniquely...
For example, Wolterstorff shows how he initially felt isolated from friends, family, and members of his community even when others had also experienced loss and grief. He points out that there is a "solitude of suffering" and "uniqueness of each death," (p. 25). The Christian point-of-view shows how a person can reconcile feelings of loneliness, isolation, and denial with the truth of Christian love and Christian community.
Stages Grief Losing a son or daughter challenges personal faith in God and can bring a person to the brink of despair. In Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff accomplishes the difficult goal of communicating his grief over the loss of his son. The author achieves his goal by grounding his sorrow in Biblical truth and also by allowing himself to proceed between the various stages of death within the Kubler-Ross
Lament for a Son: Christian Grief There are few human experiences as all-encompassing in their horror as the loss of a child. It feels unnatural for a child to die before a parent. The "natural" order of things is that the parents raise the children, se them on their way, and die, making way for the new generation to make its own mark on the world. When a child dies, especially
Grief The author of this report is asked to analyze and assess the work Lament For a Son as authored by Wolterstorff. Indeed, the author of that treatise exemplifies and shows the five stages of grief as defined and described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. The author of this report will briefly cover the Kubler-Ross framework and how it manifests in the Wolterstorff offering. Further, the author of this report will describe
Five Stages of Grief and Wolterstorff's Lament Wolterstorff (1987) finds joy after his loss by "owning it" as he notes in his Preface (p. 6). He makes the loss of his son part of his identity rather than some obstacle to his happiness or to getting back to the way things were: he accepts it and embraces it and allows it to transform him on a deep, emotional, and psychological
Job and Kubler-Ross Biblical and Buddhist Grief: A Comparison Job's lamentations, according to Patricia Byrne (2002), represent the painful process of redefining his place in the world. Before Satan's challenge to God to test Job's faith, Job's life was the envy of his neighbors. With seven healthy and vibrant sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, one thousand oxen, five hundred donkeys, and an untold number of servants, Job
suffer is to live. Suffering makes up a large part of a person's life. In Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament of a Son, a collection of quotes and anecdotes related to the author's experience with the premature loss of Eric, his son, the author provides a way of dealing with loss that is both inspiring and personal. What turned into a tragic mountain climbing accident, a father's journey to accepting a
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